Sandra Erdelez, G’95: Making a Career Out of Serendipity

Sanda Erdelez G’95 Making a Career Out of Serendipity

BY: BARBARA BROOKS I n 1987, when Sanda Erdelez G ’95 arrived at the iSchool to begin her doctoral work, the “world wide web” was anything but worldly. Or webby. “We had e-mail but everything was server based. ‘Gopher services’ was the search term of the day. And the Internet was closed to everyone except academics,” said Erdelez, who in June became director of the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University in Boston. “Just imagine! The world wide web was just emerging; and it was prohibited for businesses to use it.”

“We had e-mail but everything was server based. ‘Gopher services’ was the search term of the day. And the Internet was closed to everyone except academics. Just imagine! The world wide web was just emerging; and it was prohibited for businesses to use it.” —SANDA ERDELEZ G’95

Even academics had to overcome obstacles with clever workarounds. For example, in 1989, visa regulations required Erdelez to return to her home country of Croatia. “I told my professors, ‘we’ll keep in touch’—but when I got there, I realized there was no email yet in Croatia.” Undaunted, she traveled to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, petitioned the government, and received the very first address, “earn001,” in the nascent European Academic Research Network (EARN), which connected universities and research institutions across Europe. It also gave a few very-early adopters a way to communicate across the Atlantic. Erdelez’s curiosity—and her keen sense of where the world was headed—have been her keys to success. Her dissertation topic from nearly 30 years ago—“Serendipity in Information Behavior”—created a field that is hyper-relevant today. She has since co-authored two books on the subject: Theories of Information Behavior (2005) and Incidental Exposure to Online News (2016), which she defines as “the study of chance encounters with interesting, useful, or surprising news while using the Internet for non-news-related online activities such as email, social media or online shopping.”

A serendipitous meeting at a conference in Dubrovnik with the late Jeff Katzer, dean of the iSchool at the time, led Erdelez to Syracuse. She said, “It was a combination of him being very descriptive, and the opportunity of having earned a Fulbright to study for a Ph.D.” Fortuitously, her first iSchool class, with former professor Michael Nilan, explored user behavior. “And like many researchers who notice something interesting, I decided to study it.” She eventually expanded her study to what she called Information Encountering. “Until my work was published, that wasn’t recognized as an area of research.”

After two years of studying remotely—long before “remotely” was in vogue—Erdelez returned to Syracuse to complete her studies and start her family. At about that time, her hometown of Osijek became engulfed in civil war. “It was a rather unsettling and dramatic part of my life,” she said. “I was constantly worried for my family back home. They were hiding in cellars and phone lines would go down. But we had our nuclear family in Syracuse.” Her iSchool mentors and classmates provided refuge as best they could.

The late Marta Dosa, a refugee from Hungary, was her advisor. “Her heart was as big as a mountain for interna

tional students,” Erdelez recalled. “She understood what it was like for me.” Barbara Kwasnik, professor emerita, was new to the faculty at the time and also was a strong influence. “Just to demonstrate how closely knit the community was, she would make her place available to me between semesters,” Erdelez said. “I had nowhere else to go.” A few classmates also became lifelong friends and colleagues. She remains in touch with Howard Rosenbaum G’96, and Phillip Doty G’95, who serve, respectively, as professor of information science at Indiana University’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering; and associate dean and graduate advisor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information. To say the least, Erdelez’s career has followed an unusual trajectory. Drawn to the social sciences, she initially wanted to be an archaeologist, then a detective, and then a producer or director of movies. “Film lines up well with being a teacher,” she said, “and archaeology is one of the fields where serendipity is one of the ways of finding artifacts.” Eventually she became a lawyer, hop-

ing to study computer law and publish papers about information privacy and intellectual property. “But there wasn’t enough happening yet in that field.” Ironically, she created her field of study nonetheless.

After serving as an adjunct instructor at the iSchool from 1992–1995, she spent six years as an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science at University of Texas at Austin. From 2001–2018, she worked her way up the ranks at the University of Missouri-Columbia’s School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, becoming a full professor in 2012 and serving as program chair of the Library and Information Science Program from 2013–2016. For five years, she directed Missouri’s Information Experience Laboratory and led research on usability of information systems and human-computer interaction.

Now, Erdelez is at the helm of Simmons University’s School of Library and Information Science, with 730 graduate students. While she believes students will continue to study serendipitous information encountering, she also sees a strong future in digital preservation and archival management, as well as in virtual and augmented reality. She predicted: “As processing power and speed catch up to technological inventions, tethered VR devices will become more mobile and seamless, and will move from gaming into more general use. This is a really exciting time, with libraries and museums already leading the way,” she said.

“The most exciting developments are literally taking place at the ampersand between library and information sciences.”

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