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 help beyond academic. He’s affable, kind, energetic and intelligent.

Lecturer: Janine Pino

Location: Knoxville, Tennessee

Academic Background: MSIS, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

SIS and CCI are fondly remembering the life and service of Donald W. King, a long-time supporter of the school and college and an SIS adjunct professor, who died in November at the age of 87.

King served on the CCI Board of Visitors from 2011-2014, was a member of CCI’s Bickel Society, and was the co-creator of the Tenopir-King Research Excellence Fund with SIS Chancellor’s Professor Carol Tenopir. Tenopir said one of the reasons she came to the University of Tennessee in 1994 was to have an opportunity to do research with King.

Assistant Professor Brian Dobreski is the newest member of the SIS faculty, and he’s settling well into both his role as a teacher, and into his new community in Knoxville. He’s also made an impact academically with his dissertation, which earned him three accolades in recent months:

Tyler Martindale quit his real estate appraiser job and started waiting tables and bartending not long after he graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in business economics.

“I had that early millennial mindset, and I didn’t want to do something I didn’t derive personal satisfaction from for the rest of my life,” he said. “So I was figuring things out. While I was doing that, I was going to my local public library in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and thinking that the services it provided me were invaluable.”

Helping students find science resources comes naturally to Alexa Carter (’18). When she was an undergrad at the University of Tennessee, earning her degree in chemistry, she often found herself helping other students find information for lab classes. Her interest in chemistry merged with a love of the information sciences when she began looking for an elective to take.

“I had a friend who was doing information science, and she thought, with my curious nature, I might like it. So I took a class as an undergrad and kind of fell in love with it,” Carter said.

When MSIS student Dylan Miller heard local LGBTQ+ nonprofit organization OUTMemphis speak at her library about LGBTQ+ inclusivity, it planted the seed of an idea: why not host a Pride event at the library? She wasn’t the only one who understood the importance of the organization’s message and had the same response – two other Benjamin L. Hook Central Library employees met up with Miller and an OUTMemphis representative, and together they decided that such an event should happen.

When Regina Mays and Rachel Fleming-May get together, it’s a close camaraderie. They joke about which one of them is “the best” (each claiming it’s the other, and not themselves), and their interactions have that underlying trust and ease that takes years to build. In fact, it’s been about a decade since the two began their professional collaboration.

SIS Director and Professor Diane Kelly was recently elected incoming chair-elect for the iSchools organization. She will serve two years as chair-elect beginning in March 2020 at the iConference in Sweden, and will work alongside Gobinda Chowdhury, professor of information science and chair of the iSchool at Northumbria University, who is iSchools incoming chair. Her two-year term as chair of the organization will begin in 2022.

Featured student: Yasmin Stoss.
Location: Knoxville, TN.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in Japanese.

Career: After graduating, I was working for a while, I had two full-time jobs before I started the master’s program.  One of them was working with an institutional review board at a different university and through that job, I got a job with a tech company, Techsoftware.