About

Kristin Eschenfelder is a professor and associate dean at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has been on campus since 2000, joining the faculty of the Information School. Her research lies at the intersection of technology, law, and society, with a focus on information access, sharing, and rights management. As associate director of the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences since its launch in 2019, she has been an advocate for creating flexible, interdisciplinary pathways for undergraduates and developing student supports such as Morgridge Hall’s Rebecca M. Blank Student Commons and Phill and Liz Gross Learning Center. Eschenfelder has spearheaded stewardship efforts that helped secure a $5 million endowment and established systematic stewardship for annual giving and scholarship use. She also planned and directed major departmental relocations into Morgridge Hall. She is an affiliate of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies in L&S and helped develop the Wisconsin Digital Studies program. Her vision involves integrating the human and ethical aspects of technology, computing, and data into the curriculum, ensuring that students across diverse fields—from the humanities to the social sciences—gain both functional and critical literacies.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Engineering
• Data science
• Data Mining
• Political Science
• World Wide Web
• Public relations
• Knowledge management
• Finance

Selected publications

• Communicating Biodiversity Data Restriction Rationales: Balancing Specificity with Practical and Ethical Considerations

  Citizen Science Theory and Practice · 2025-12-22

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Web-accessible biodiversity databases accept and openly share species observations from the public, which benefits research, conservation, and education. However, public data sharing can also bring harm, for example by facilitating poaching. Databases may mitigate potential harms associated with data sharing by designating certain species as “sensitive” and restricting access to those species data. Herein, we explore how databases explain those restrictions through rationales. We analyzed rationale communication in 43 biodiversity databases that automatically restrict access to certain participatory science species data. We found a small set of commonly used rationales, wide variation in the number of rationales provided, and a surprising number of databases citing few rationales. We distinguish between general theme rationales that can apply to many species and specific theme rationales that apply to fewer species, and between low- and high-context rationales. Most databases provided general theme rationales at the database level, and a smaller group provided rationales (general or specific theme) unique to each species. Most databases explained restrictions in formal policies, but some did not. We discuss implications of rationale communication for data accessibility, risk management, and informed participation in participatory science, and link our findings to ongoing metadata standardization efforts. We suggest seven best practices for data restriction communication that account for differences in project values, obligations, and resources. Our primary recommendations are that databases provide rationales for data restrictions, ideally unique to each species, and make these rationales publicly accessible and easy to locate when doing so does not increase threats.

  PublisherDOI

• The relationship between university presses, e-book vendors, and academic libraries: A platform theory analysis

  Journal of Librarianship and Information Science · 2023-07-10 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  University presses, as one of the major content providers in the scholarly e-book market, especially in humanities and social sciences (HSS), play a critical role in the production and distribution of new knowledge and culture. We investigate the relations among university presses, academic libraries, and e-book vendors, by examining university presses’ perceptions of academic libraries and e-book vendors, and presses’ perceptions of themselves and the university press community. Findings are drawn from one-on-one interviews with 19 participants from 18 different university presses in the United States during 2020–2021. We observe a market structure for HSS e-books where most presses were satisfied with Big Four e-book vendors, including Project MUSE, EBSCO, ProQuest, and JSTOR, and lacked strong incentives to search for new e-book vendors. We find that most presses often treat libraries, including the one from the same institution, as their customers with limited interactions; findings also show university presses’ varied self-imaging, along with a shared perception about the collegiality of the university press community. We then explore the question of why the market is dominated by the Big Four through the theoretical lens developed in platform literature, and further examine the factors contributing to the low communication between university presses and academic libraries related to e-book distribution.

  PublisherDOI

• The financial maintenance of social science data archives: Four case studies of long‐term infrastructure work

  Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2022 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Finance

  Abstract Contributing to the literature on knowledge infrastructure maintenance, this article describes a historical longitudinal analysis of revenue streams employed by four social science data organizations: the Roper Center for Public Opinion, the Inter‐university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the UK Data Archive (UKDA), and the LIS Cross‐National Data Center in Luxembourg (LIS). Drawing on archival documentation and interviews, we describe founders' assumptions about revenue, changes to revenue streams over the long term, practices for developing and maintaining revenue streams, the importance of financial support from host organizations, and how the context of each data organization shaped revenue possibilities. We extend conversations about knowledge infrastructure revenue streams by showing the types of change that have occurred over time and how it occurs. We provide examples of the types of flexibility needed for data organizations to remain sustainable over 40–60 years of revenue changes. We distinguish between Type A flexibilities, or development of new products and services, and Type B flexibilities, or continuous smaller adjustments to existing revenue streams. We argue that Type B flexibilities are as important as Type A, although they are easily overlooked. Our results are relevant to knowledge infrastructure managers and stakeholders facing similar revenue challenges.

