Hillary Tune

SIS 2020 Alumni Innovator’s Award: Wendy Cornelisen

SIS alum Wendy Cornelisen (‘07) is a big picture, out-of-the-box kind of person. This mindset is why her career trajectory took her from a reference librarian position all the way to her current job as Georgia’s assistant state librarian for library innovation and collaboration – and it’s also why she is the recipient of the…
SIS Faculty Award Recipients: Associate Professors Awa Zhu and Devendra Potnis

SIS Associate Professor Awa Zhu was awarded the 2020 SIS Bonnie Carroll and Roy Cooper Faculty Enrichment Award for the cumulative research she has done over the past two years. “I was so excited. I don’t have a lot of publications, so I was very surprised, and [SIS Director Diane Kelly] said that the award…
SIS 2020 Distinguished Alumni Award Recipient David Johnson

Fayetteville Public Library has long been the Arkansas city’s center, a hot spot for learning, special events, and other communal gatherings. In 2005, it won the Library of the Year award sponsored by Library Journal and Thompson/Gale Publishers – the smallest library ever to earn that accolade, said the library’s current director, SIS alum David…
Student Jessica Giles Creates Map to Track People’s Movements During the Pandemic

One of the reasons student Jessica Giles entered the MSIS program was to learn how to better represent data through visualization for her job as an associate data engineer at Intermx in Atlanta, Georgia. She had hoped to gain skills that would allow her to put data and statistics into an easy-to-consume format for the…
Alum Andrew Grissom: Librarian at Nonprofit That Helps Advance Women in the Workplace

When Andrew Grissom (’15) entered the MSIS program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, he had imagined himself working in an academic library setting. He loved the idea of helping others with research, as well as getting a chance to conduct his own research. But his career took a surprise turn when an interest in…
SIS Alumni Share How Their Organizations Are Responding to the Covid-19 Pandemic

We know that everyone’s lives have been impacted by this pandemic, and just as we have adjusted our work and support for students here at the School of Information Sciences, many of our alumni have had to drastically change everyday operations. We reached out to some of our alums to see how they and their…
SIS Students, Staff Step Up and Embody the Volunteer Spirit

SIS Student & Staff Member Hillary Tune (featured at 0:29) sews face masks for Knox Makes Masks During this time, people are coming together (while staying apart), and doing what they can to support and inspire their community. The members of the SIS community are no different; alumni, faculty, students, and staff are already…
SAA Chapter is Revived, Hosted First Speaker Event

Julia Proctor and some fellow students have worked for months on reinstituting the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s student chapter of the Society for American Archivists (SAA). While at first it may have seemed that the timing of their inaugural special speaker wasn’t ideal – with it being the Sunday after Spring Break and in the…
Guest Speaker Aisha Johnson-Jones Explores Diversity in Information Sciences

It was by chance that Aisha Johnson-Jones found information about the historic Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program while she was doing research on increasing African-American diversity in archives. As she started learning more about the program, she started asking around to see what research had been done on the topic. When it became clear that…
Student Spotlight Jeff Zentner is a Musician, Lawyer, Author, and Librarian is Next on His List

Featured student: Jeff Zentner Location: Nashville, TN Education: Bachelor’s degree in communications from University of Utah, law degree from Vanderbilt University Law School Career/Background: I’ve had a number of different lives. I used to be a musician. As a musician, I recorded several albums with bands and solo, and wrote a bunch of songs. I’ve worked with Iggy…