Dr Allen Foster

Lecturer
BA, MSc, PhD, FHEA Photograph of Dr Allen Foster.

Contact

Email: aef@aber.ac.uk
Office: 210
Phone: +44 (0)1970 622167
Fax: +44 (0)1970 622190

Responsibilities

Departmental Director of Postgraduate Studies, Module Coordinator, Online Coordinator, Personal Tutor.

Teaching Areas

Undergraduate Teaching

Information Literacy, Information Retrieval, Music Librarianship, Advanced Music Librarianship, Research Methods.

Postgraduate Teaching

Information Services Planning for Delivery, Research Methods, Dissertation Supervision, PhD Supervision. 

Research

Human Information Behaviour: Information Seeking and Searching Behaviour, Serendipity, Interdisciplinarity, Information Literacy and Information Skills, Technology and Communication, Computer Mediated Communication.

Research Group

Information Behaviour and E-learning





Biography

Before joining the department in 2002 I spent time as a Research Associate and PhD research student at the University of Sheffield. I have a broad range of interests and have studied law, history, and information management and enjoy the challenges of a variety of research problems. 

Staff Publications

Foster, A.E. & Rafferty, P. (2011), Innovations in Information Retrieval: Perspectives for Theory and Practice, Facet.

Foster, A E. Ferguson-Boucher, K. & Broady-Preston, J. (2010) Unifying information behaviour and process: a balanced palette and the balanced scorecard, Performance Measurement and Metrics, 11(3).

Foster, A E; Ferguson-Boucher, K. & Broady-Preston, J. (2010) Unifying information behaviour and process: a balanced palette and the balanced scorecard, QQML Conference 2010

Stokes, P, Foster, A, and Urquhart, C.  (2009).  Beyond relevance and recall: testing new user-centred measures of database performance, Health Information & Libraries Journal, (DOI) 10.1111/j.1471-1842.2008.00822.x

Foster, A., Urquhart, C. & Turner, J. (2008). Validating coding for a theoretical model of information behaviour. Information Research, 13(4) paper 358. [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/13-4/paper358.html]

Foster, A.E. and Urquhart, C.   (2008).  Validating coding for a theoretical model of information behaviour.  Paper presented at the Information Seeking in Context (ISIC) 2004 conference (Vilnius).

Foster, A.E. and Urquhart, C.J. (2007). Testing a nonlinear model of information behaviour: experiences of examining coding. Paper presented at the I3 Conference, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen.

Foster, A. E. (2007). Information literacy for the information profession: experiences from Aberystwyth. Aslib proceedings, 58(6),488-501.

Foster, A. E. (2006). "A nonlinear perspective." In A. Spink & C. Cole (Eds). New directions in human information behaviour (pp.155-170). Dordrecht: Springer.

Foster, A.E. (February, 2006).  A Nonlinear Perspective.  In Spink, A. and Cole, C. (Editors).  New Directions in Human Information Behaviour, Dordrecht: Springer, pp.155-170.
Foster, A. E. "A non-linear model of information seeking behaviour."  In : Information Research, paper 222 10 (2) (2005).  [Available at http://informationr.net/ir/10-2/paper222.html]
Foster, A.E. (2005). Non-linearity and Human Information Behaviour, Elucidate, 2(4), July/August, pp3-8.
Foster, A.E. (July, 2005) Nonlinear information seeking. In Fisher, K E., Erdelez, S., & McKechnie, E. F. (Eds.). Theories of Information Behavior: A Researcher's Guide. Medford, NJ: Information Today.
Foster A.E. (2004).  A Nonlinear Model of Information Seeking Behaviour. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(3), 228:237. (This article was awarded a position in the ALA Library Instruction Round Table Top Twenty library instruction articles of 2004).
Foster, A.E. (2004). Nonlinear information seeking. Paper presented at the Information Seeking in Context (ISIC) 2004 conference, proceedings to be published Information Research.
Foster, A and Ford N. "Serendipity and Information Seeking." Journal of Documentation 59(3) (2003): 321-340
Ellis, D, Wilson, T D, Ford, N J, Foster A & Spink A. "Information Seeking and mediated searching: Part V User-Internediary interaction." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 53 (2002): pp728-735
Spink, A, Wilson, T D, Ford, N J, Foster, A & Ellis, D. "Information seeking and mediated searching: Part III Successive searching." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 53 (2002): pp716-727
Spink, A, Wilson, T D, Ford, N J, Foster, A & Ellis, D. "Information seeking and mediated searching: Part I Background and research design." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 53 (2002): pp695-703
Wilson, T D, Ford, N J, Ellis, D, Foster, A & Spink, A. "Information seeking and mediated searching: Part II Uncertainty and its correlates." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 53 (2002): pp704-715
Ellis, D, Wilson, T D, Ford, N J, Foster, A & Spink, A. "Information seeking and mediated searching: Part V User-Intermediary Interaction." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 53 (2002): 883-893