  PublisherDOI

• Autonomy Framing and Cybersecurity Training Completion

  Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2021-10-01

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT This pilot project conducted an AB test to see whether inclusion of an autonomy framed appeal in announcement of organizational cybersecurity training influenced training completion or time to training completion. The interim results, which include approximately 31% of the population, show that groups receiving the autonomy appeal had a lower training completion rate. The results show no difference in time to training completion.

  PublisherDOI

• Comparing Use Terms in Spanish and US Research University E-journal Licenses: Recent Trends

  College & Research Libraries · 2021-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  This paper describes the results of a study to compare contemporary e-journal licenses from two research universities in the United States and Spain in terms of e-reserves, interlibrary loan, text and data mining, authors’ rights and treatment of copyright exceptions, usage statistics, governing law, data privacy, and obligations entailing security. The data include a higher proportion of scholarly society and academic press publishers than earlier license analyses. This analysis compares license terms over time, across publisher types and between the two libraries, and it compares findings with recommendations from model licenses. The results show progress toward model license goals in some areas, but deficiencies in others including self-archiving, usage statistics clauses, and clauses related to e-resource data privacy and library security and disciplinary obligations. Our findings also raise questions about international ILL and governing venue clauses in library licenses outside the North American context.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Of Seamlessness and Frictions: Transborder Data Flows of European and US Social Science Data

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2020 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Data science
  PublisherDOI

• Inter-Organisational Coordination Work in Digital Curation: the Case of Eurobarometer

  International Journal of Digital Curation · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science

  
 Open research is predicated upon seamless access to curated research data. Major national and European funding schemes, such as Horizon Europe, strongly encourage or require publicly funded data to be FAIR - that is, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (Wilkinson, 2016). What underpins such initiatives are the many data organizations and repositories working with their stakeholders and each other to establish policies and practices, implement them, and do the curatorial work to increase the available, discoverability, and accessibility of high quality research data. However, such work has often been invisible and underfunded, necessitating creative and collaborative solutions.
 In this paper, we briefly describe how one such case from social science data: the processing of the Eurobarometer data set. Using content analysis of administrative documents and interviews, we detail how European data archives managed the tensions of curatorial work across borders and jurisdictions from the 1970s to the mid-2000s, the challenges that they faced in distributing work, and the solutions they found. In particular, we look at the interactions of the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) and social science data organizations (DO) like UKDA, ICPSR, and GESIS and the institutional and organizational collaborations that made Eurobarometer “too big to fail”. We describe some of the invisible work that they underwent in the past in making data in Europe findable, accessible, interoperable, and conclude with implications for “frictionless” data access and reuse today.
 

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Prevalence and Use of the Term “Business Model” in the Digital Cultural Heritage Institution Professional Literature

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2019-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Smart home technologies: A new source of social support or just another gadget?

  2019-01-01

  articleSenior author

  This paper describes a pilot field study of the extent to which the current smart home technologies (SHoT) could provide social support to individuals and families including emotional support, companionship, information support and instrumental support. Data includes interviews with 6 households (15 people including adults and children) who used SHoT. Results suggest that SHoT can provide a low/medium level of information and instrumental support and a low level of emotional support and companionship to adults. However, child users reported more emotional support and companionship from SHoT.

  PublisherDOI

• Talking About Metadata Labor: Social Science Data Archives, Professional Data Librarians, and the Founding of IASSIST

  History of computing · 2019-01-01 · 9 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kalpana Shankar

  University College Dublin

  26 shared

• Steve Sawyer

  Syracuse University

  11 shared

• Greg Downey

  Macquarie University

  10 shared

• Charles R. McClure

  9 shared

• Anuj C. Desai

  8 shared

• Rachel Williams

  University of South Carolina

  4 shared

• Chi‐Shiou Lin

  National Taiwan University

  4 shared

• Noriko Hara

  Indiana University Bloomington

  3 shared

Education

• PhD, Information Studies

  Syracuse University

  2000