Alison Head Email & Phone Number

Executive Director of Project Information Literacy (PIL), a public benefit nonprofit dedicated to conducting ongoing, large-scale research about today's college students and their research habits. She is also a Senior Researcher at the metaLAB (at) Harvard University. From fall 2011 through spring 2015 she was a Fellow, and then a Faculty Associate, 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 has conducted eight large scale research studied and interviewed or surveyed 21,000 college students in more than 93 US colleges and universities. In 2012, PIL launched "The PIL Passage Studies," a unique series of studies about the challenges college students and recent college graduates face as they transition from one complex information landscape to the next. PIL is the largest scholarly research study (by sample size) about information literacy in the U.S. that has ever been undertaken. This ongoing study has been supported with contributing funds from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Gale/Cengage Learning, ProQuest, and Cable in the Classroom.

Harvard University

Cambridge, Ma

The Information School

Founder and director of a consulting firm with an expertise in Web usability, product research, and user-centered design. Evaluating the workability of information systems from a user's point of view: Developing and executing usability research plans, which may employ as methods focus groups, heuristic audits, online surveys, persona building, usability testing, card sorting, paper prototyping, and transactional log analysis. Clients included: Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group, San Francisco Public Library, and National Cancer Institute.

Faculty in Communication Department, teaching new media courses, including "Web Origins, Adoption, and Development," "Wired Workplace," "Interface Design Language," "Theory," and "Mass Media."

Lecturer, teaching the following courses to graduate students: Human-Computer Interaction, Management, Organizational Communication, and Information and Society.

Senior editor, chairing the newspaper-wide task force on new media development and strategic planning. Developed blueprint for community-based Web news site in 1994--the first Web site, a testbed, within the New York Times Newspaper Company. Automated newsroom "clip" collection and championed and led news research services for reporters and editors. Represented the newspaper group as visiting faculty in new media and news research at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

Stanford, Ca

Emphasis on Human-computer interaction, interface design, and communication theory.

Phd, Library And Information Science

Emphasis in research methods, information-seeking behavior, and economics of information.

Ms, Journalism

Ba, Rhetoric