Hillary Tune

Event Recap: MSIS Celebrates its 50th Anniversary of Accreditation

SIS faculty, students, alumni, staff, and friends joined together Friday, October 21, 2022, to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the MSIS Program’s ALA Accreditation. Accreditation for an information sciences school means that the program adheres to the highest standards in the field and continues to keep apace of the advancements and innovation of the day.…
Alumni Highlight: MSIS Alum Roger Justus Offered Dream Job on Graduation Day

Featured alumni: Roger Justus Current position and location: Data Services Librarian at Miami University Location: Oxford, Ohio In May of 2022, Roger Justus was playing the job search waiting game. He’d left behind his 25-year career in IT to find a vocation that would “feed his soul,” and friends and family had encouraged him to…
Hannah Gunderman Given 2022 SIS Innovator’s Alumni Award

Videogames and information sciences may not sound like a natural fit, but Hannah Gunderman (’21) has found her niche at the crossroads of the two. She came into the MSIS program with a PhD in geography and a desire to be a librarian. Before she graduated with her master’s degree, she was hired on at…
2022 SIS Distinguished Alumni Susan Jennings

Susan Jennings (’07) didn’t start out with the dream to be a librarian, but in hindsight, she believes it was pre-ordained. After all, she and her family were voracious readers, she was a library page in junior high school, and she drove her mother to the public library every Saturday where they’d spend an hour…
PhD Alum Scott Sikes’ Earns 2022 CCI Outstanding Dissertation Award

At the core of Scott Sikes’ work, both research and professional, is observing and analyzing what people can do when they work together to make their communities and the world a better place. His dissertation, In Our Very Blood: The Use of Social media in the 2018 West Virginia Teachers Strike, follows that same thread.…
Chad Lanctot on What it is Like Being a Veteran and a Student

It took a decade for Chad Lanctot to finish his undergraduate degree, and for good reason: Lanctot was in the U.S. Coast Guard and was taking online classes while he actively served. It was tough going but once he was done and retiring from the Coast Guard, he knew that more higher education was his…
Student Spotlight: Kristina Larsen Becomes Rare Map Librarian After One Semester in MSIS

Featured student: Kristina Larsen Location: San Francisco, California Education: Undergraduate degree in studio art and sculpture from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. What is your professional background? For my undergraduate degree I studied painting and sculpture at Hampshire College. After graduation, I didn’t have plans and went on a road trip with a friend to…
Bonnie Carroll Honored for Long-Time Support of CCI and SIS

Bonnie Carroll may have recently retired from Information International Associates (IIA), the information and scientific data management company she founded decades ago in Oak Ridge, but the long-time supporter of the College of Communication and Information is not yet done with data or with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She was recently honored by CCI…
MSIS Student Kelsey Badger Named Volunteer of Distinction: Extraordinary Professional Promise

Kelsey Badger came into the School of Information Sciences master’s program with the honor of being accepted into the Collaborative Analysis Liaison Librarians (CALL) program, and she will continue that tradition of excellence with the honor of being named a University of Tennessee, Knoxville Volunteer of Distinction: Extraordinary Professional Promise. She’s also already accepted a position…
Student Elisha Jewell and Assistant Professor of Practice Joy Marie Doan Research How NFTs Can Benefit Libraries

Libraries are often places of innovation, many times embodying the adage, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Sitting at the crossroads of technology and information access gives information sciences professionals a unique view of the world, and in the case of School of Information Sciences master’s student Elisha Jewell, a unique take on the blockchain…