BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Gregory B. Newby received his undergraduate degree with majors in Communication and Psychology, and his master's degree in Communication at the State University of New York at Albany. He originally studied mass media and organizational communication, but took a new focus after starting to make regular use of BITNET in the early 1980s and later, the Internet. Newby examined issues surrounding new electronic communication media use during his PhD studies at Syracuse University. While at Syracuse, he developed a new virtual reality laboratory and worked on development of a visual interface to information space as part of his dissertation. After his PhD, Newby took a position as assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign from 1991–1997.

At the University of Illinois, Prof. Newby worked extensively to update the information technology curriculum and to integrate education of technological skills for all students. During this time, he founded Prairienet, a public-access community computing system. He was also given responsibility to develop a new technology-based distance education option for the MS degree at UIUC. He has written on information retrieval, human-computer interaction, electronic publishing, uses and norms for the Internet, and new technologies for business use. Newby has taught courses dealing with Internet use since 1988.

He is currently an assistant professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. His research interests are focused on information retrieval, information space, human-computer interaction, and impacts of new electronic media. His courses include Information Security, Distributed Systems and Administration, and Internet Applications.

Prof. Newby is currently developing an information retrieval software toolkit for large-scale experimentation with World Wide Web data, and has received a three-year federal grant for this work.