Information Science Professor Is a Big Hit Online

By Staff -- School Library Journal, 5/1/2005

Born in Lebanon, educated in the U. S., and awarded a grant to study in Egypt, Dania Bilal is a multilingual associate professor who's long been fascinated with cyberspace.

For the past seven years, Bilal has studied how children and their linguistic ability affect how they search and retrieve information on the Web.

"Kids think everything on the Web is good," says Bilal, who teaches at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee (www.sis.utk.edu). "The easier a search engine is to use, the more they prefer it. But once they pull up a site, they often can't sift through [the information]."

Bilal points to a study she coauthored in 1998 that examined how children used a popular Web site for kids, Yahooligans! The findings "were not encouraging," she says. The children found Yahooligans! very confusing—and actually preferred the cleaner look of Google. But Google often retrieved listings that were not appropriate for youngsters.

"Children need to learn that the Web is not always the best thing to use," says Bilal. "A media specialist or teacher should work with children, giving them an overview of what a search engine is and when it's best to use that or resources in print."

Bilal's work has drawn a great deal of attention. Her paper "Children's Use of the Yahooligans! Web Search Engine" has become the most requested article on the Web site of Information Processing & Management, a journal on information research, with 80,000 downloads this year alone.

Bilal is already on her next project—synthesizing the data she has collected from watching Arabic children use the Children's Digital Library at the Alexandria Library in Egypt. The kids navigated the site fairly well, despite the language barrier posed by the online library's English-only interface. Bilal hopes that her research will prompt site designers to create an Arabic interface. She may recommend including other languages next—Bilal speaks French, too—but for now, she's focusing on her fascination with research, her love of children, and her roots.