Photo by Paul Martens
(Left to right) Min Xiao, Stace Chow, Jiah Kim and Natalia Minibayeva
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In a virtual world, four international SLIS students
meld their talents, look to the future
By Diane J. Squire and Michael T. Dietsch
Destiny deals some intriguing hands. Sometimes fate seems to bring
together people in surprising ways.
For example, what would four students from South Korea, Kazakhstan, China and Singapore have in common? The Internet, for one. Gather them all together at Indiana University in Bloomington and their common bond starts with a love of that technology, but also a desire to create their futures by studying how humans interact with computers.
Quite by fate, four young women—Jiah Kim, Natalia Minibayeva, Min Xiao and Stace Chow—met through the IU School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) while attending Katy Börner’s class in human computer interaction (HCI). They began a seven-week student project, tackling a time-consuming re-design of the current IU Digital Library Program (DLP) Web site.
“We were so impressed with what the four students designed that we plan to use it as the basis for our DLP site re-design,” said the project contact, Deborah Horn, who is a content analysis and interface design specialist at University Information Technology Services. In a fortunate twist of fate, Horn had already taken the HCI class at SLIS as a master of library science student. “When I saw the end result, I was pleased that it came out so well,” agreed Jon Dunn, assistant director for technology for the DLP.
Recently, the Digital Library Program received a $3 million grant from Digital Libraries Initiative-Phase 2, a multi-agency federal program with funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Kim, a native of Seoul, South Korea, who became team leader for the HCI group project, had been working as a DLP graduate assistant. While helping study usability issues with the Hoagy Carmichael Collection, she found the main DLP Web site was difficult to navigate.
As a master of information science student, she wanted to apply her coursework to her usability interests. She had studied philosophy at South Korea’s Chung-Ang University and later came to IU because of its top-ranked graduate programs. Kim was randomly teamed with Minibayeva, Xiao and Chow.
Russian in her ethnic background, Minibayeva is originally from the republic of Kazakhstan, a state in the former U.S.S.R. “Since the age of five, I’ve been in music, first as a pianist and then since the age of 14, as a music theorist and a musicologist,” she recalled. She earned a degree from the Kazakh Almaty Conservatory and came to study in the United States as a Kazakh Presidential Scholar. After receiving a graduate degree in musicology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, she began a doctoral degree in musicology at the IU School of Music through a four-year Chancellor’s Fellowship.
“Last year, I finished all the coursework for my Ph.D. At the time, I became very interested in music information technology,” Minibayeva said. “I found that, conceptually, music and programming can be quite close, at least in terms of the technical principles, so I decided to study information science more closely and applied for the master’s program at SLIS. You can study usability, Web design, user-interface design,” she said. “SLIS provides the big picture.”
Xiao came to IU from Beijing, China, where she worked as an advertising designer. She is applying to the computer science program but is taking SLIS courses because of the emphasis on graphics and architecture. She is working on an independent study project with Börner, using virtual-reality technology to design multi-dimensional objects.
Chow graduated with a degree in business administration from the National University of Singapore. She was attracted to SLIS in part because of its high ranking in U.S. News and World Report.
For those interested in details of the DLP Web site assessment, usability testing and design process, go to the site documentation footer link to the DLP prototype:
http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/dlib_temp/
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 Min
Xiao (People’s Republic of China)
"My dream is to run my own design company. For now,
I am learning VRML, a 3-D modeling language which helps create
an on-line 3-D interactive environment. I am foreseeing a
big market for it, say, 3-D on-line shopping, when Internet
broadband becomes more popular." Xiao and her husband
plan to eventually return to China to open their own information
technology-based company.
http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~mxiao/
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 Stace
Chow (Singapore)
"I really want to get a feel of corporate strategies
and how corporations have used information to create a competitive
edge for themselves. I hope, in a few years, to do an MBA
in corporate strategy." Chow graduates
in May and eventually plans to pursue a job in E-commerce
or strategic intelligence.
http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~wchow/L571/version1/version1.html
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 Jiah
Kim (South Korea)
"Sometimes I found myself working too much without
reasonable reason. I want to have a life that work and life
goal can somehow integrate, and not betray each other. I want
to enjoy my work and also help people with my work. I want
to be a somewhat useful person for a community and a society.
Ultimately, that is the way we can live well and be happy
as individuals, I believe." After graduating in August,
Kim hopes to work as an information architect, Web developer
or in some other creative environment with human-computer
interaction.
http://php.indiana.edu/~jiakim/home/
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 Natalia
Minibayeva (Kazakhstan)
"My professional objective is to pursue a career
that entails the use of information technology as related
to database design, usability testing and Web development,
and requires thorough music expertise and/or knowledge of
the Russian language. One of the things I would really like
to try is working for the Digital Music Library projects at
IU. After I graduate, I would like to find a creative and
interesting job and work with people like our DLP team members."
http://php.indiana.edu/~nminibay/home.htm
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