Biography

Tammera M. Race is the Systems, Metadata, and Assessment Librarian at New College of Florida, Sarasota, FL, United States. She has presented on scientific gray literature and access, the application of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), social media tools and citizenship, and native plant conservation. Tammera is also the author of “Resource Discovery Tools: Supporting Serendipity” for Planning and Implementing Resource Discovery Tools in Academic Libraries.

Stephann Makri is a Faculty Researcher and Lecturer at City University London. He has worked on a £1.82m UK Research Council project on accidental information discovery (SerenA: Chance Encounters in the Space of Ideas). His research on the topic has been published in the Journal of Documentation and Journal of the Association for Society for Information Science and Technology. This research has also received extensive media coverage, including from the BBC, Readers Digest, and The Sunday Times.

Lori McCay-Peet is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Management at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her research focuses on people’s perceptions and uses of digital information environments such as social media, particularly in the context of knowledge work. She has developed two self-report scales: one to measure perceptions of serendipity and the other to measure how well a digital information environment facilitates serendipitous experiences. She continues to work on the wicked problem of support for serendipity in digital information environments and has published a number of journal papers and conference proceedings on the topic.

Phyllis Mentzell Ryder is an Associate Professor of Writing in George Washington University. Her research and teaching interests focus on first-year writing pedagogy, including service-learning and information literacy. Her book, Rhetorics for Community Action, introduces a theory of public writing, along with a framework for service-learning writing classes. She has published multiple articles about teaching critical research to first-year students; these have been co-written with Jennifer Nutefall (University Librarian, Santa Clara University; and Bill Gillis, Instructional Librarian, George Washington University).

Jennifer Nutefall is University Librarian at Santa Clara University. Prior to joining Santa Clara she was Associate University Librarian for Innovative User Services at Oregon State University Libraries; Instruction Coordinator at the Gelman Library, George Washington University; and Reference/Instruction Librarian at the State University of New York (SUNY), College at Brockport. She holds a BS in Journalism and an MLS from Syracuse University, and an MA in Education and Human Development from George Washington University.

Abigail McBirnie is a UK-based analyst and information specialist who works primarily in higher education and research. Alongside serendipity, she is interested in networks, data (big and small), and the art and science of analysis.

Sam Ford is a VP at Fusion and head of the Fusion Media Group’s Center for Innovation and Engagement. He is a research affiliate of the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing and teaches in the Western Kentucky University Popular Culture Studies Program. He is co-author, with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green, of the 2013 book Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture and has written about media fandom, professional wrestling, the US soap opera, transmedia storytelling, the marketing and corporate communication industry, and a range of other subjects about media, audiences, and publics.