Alison J. Head

Alison J. Head is the Co-Director and Co-Principal Investigator (with Michael Eisenberg) of Project Information Literacy, a nationwide study sponsored by a gift from ProQuest and a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to the UW Information School. The project seeks to understand how U.S. college students conduct course-related research and everyday life research in the digital age. By project conclusion, PIL will be the largest research study about information literacy in the U.S. that has ever been undertaken.

Alison's academic areas of interest include web origins, adoption and diffusion research, media effects, technology in the wired workplace, human-computer interaction, and information literacy. 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.