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 and with aplomb, which is why she is the recipient of the 2021 SIS Alumni Innovator Award.
As good leaders do, Reech-Harper deflects much of the praise for how the Rapides Parish Library changed services and implemented new ideas during the COVID-19 pandemic, preferring to … Read more “2021 SIS Alumni Innovator’s Award: Celise Reech-Harper”
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 have made it a career she loves.
When he was growing up, Joseph Winberry (’19) spent a lot of time around his grandparents and their friends in a retirement community – he found himself drawn to older people, and it stuck. It was just a fluke, he said, that he eventually was hired for a job at the 
Dan Greene’s (’03) current life is immersed in information sciences: he’s an alum of SIS, he is the SIS technology coordinator, and he’s also an SIS lecturer. But information sciences wasn’t even on his radar when he was an undergraduate at East Tennessee State University. There, he switched majors so many times he almost lost count before he finally did graduate with a degree in history. But there were always two other fields that kept pulling at him throughout the years: computer science and librarianship.
For every single product you search for while shopping online, there are layers of data that led you to it. Granular data that has been dug up, categorized, standardized, and recorded by teams of people – people like Laura Creekmore (’17).
Madison Langseth (’15) was first drawn to the idea of connecting people to information when she was volunteering for the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, teaching chemistry and physics to middle and high school students. There, she helped reopen the school’s library, and it was one of the most impactful projects she did during those years.