"Mark A. Spasser" <mspasser who-is-at cbi.mobot.org>

Mark A. Spasser (mspasser who-is-at cbi.mobot.org)
Thu, 31 Jul 1997 07:07:36 -0500

My name is Mark Spasser. I'm a doctoral candidate in library and
information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My
dissertation research is an activity theoretic analysis of a large-scale,
Internet-coordinated botanical database publishing project. I have been
influenced particularly by the work of Kaptelinin, Engestrom, Bodker,
Kuutti, and Nardi. I am also Bioinformatics Coordinator for the Center of
Botanical Informatics (CBI) at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis,
MO. At CBI, we not only study the development and use of large-scale
biodiversity databases, but are in the process of creating a separate
social informatics division for studying the material, socio-interactional,
organizational, and cultural issues related to computer-mediated scientific
collaboration. I have work either recently published or forthcoming in the
Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS),
Scientometrics, and Library Trends, dealing with citation context analysis,
co-classification analysis, and psychiatric classification respectively.