SIS Alum Featured Speaker

Dr. Fei Yu, who received her PhD in Library and Information Science at SIS, will be the next featured speaker at the Digital Libraries Colloquium Series.  The ILS Applications Specialist at the eiNetwork, Dr. Fei Yu will discuss “Users’ Emotional and Material Satisfaction at the Micro/Macro Level in Academic Libraries” on Wednesday, March 14, 2007, at 12:00 noon in Rangos 2 at Carnegie Mellon University’s University Center. 

Library service evaluation and user satisfaction have been major topics in library and information science literature since the late 1990s. Fei will discuss her recent doctoral dissertation research that evaluates academic library services based on college students’ perceptions. Her research integrates diverse theoretical approaches, such as emotional and material satisfaction, service encounter and overall service satisfaction, as well as user satisfaction at the micro and macro levels. She clarifies the attributes of library services that contribute to user satisfaction and examines the relationship between user satisfaction and user behavior.  Her findings indicate that users’ emotional experience with library services determines their subsequent library use behavior and service use loyalty. Fei will also discuss current usability testing in the eiNetwork, which is a practical application of her dissertation research.

Fei is the ILS Applications Specialist at the eiNetwork (www.einetwork.net), which provides information infrastructure to more than 80 public library locations in Allegheny County. She conducts usability testing on the online catalog, Find it! (a federated search engine), WiFi, and CybraryN, and uses the test results to improve information access through countywide websites. Fei has an MLIS from Wuhan University, P.R. China, and a PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh (2006).  At Pitt, she worked in both the Hillman Library and the East Asian Library.

The Digital Libraries Colloquium Series is co-sponsored by Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries.  Since 2003, these partners have presented world-renowned speakers on cutting-edge topics in Digital Libraries.