Interactive visualization is a powerful educational tool, which has been used to enhance the teaching of various subjects from computer science to chemistry to engineering. This paper describes the use of interactive visualization tools in the context of a graduate course in information retrieval, to demonstrate two well-known retrieval models, the Boolean model and the vector space model. The results of five classroom studies with these tools are reported. The impact of the tools on student learning, as well as student attitudes toward the tools, were investigated. The results of …

Overall, the involvement of people of all colors at the doctoral level can be fairly characterized as minimal. The need for immediate response is acute (Turock, 2003, p. 493).
Doctoral fellows serve as the nucleus of energy for continued recruitment of a diverse doctoral student population. Attrition through graduation will extend the diversity to the LIS professoriate. Future generations of librarians are educated by the professoriate (Bonnici & Burnett, 2005, p. 125).
As is demonstrated in the larger field of librarianship, there is a serious dearth of minority scholars in the Library …