Mei Zhang

Mei Zhang joined SLIS in the fall of 2023 as an Assistant Professor. She received her Ph.D in Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Prior to Simmons, Zhang worked as a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar at Syracuse University. Her teaching areas include collection development/management, metadata, e-resources management, database design, data analytics, and natural language processing. Zhang's research focuses on understanding the interaction between technology and information professionals in the scholarly publishing industry at the organizational and industrial levels. She adopts a socio-technical approach in her teaching and research, by addressing both the social and technical aspects of a problem.
 

What I Teach

• LIS 445: Metadata
• LIS 453: Collection Development and Management

Research Projects

My research focuses on understanding the interaction between technology and information professionals in the scholarly publishing industry at the organizational and industrial levels. I explore the organizational decision processes of different stakeholder groups (e.g., libraries, publishers, vendors) when purchasing or disseminating scholarly e-books in the institutional market. I approach these topics by drawing on in-depth, one-on-one interviews with information professionals in the scholarly publishing industry to highlight a wide range of perspectives from multiple key stakeholders in the field, which provides a foundation for collaboration to build a viable ecosystem to better disseminate and preserve scholarly communications. Previously, I have investigated the academic libraries as the consumers, and university presses as the content providers in the scholarly publishing market, and my works can be found at journals like Journal of Academic Librarianship, College & Research Libraries, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, and Learned Publishing. My current project explores vendors as the intermediary platforms in the scholarly publishing market. I am currently examining vendor differentiation strategies used to attract publishers as content providers and libraries as consumers, and I will present my findings in the 22nd International Conference on Publishing Studies in 2024.