We are a group of educators and researchers who formed a non-profit organization to disseminate effective teaching and learning strategies that improve critical thinking and information literacy.

Before the availability of the Internet, Davida Scharf worked on the first team of librarians and programmers to computerize access to the collections of the Columbia University Libraries. At NYNEX Corporation she worked in strategic planning, and established the corporate research group with a staff of 20 providing business, financial, and technical information to support executive decision-making and R&D. As Director at the United Engineering Trustees, she ran a research and document delivery business serving the public and professionals in all the engineering disciplines. There she also headed the Engineering Societies Library, a large public engineering library and archive established by Andrew Carnegie in 1904. Later she started her own consulting firm, NKR Associates and was among the first members of the Association of Independent Information Professionals. She provided consulting and training in information management, as well as business research to a variety of clients in business, non-profits, and academia before working at the New Jersey Institute of Technology to create and direct the Research Roadmaps program.

Her research interests include question formulation, critical thinking, information literacy instruction and assessment, program evaluation, online communications, knowledge management and digital libraries.

 

Roberta Brody is a Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, City University of New York. Her relevant research interests concern the social construction of information content and information technology. Included in this agenda are evaluative explorations of both the material and non-material information culture. This includes inquiry into information quality and information ethics issues in social and technical environments of information and information use; especially within business setting. She teaches about material information – basic research and reference sources, business research sources, and records management. Her work in Competitive Intelligence before she entered academia informs her research and writing on business and competitive intelligence. Other research interests include contemporary and popular material culture; particularly artists’ books, soap operas, romance novels, and time travel fiction. Recent research in this area includes an analysis of folk motifs in soap operas and thematic comparisons of soap opera themes to romance literature.