Senior Lecturer

• Information organisation and retrieval
• Digital humanities
• Usability studies
• Scholarly communication

• UPSpace: https://repository.up.ac.za/handle/2263/975
• OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1483-0780

• INL 210 – Information seeking and retrieval
• INL 340 – Digital repositories
• INY 717 – Data management
• MIT 886 – Institutional repositories and virtual work environments

• INY 714 – Information behaviour, retrieval and organisation

• Master’s dissertations
• Coursework master’s dissertations

Dr Ball is a senior lecturer in the Department of Information Science. She joined the Department in 2011. She was formerly employed as an instructional designer in the private sector. She received her PhD in 2021. She enjoys the intersection of teaching and research. She is particularly interested in how people live well within the context of information technology, including how technology can help people to cope with the vast amount of information available, how technology can be used to create new opportunities when working with information and how people work with information ethically. Specific research interests are information organisation, information seeking and retrieval, digital humanities,scholarly communication and information ethics. In terms of teaching she enjoys developing new content to explain concepts clearly and creating exercises to strengthen students’ skills.

• Bothma, T.J.D. & Ball, L.H. 2017. Evaluating advanced search and display options for e-dictionaries. eLex 2017, 19-21 September 2017, Leiden, Netherlands. 
• Ball, L.H. & Bothma, T.J.D. 2017. A usability evaluation of the Afrikaanse idiome-woordeboek. Afrilex 2017, 26-29 June 2017, Grahamstown, South Africa. 
• Ball, L.H. & Bothma, T.J.D. 2017. The importance of usability evaluation when developing digital tools for a library – a case study. Bobcatsss 2017, 25-27 January 2017, Tampere, Finland.
• Ball, L. & Fourie, I. 2012. “If love is in the air… will students put more effort into information seeking?” Presentation at the 11th Southern African Online Information Meeting, June 2012, Johannesburg, South Africa.

• Ball, L. & Bothma, T.J.D. 2020. The capability of search tools to retrieve words with specific properties from large text collections. In Proceedings of ISIC, the Information Behaviour Conference, Pretoria, South Africa, 28 September - 1 October, 2020. Information Research, 25(4), paper isic2030. Retrieved from http://InformationR.net/ir/25-4/isic2020/isic2030.html (Archived by the Internet Archive at https://bit.ly/3meU2cA) https://doi.org/10.47989/irisic2030.
• Ball, L.H. & Bothma, T.J.D. 2017. The importance of usability evaluation when developing digital tools for a library – a case study. Bobcatsss 2017, 25-27 January 2017, Tampere, Finland: 137 – 142, http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-03-0524-6.

• Ball, L.H. & Bothma, T.J.D. 2022. Investigating the extent to which words or phrases with specific attributes can be retrieved from digital text collections, Information Research, In publication.
• Ball, L.H. & Bothma, T.J.D. 2018. Heuristic evaluation of e-dictionaries, Library Hi Tech, 36(2): 319-338. 
• Ball, L.H. & Bothma, T.J.D. 2018. Establishing evaluation criteria for e-dictionaries, Library Hi Tech, 36(10): 152-166.
• Ball, L.H. & Bothma, T.J.D. 2017. A usability evaluation of the prototype Afrikaanse idiome-woordeboek, Lexikos, 27: 78-106.
• De Beer, M., Van der Merwe, M. Ball, L. & Fourie, I. 2016. Legal Deposit of Electronic Books - A Review of Challenges Faced by National Libraries, Library Hi Tech, 34(1): 87-103.
• Fourie, I. & Ball, L. 2012. Promotional strategies for information products and services: Aligning with the serious and entertainment facets of information consumers' lives, Library Hi Tech, 30(4):683 – 692.

• Library Hi-Tech
• Electronic Library
• Mousaion

• ASIS&T

• Part of local steering committee for ISIC2020, the Information Behaviour Conference, Pretoria, South Africa, 28 September - 1 October, 2020.
• Part of the local organising committee for CODATA-RDA School of Research Data Science, 2021.

• 2021 Recipient of the annual Peter Underwood book prize for academic research achievement for completing her PhD degree titled Enhancing digital text collections with detailed metadata to improve retrieval
• Best poster award at ISIC, the Information Behaviour Conference, 2020, Pretoria, South Africa.
• The Microsoft prize for the best female third year student in Computer Science
• Part of the group that won the Technology prize and the Overall prize for COS 301 (final year project for Computer Science)
• Share the first prize for INY 300 (final year project for Multimedia)
• Top student in Multimedia-modules on the 300-level
• Top student in Multimedia-modules on the 200-level
• Top student in Multimedia-modules on the 100-level