Lori McCay-Peet works in government in the area of corporate information management and is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Information Management at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her research focuses on people's perceptions and uses of digital information environments, particularly in the context of knowledge work. Her Ph.D. research, funded by a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship, investigated the facets of a digital environment that may facilitate serendipity. She has published and presented her research in several information science and computer science publications and venues including the Journal of the Association of Information Science and Technology, Information Research, Information Processing and Management, and the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Elaine Toms is Professor of Information Innovation & Management in the Management School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. Prior to this she held posts at the University of Toronto and Dalhousie University (including a Canada Research Chair) in Canada. She researches information interaction in complex information use environments, focusing on the human use of technology to support human tasks and how to evaluate the technology and the processes. Serendipity has been a lifelong research interest from the Ph.D. research when her research design ""caused"" serendipity to occur, to the present which is now immersed in how we might nurture serendipity in our digital spaces. Along the way her work was supported by a number of research agencies including in particular the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Research Chairs Program, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
Gary Marchionini is the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Information Science in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Ph.D. is from Wayne State University in mathematics education with an emphasis on educational computing. His research interests are in information seeking in electronic environments, digital libraries, human-computer interaction, digital government and information technology policy. He has had grants or contracts from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Council on Library Resources, the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress, the Kellogg Foundation, and NASA, among others. He was the Conference Chair for the 1996 ACM Digital Library Conference and program chair for the 2002 ACM-IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. He is editor-in-chief for ACM Transactions on Information Systems and serves on the editorial boards of a dozen scholarly journals. He has published more than 150 articles, chapters, and conference papers in the information science, computer science, and education literatures. He founded the Interaction Design Laboratory at UNC-CH.