From left to right: Sidney Gavel, Professor Wade Bishop, and Emily Chapin
When Professor Wade Bishop from the School of Information Sciences began studying how museums organize and digitize their physical collections, he did not anticipate that a class assignment would evolve into a multi-year research project. This unexpected journey would involve three SIS master’s students, establish a connection between the School of Information Sciences (SIS) and a national research institute, and ultimately lead to a publication in PLOS One, an academic journal focused on research from any discipline within science and medicine. Their article is titled “From Ice Cores to Dinosaurs: Physical Collections Managers’ Research Data Curation Perceptions and Behaviors.”
Bishop, who specializes in scientists’ approaches to and opinions on research data management, works with numerous individuals who manage physical collections at museums. These collections include a wide variety of items, ranging from articles and ice cores to dinosaur fossils, rocks, various species, plants, animals, and fossils—essentially anything related to Earth research.
“My goal is to understand how these collections are organized, as this knowledge could help us digitize and make the information accessible online,” he explained.
There are numerous efforts underway to better organize collections, such as digitization, creating and adding 3D models, and utilizing current AI tools to analyze data more efficiently than an individual could, but currently there isn’t a standardized process that all museums use. Bishop has been looking at ways to change this to make this data accessible to everyone.
CALL Cohort Class Assignment Turns Into Multiyear Research Project
At the time Wade was conducting his research, two master’s students, Sidney Gavel (‘23) and Emily Chapin (‘23), were participating in SIS’s CALL (Collaborative Analysis Liaison Librarians) Program, which was designed to provide students with essential learning experiences for pursuing liaison librarianship. Bishop was the principal investigator of the program. One of their assignments for their cohort was to learn about the information needs of a specific group, which ultimately led to research beyond the initial assignment.
Chapin explained, “It was a bit of a domino effect, really. Sidney and I had been working and studying together since our undergraduate degrees in the physics program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, so we had a lot of shared background and interest in research. When we started our MSIS journey together in the third cohort of the CALL Program, those interests kept overlapping. In our liaison librarianship course, we had a project to study a community and its research/information habits. I ended up studying forensic anthropologists, and Sid studied paleontologists, which led to our studying of each discipline’s physical collections.”
Bishop, having previously investigated data curation behaviors for biocollections, suggested that if the students wanted to continue exploring these groups, they could potentially develop their findings into a paper.
“Seeing their enthusiasm, I thought it would be beneficial to expand their independent studies. Their research focused on engaging topics that would attract a wide audience, such as true crime and dinosaurs.Who doesn’t love dinosaurs?” Bishop said.
The three individuals collaborated to complete a student-led project that, after taking two years to complete, has now been published. Bishop’s connections and mentorship elevated Gavel and Chapin’s research, while the funding from the CALL cohort helped facilitate a student-led approach to the project.
“I decided to scale up their project and involve as many scientists as possible who work with physical collections. I also brought in geologists and biologists whom I had known for a long time and had collaborated with on previous projects,” said Bishop. “While I conducted focus groups, the students were compensated for their work in transcribing and coding the transcripts. This allowed us to identify themes across the various collections,” he added.
Chapin contributed by developing the interview questions for the focus groups, transcribing the recorded Zoom interviews, and performing the initial coding of the first focus group interviews. Gavel was more involved in the research process; she helped facilitate focus groups, worked on transcriptions, and conducted a significant amount of qualitative coding.
“It was a pretty symbiotic writing process, with a lot of communication and back-and-forth between authors throughout the entire process,” Chapin mentioned.
This project was important to all three of them due to the relationship between data curation and information sciences.
Bishop explained, “The reason why this matters to information sciences is that we create metadata standards, we focus on knowledge organization, and we are really concerned with information-seeking behavior to ensure that students and various users can find the information they need.”
He further stated that there are many possibilities today that were not feasible in the past, saying, “It’s crucial to store information in ways that are compatible with machines and AI. Understanding how this information is organized is essential.”
Project Challenges and Reaching the Finish Line
Studying multiple scientific disciplines created unexpected challenges for the research team. Gavel explained that each field, whether paleontology, forensic anthropology, or geology, has its own curation behaviors and research culture.
“You have to really delve into what the research process looks like for that domain,” she said. “Putting that puzzle together means understanding not only the tools and workflows they currently use, but also what they used to do and how those processes evolved into what they are now.”
For Chapin, the project represented her first full research experience from ideation to publication, which meant there was a lot of learning by doing.
“My background up to that point was in physics, so I was more familiar with quantitative approaches and hard numbers data. Switching to qualitative human subject research was a little intimidating, I will admit! I was learning how to conduct research and analyze the results in class and immediately applying it to this project after hours,” Chapin said.
As they worked across disciplines, the team discovered significant variability in data practices among scientists and museums. Their findings highlighted the importance of creating standardized metadata to support AI-enabled discovery, especially for emerging uses such as 3D modeling and automated species comparison.
The team eventually published their work in PLOS One, a peer-reviewed open-access journal from the Public Library of Science that features primary research across science and medicine. Gavel said the choice of journal aligned with the values behind the project.
“I was really excited when we decided to publish with PLOS One because of their reputation and commitment to open access,” she said. “Because our results had potential recommendations for physical collections, having those available was important to me.”
For Chapin, seeing their work appear in a major journal still feels surreal.
“It honestly hasn’t really sunk in,” she said. “The project still feels like a fun class assignment, so to have it published in a journal like PLOS One really emphasizes the accessibility of research when you have the right tools and environment.”
She added that the experience shaped her perspective on what research can be.
“It doesn’t seem like an abstract or faraway goal.ou really can just start with a question like ‘How do forensic anthropologists access skeletal collections data?’ and see where that takes you,” she said. “Research can seem like an indomitable mountain when you’ve never done it before, but when you have access to climbing gear, accomplished instructors, and supportive partners, you can scale to the very top.”
What’s Next for Chapin and Gavel, and Their Research
Both Chapin and Gavel have since graduated from the MSIS program and moved into professional roles shaped by their experiences at UT and within the College of Communication and Information. Chapin now serves as a data scientist while Gavel works as a data science librarian. Both credit their hands-on research training at SIS for preparing them for these opportunities.
Their work also continued after graduation. SIS alumnus Jaxx Foxx (‘25), a member of the final CALL cohort, picked up where Chapin and Gavel left off. Foxx conducted additional interviews, transcribed and coded new data, and completed the manuscript, including writing the literature review built on the students’ original liaison course projects.
Chapin is proud to see the project live on through new students.
“I’m really proud of the work that we all put in to get here, and super excited to see that it continued with more students after I graduated,” she said. “I think this is a broadly applicable study in library and museum studies, and we barely scratched the surface on data management practices connected to interdisciplinary physical collections.”
She added that she looks forward to seeing how future researchers build on their foundation.
“I’m eagerly watching how we can identify and tackle problems of information use and reuse in this field, and pleased to have been part of the discussion,” she stated.
The article is freely available to anyone on the planet thanks to support from the UT Libraries’ open access fund. You can view it here.