At iConference 2016, which took place March 20-23 in Philadelphia, the Informatics team of Kathleen H. Pine, assistant project scientist; Melissa Mazmanian, associate professor; and graduate student Chris Wolf received the prestigious Lee Dirks Award for Best Paper. Their paper, “The Work of Reuse: Birth Certificate Data and Healthcare Accountability Measurements,” assesses the key information science concept of data reuse in the practice of recording birth certificate data. It documents an ethnographic study of ways to “assess and improve birth certificate data in response to a new re-use of birth certificate data for measurements introduced to hold hospitals accountable for the quality of the care they are delivering,” according to the paper’s abstract.

The Lee Dirks Award includes a crystal trophy and $5,000 prize provided by Microsoft Research. View the team’s winning paper here. The Lee Dirks Award is named in honor of the late Lee Dirks, director for portfolio strategy at Microsoft Research Connections and a long-time friend and supporter of the iConference. The award “recognizes the most exceptional completed research paper presented at the iConference each year,” according to iSchools.

The ICS Communications Office also scored a fourth-place award for its submission to the iSchools Video Contest. The video titled My iSchool was one of more than a dozen entries that were created as short promotional videos helping to position the information field and information schools as exciting, new programs that educate undergraduate and/or graduate students to solve the information problems of the 21st century.

Alex Wade presenting the Lee Dirks Best Paper Award to Kathleen Pine during an awards ceremony at iConference 2016. (Courtesy of @iconf on Twitter)