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MSIS Student Diona Eberhart Layden Awarded ALA Spectrum Scholarship
Diona Eberhart Layden is a licensed attorney and has served as a judicial law clerk for the Tennessee Supreme Court, worked in the Davidson County District Attorney General’s Office, and currently serves as a Guardian ad Litem in the Davidson County Juvenile Court. But after two decades of working as a lawyer, she decided she…
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MSIS Alumna Lara Marler Creates 68 Kindergarten Readiness Backpacks for Bridge Refugee Services in Knoxville
While she was in the MSIS program, Lara Marler (’17) started a passion project to get books into the hands of refugee children in Knoxville, and that project recently came to full fruition in the form of 68 backpacks filled with tools to ready Swahili-speaking children for kindergarten. Each backpack has a picture book in…
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MSIS Student Melinda Sandkam Awarded Lemoncello Scholarship
Melinda Sandkam has always had a heart for certain endeavors, including the education of children and youth, and also helping people find the answers they need. This has guided her career, which includes positions as a hotel concierge, church program director, and preschool director. So perhaps it’s not unusual that she decided to pursue information…
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New SIS Director Abebe Rorissa Elected to be ASIS&T President
Just as new School of Information Sciences Professor and Director Abebe Rorissa stepped into his role July 1, 2021, it was announced that he was elected to be president of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Rorissa’s biography and position statement can be viewed here on the ASIS&T site. He has been heavily…
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SIS Alumni Named as 2021 Movers and Shakers by the Library Journal
Two SIS alumni were recently announced as 2021 Movers and Shakers by the Library Journal: Amber Gregory (’11) as an Advocate and Kelly Passek (’11) as an innovator. The Library Journal states that this list, which features 46 people this year, is comprised of “individuals who are moving the library field forward as a profession.”…
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MSIS Student Alissa Browning-Couch Awarded TLA Gleaves Scholarship
“I just want students to fall in love with the space of the library and feel welcomed there and affirmed there,” said MSIS student Alissa Browning-Couch as she explained why she decided to make a career change and become a school librarian. Browning-Couch doesn’t have a background in education or libraries but she fell in…
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Paper by PhD Student Joseph Winberry & Associate Professor Devendra Potnis Wins ALISE Award
When Joseph Winberry was still a master’s student at SIS, he was a graduate teaching assistant to Associate Professor Devendra Potnis and also assisted in research. Both Potnis and Winberry are interested in social innovation, social justice, and the role information sciences can play in both of those areas. Winberry was helping with Potnis’s research…
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2021 SIS Alumni Innovator’s Award: Celise Reech-Harper
Celise Reech-Harper (’12) moved into her first library director position in January 2020 – so you can imagine that flexibility and innovation quickly became a necessity as she navigated overseeing one main library and nine branches of the Rapides Parish Library in Central Louisiana through a pandemic. But it was a challenge she handled deftly…
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2021 SIS Distinguished Alumni Award: Nancy Pack
For Nancy Pack (’81), the last three decades of being a librarian has really been about one thing: the people. Whether it was her cohort at the School of Information Sciences, many of whom she’s stayed in touch with throughout the years, or the varied patrons she has served, it has been the people who…
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2021 SIS Best Technical Project Award: Kyle Johnson
Whiskey and metadata are two of Kyle Johnson’s favorite things, so it made sense to put them together for a project this last year in his metadata class. The result was “Whiskey Label Schema,” which has earned him the 2021 SIS Best Technical Project Award. “It was easily my favorite project. It seems like every…