UMSI doctoral student Ji-Yeon Yang has received the Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from Beta Phi Mu, the international library and information studies honor society.

The $3,000 fellowships are awarded each year to up to six recipients who are selected from all library and information science doctoral students across the nation. Beta Phi Mu was founded in 1948 by a group of leading librarians and library educators to recognize and encourage scholastic achievement among library and information studies students.

Yang’s dissertation, “Information Mediation at Work: An Approach to the Social Process of Credibility Judgment,” examines how organizational workers intervene in one another’s information seeking and credibility judgments and how the mediation process influences their subsequent information behaviors.

She expects that her research will expand our understanding of interpersonal information seeking and inform the design and implementation of social media and other knowledge management tools within organizations.

Yang's dissertation committee members include Associate Professor Soo Young Rieh (chair), Professor Mark Ackerman, Assistant Professor Lionel Robert, Assistant Professor Michael Heaney (Organizational Studies and Political Science), and Professor Chun Wei Choo (University of Toronto Faculty of Information).