About

I work as an associate professor of information science at the University of Kentucky, where I teach in the library science and the information, communication, and technology programs.

My research interests broadly include scholarly communication, information retrieval, and academic libraries. A bit more specifically, some of the topics I have explored include bias in peer review, health information retrieval, journals / scholarly publishing, reference librarianship, qualitative methodology, fake news, tacit knowledge, open access, open science, history of library automation, and electronic resources.

I use quantitative and qualitative methodologies but have also published some historical and philosophical work. More information about my research is available on my research topics page and my research workflow page, on my CV and at the following sites:

• GitHub@cseanburns
• ORCID: 0000-0001-8695-3643
• Google Scholar
• ResearcherID
• Scopus Author ID
• Scholars@UK
• Green OA works at UK
• RPubs

Bio

I grew up in San Antonio, Texas and left for Monmouth College, Monmouth, Illinois upon the advice and encouragement of a high school English teacher. Monmouth was a great experience with wonderful professors.

Some life happened after college, and instead of attending graduate school, I started to work in restaurants full time. I had cooked in some restaurants in high school and in college, and I felt comfortable in that space. I also waited tables and tended bar, and I ended up working in about 21 restaurants overall. I worked in fast food, a diner, a truck stop, a dive bar, a bistro, a steakhouse, various other casual places, and one fine dining Italian restaurant in the Seattle area. I moved around a lot—something like seven states and well over twice as many cities/towns.

I applied to graduate school and started in 2007. While in school, I worked as a reference librarian and as a cataloger at a small liberal arts college. I also built a digital library of nearly 40,000 photos for a photojournalism institute. I intended to work as a librarian but was encouraged to apply to the PhD program. I think I would have enjoyed librarianship as a long-term career, but I am glad that I did the PhD.

I've been at the University of Kentucky since 2013. I feel privileged and fortunate to do it. I feel more fortunate for some other things, like my family, which I never imagined I'd have and which started later in life for me.

Thanks for visiting.

Site Info

Automating this Website

I wrote a handful of weird scripts to automate site publishing and deploying to The Text, which is a single page of mostly short posts on a range of topics: Site Automation w/ Scripts.

Site Technology

This site uses only HTML and CSS and is coded in /usr/bin/vim, although some posts in The Text are written in /usr/bin/ed.

Outside of being hosted on GitHub, this site does not include any additional analytics.