Nancy Fried Foster

Nancy Fried Foster is the Director of Anthropological Research for the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries. She is responsible for work-practice studies of faculty members, students and staff, and for ensuring that members of these groups participate in the design of technology, space and services. Dr. Foster holds a Diploma in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Applied Anthropology from Columbia University. She has extensive experience conducting anthropological research in the Amazon and Papua New Guinea as well as in higher education in the US and UK. Past projects include the user-centered design of the University of Rochester’s institutional repository, IR+ (http://code.google.com/p/irplus/), and a two-year study of students, the Undergraduate Research Project (http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=2322). She is also Co-Executive Director of the eXtensible Catalog Organization (http://www.extensiblecatalog.org).