About

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

My research interests broadly include scholarly communication, information retrieval, and academic libraries. Some of the topics I have explored include scholarly communication, scientometrics, and citation analysis; information retrieval and search systems; reference librarianship and qualitative methodology studies; technology and automation in libraries; library and information science education, open educational resources, and pedagogy; and fake news, misinformation, and communication studies.

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 topic page and 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 the southeast side of 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. I began as a declared double major in English and Computer Science. Then I took a philosophy course and dropped the CS major for a major in philosophy and religious studies. That did not go well with some family members.

Some life happened after college, and instead of attending graduate school, I started to work in restaurants full time. I ended up working in about 21 restaurants overall, mostly as a cook but also as a server, bartender, and front manager. 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.

Eventually I applied to graduate school, which I started in 2007. I worked as a reference librarian and as a cataloger at a small liberal arts college and built a digital library of nearly 40,000 photos for a photojournalism institute. I describe that process on this site: Building the POYi Archive. I intended to work as an academic librarian but was encouraged to apply to the PhD program. I completed that in May 2013.

I started at the University of Kentucky in 2013. I feel privileged and fortunate to do work as a professor. I feel more fortunate to have my children. I never imagined I'd have such beautiful souls in my life.

Thanks for visiting.

Site Info

Automating this Website

I wrote what might be called an eccentric bash script to automate site publishing and deploying to The Text, which is a single page of mostly short posts on a range of topics. I describe the beginnings of that script at 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.