Ray Larson specializes in the design and performance evaluation of information systems, and the evaluation of user interaction with those systems.  His background includes work as a programmer/analyst with the UC Division of Library Automation (DLA) where he was involved in the design, development, and performance evaluation of the UC public access online union catalog (MELVYL).  His research has concentrated on the design and evaluation of information retrieval systems, with an emphasis on online library catalogs and digital libraries.  Prof. Larson was a faculty investigator on the Sequoia 2000 project, where he was involved in the design and evaluation of a very-large-scale, network-based, information system to support the information needs of scientists studying global change. He is also a faculty investigator on the UC Berkeley Environmental Digital Library Project (one of the six large-scale digital library projects sponsored by NSF, NASA and ARPA) where the work is continuing on a very large environmental information system providing access to information on the California Environment. Prof. Larson was the principal investigator for the "CHESHIRE Demonstration and Evaluation Project" sponsored by the US Dept. of Education, that is developing a next-generation online catalog and full-text retrieval system. He is a co-principal investigator for the "Searching Unfamiliar Metadata Vocabularies" project sponsored by DARPA.  Prof. Larson is principal investigator of the "Cross-Domain Resource Discovery: Integrated Discovery and Use of Textual, Numeric and Spatial Data" project sponsored by NSF as part of the International Digital Libraries program.

Ray R. Larson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
School of Information Management and Systems
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, California  94720-4600
Email: ray@sherlock.sims.berkeley.edu