Emeritii Faculty

Michael J. Nelson
Associate Professor

North Campus Building Room 256 Phone: 519-661-2111 x88507 University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B7 Fax: 519-661-3506 Email: mnelson@uwo.ca

Teaching
I teach a variety of courses for the graduate program in library and information science. My primary areas of teaching involve information technology, programming and the Internet. Specifically, I teach LIS 505, Information Systems and Technology, LIS 520, Digital Libraries, and LIS 525, Managing Internet Information Services. For the doctoral program, I teach courses in advanced research and statistical methods in addition to courses in the information systems area.

Research Interests
My research interests are in two related areas. The first is mathematical models of information retrieval for both describing and understanding how retrieval of documents behaves both at a systems level and in its performance. Recently this has led to an investigation of the statistical properties of the standard measures of performance recall and precision. Currently, I am starting a new project to build a 3D model of the documents retrieved and to develop methods of navigating this structure. The second area of research is concerned with the bibliometric properties of retrieval systems, involving the distributions of various components involved in retrieval such as index terms. My most recent paper in this area, written with Stephen Downie, analyses the statistical properties of music databases.

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