Alison J. Head (University of Washington)

Alison J. Head, Ph.D. is the Co-Director and Co-Principal Investigator (with Michael Eisenberg, Ph.D.) of Project Information Literacy (PIL), a nationwide study in the University of Washington's Information School. During 2011-2012, Alison is also a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The ongoing PIL research study seeks to understand how U.S. college students conduct course-related and everyday life research and find and use information in the digital age. PIL is the largest scholarly research study (by sample size) about information literacy in the U.S. that has ever been undertaken. The study has been supported with contributing funds from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Gale/Cengage Learning, ProQuest, Cable in the Classroom, and Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

Alison's academic areas of interest include information-seeking behaviors of early adults, information literacy and lifelong learning, Web adoption and diffusion, human-computer interaction, and usage of social media for collective learning. Alison is the author of two books about interface design and usability: Design Wise: A Guide for Evaluating the Interface Design of Information Resources (CyberAge Books, 1999) and On-the-Job Research: How Usable Are Corporate Research Intranets? (Special Libraries Association, 2002). She has a MLS and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Studies from U.C. Berkeley and studied Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University, as a Visiting Scholar.