Research Projects

Broadband Instructional Modules

Project Website

A project of the Information Institute, the Broadband Instructional Modules are designed to raise awareness of programs to support broadband adoption and expansion, provide information about various broadband applications that can improve life and work, and assist communities to better exploit broadband availability and services.

Digital Libraries to School Libraries

Digital Libraries to School Libraries is a project whose aim is to explore ways in which school librarians can use digital open content to expand and enrich the school library’s resource base and instructional support. This project uses the newest web-based technologies to help school librarians identify DL open content, integrate open content metadata into their OPACs, and help use open content for learning. Guided by the overarching question “How can school libraries support strong STEM achievement with digital library open content?” in this three-year exploratory Early Career Research project, the researcher will investigate a framework for school librarians’ promotion of sustainable open content use in schools through the following research questions. Dr. Marcia Mardis of the Institute for Digital Information and Scientific Communication (iDigInfo) heads this project.

iCPALMS

iCPALMS is a National STEM Digital Library Pathway into content, services, professional development, research and dissemination that will result in a scalable, sustainable infrastructure to support individual and collaborative standards-driven instructional planning. Funded with a $2.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation, iCPALMS will provide infrastructure to support professional educators individually and in teams by technology that connects them to data, content, resources, expertise and learning experiences that can empower and inspire them to provide more effective teaching for all learners. Florida State University’s Marcia Mardis and Nancy Everhart contribute to the leadership of this project along with colleagues from the Learning Systems Institute.

iDigBio

Project Website

Since 2011, iDigBio has served as the US National Science Foundation’s National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections. “Digitization” in this context means the creation of digital data and media (e.g., digital images) about biodiversity specimens. These specimens include insects on pins, fish in jars, fossils in drawers, and plants on sheets and are critical to research that puts present day diversity and distribution in context and models the future of Earth’s biome.  Together, there are an estimated 2 billion biodiversity specimens in US collections, such as those curated by museums, botanical gardens, universities, field stations, government research centers, and other organizations.  In 2021, the National Science Foundation awarded Florida State University $3.3 million to continue to serve as home to iDigBio’s Digitization, Workforce Development, and Citizen Science domain for five more years.

Habitat Tracker

The Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education has awarded a $1,156,497 grant to Florida State University’s Co-PIs Paul Marty and Michelle Kazmer, with the College of Education and Tallahassee Museum (award number R305A100782). Habitat Tracker’s goal is to support the school-based science learning of fourth and fifth grade elementary students before, during, and after field trips to a local wildlife center (the Tallahassee Museum). Visits to the museum will be part of a week-long intervention on scientific inquiry in which pre-visit planning and post-visit data analysis form essential parts of the inquiry experience. Supported through the use of online resources in the classroom, before and after the field trips, this project will help students gain experience planning and conducting scientific inquiries while making museums an integral part of classroom learning.

Military Suicide Research Consortium

The Department of Defense, Assistant Secretary of Defense (Health Affairs) from the Defense Health Program Enhancement (DHPe) awarded a $17 million federal grant to Florida State University and the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center to establish the Department of Defense Military Suicide Research Consortium (MSRC). The consortium is the first of its kind to integrate DOD and civilian efforts in implementing a multidisciplinary research approach to suicide prevention. This is a project of the Institute for Digital Information and Scientific Communication (iDigInfo).

Virtual Scientific Teams:
Life-Cycle Formation and Long-Term Scientific Collaboration (VOSS)

The VOSS project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF; award number OCI-0942855) and is being conducted by researchers at Florida State University‘s College of Communication and Information. It asks the following overall question: what social and organizational factors best support the transition of short-term experiment-focused multidisciplinary virtual scientific collaborations to long-term productive and innovative programs of scientific research? The goal of this research is to develop and validate one or more lifecycle models that support scientific teams through the transition from discrete, experiment-focused projects to long-term collaborations, thereby advancing discovery and innovation and increasing productivity.