Featured Story

  • Student Spotlight: Kristy Cunningham Combines a Passion for People and Tech

    Featured student: Kristy Cunningham Location: Cookeville, TN Education: Bachelor’s in Management Information Systems, MBA from Tennessee Tech, will graduate Spring 2020 with an MSIS Career: I work at Tennessee Tech, but not in the library. I am the assistant director for the Center for Career Development; I do resume reviews, career fairs, classroom presentations about interviews and resumes, and…

  • Alum Ken Wise Directs UT Libraries Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project for 23 Years

    It was his longtime love of hiking that pushed Ken Wise from being an accountant to becoming director of the UT Libraries’ Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project in 1998. So it was a little bit of being in the right place at the right time, and a lot of passion. Even before Wise had completed…

  • Kendra Albright: SIS Alum, Former SIS Faculty, Director of Kent State University’s LIS School

    When one takes a step back and looks at the varied career of alum Kendra Albright, it’s not difficult to see why she was awarded the SIS Distinguished Alumni Award in 2017. While Albright is humble about work she put in to get to where she is now, there’s no doubt that she built on…

  • Recent Alum’s Hands-On Learning at SIS Leads to Instructional Librarian Position

    Brooke Olson (’19) was a project manager for almost a decade when she decided it was time for a career overhaul. The Nashville resident began taking distance education classes through SIS in 2017, but she knew she wanted a look at what happens behind the scenes in a library before deciding that was her endgame.…

  • MSIS Student Rachael Murphy Uses Practicum to Explore Diversity & Inclusion in Hodges Library

    MSIS student Rachael Murphy started an assistantship at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Hodges Library in fall 2019, conducting a “kindness audit.” The audit takes an inventory of all the signage throughout the library to assess what kind of messages or ideas are being communicated to those who walk into the building. “We’re looking at,…

  • Amanda Liford Hopes to Start Career Through USGS Practicum

    Recent graduate Amanda Liford (’19) transitioned from a student practicum into an assistantship at the US Geological Survey this past year, and now she’s hoping it could turn into a full-time career as a data manager at the organization. Liford was part of the User Experience Assessment Cohort that was funded by a grant and…

  • Alum Rick Wallace: A Scholastic Cheerleader, Lifelong Learner and Librarian

    Rick Wallace takes the traditional tenets of being an academic librarian seriously – he ensures students have the skills and access to information they need, and maintains a space for them to study and explore that information. But he also takes it a step farther by making the library a place they can go for…

  • Katie Knight Pursues Big Data and Her Doctorate

    Katie Knight has traveled from one end of the information sciences highway to the other – from public libraries to archives, and from archives to metadata. As part of her job as an assistant librarian at the New York School of Design, she cataloged and archived items requiring metadata tagging. It was then that she…

  • Learn About a Lecturer: Janine Pino Immerses Students into Cataloging

    Lecturer: Janine Pino Location: Knoxville, Tennessee Academic Background: MSIS, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Current Career: I am a Catalog/Reference Librarian at Pellissippi State Community College. This will be my fifth year, and I’m currently up for tenure. The librarians all do a little bit of everything, but that really is everything you can imagine at…

  • PhD Student Cassandra Huang Pursues Research to Make an Impact on Teenage Cyber-bullying

    When Cassandra Huang graduated from high school in her home country of Taiwan, her General Scholastic Ability Test results gave her several options as to what she could pursue in college. For her, it came down to a choice between Chinese literature study and library information science; she chose the latter. “The LIS field has…