Faculty

Roma M. Harris
Professor

North Campus Building Room 240 Phone: 519-661-2111 x86673 University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B7 Fax: 519-661-3506 Email: harris@uwo.ca

Teaching
After spending more than a decade as an academic administrator at Western, I am pleased to have returned to full-time teaching. I teach several sections of the required management course in the MLIS program (9005) and I am developing a new course in the LIS Ph.D. program focused on lay information behaviour, particularly in the area of health, in which I am drawing on ideas from a number of fields, particularly Science and Technology Studies.

Research
Much of my research falls in three general areas: (1) how ordinary citizens locate and use health information and how their search efforts are mediated by technologies as well as professional and lay help providers; (2) the relationships between gender and technology in the practice of information work; and (3) the information and help-seeking experiences of abused women. I enjoy working with students and colleagues from a variety of disciplinary and professional backgrounds and my research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada as well as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Recent Research Collaborations:

• The ‘Rural HIV/AIDS Information Networks Project’ funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research under the HIV/AIDS Community-Based Research Program.
  
  
• ‘Health(y) citizenship: Negotiating health information and technology in a consumerist age’, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under the Aid to Research Workshops and Conferences in Canada program.

• 'Beyond tired of driving that far’: HIV/AIDs information exchange in rural Canada. In Judith C. Kulig and Allison Williams (Eds.), Rural Health: A Canadian Perspective, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, forthcoming. (with Tiffany Veinot, Leslie Bella and Judith Krajnak)
  
  
• 'I’m not sure if that’s what their job is': Consumer health information and emerging ‘healthwork’ roles in the public library.
• Reference & User Services Quarterly, forthcoming.(with Flis Henwood, Audrey Marshall and Samantha Burdett)
  
  
• ‘Their little bit of ground slowly squashed into nothing’: Technology, gender and the vanishing librarian. In John Buschman and Gloria Leckie (Eds.), Information Technology in Librarianship: New Critical Approaches. Westport, Connecticut: Libraries Unlimited, 2009, pp. 165-180.
  
  
• Mediating Health Information: The Go-Betweens in a Changing Socio-Technical Landscape. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. (co-edited with Nadine Wathen and Sally Wyatt)
  
  
• 'If my mother was alive I’d probably have called her.’ Women’s search for health information in rural Canada. Reference and User Services Quarterly, 2007, 47(1), 67-79.(with Nadine Wathen)
  
  
• Relations of production: Representations of consumers and their health on mainstream and alternative health information sites. Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 2007, 31(3/4): 249-268. (with Jill McTavish)
  
  
• Barriers to Information: How Formal Help Systems Fail Battered Women. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1994. (with Patricia Dewdney)
  
  
• Librarianship: The Erosion of a Woman's Profession. 1992. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex, 1992.

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