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.
In fact, it all started at his high school library one day when a librarian … Read more “SIS Alum, Staff, and Lecturer – Dan Greene is All Three!”
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.
Jennifer Chilcoat (’89) admits she didn’t follow a rule handed to her and other SIS students by their professor at the time, Mike Pemberton. He told them to stay at their first job out of grad school for 3-5 years, and then move onto something new…but she ended up staying at the Central Arkansas Library System for 28 years after graduating. Chilcoat, however, may be an exception to that rule, seeing as she just moved into her new role as director of the Arkansas State Library. She replaces Carolyn Ashcraft, who retired July 1.
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.
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 her experience in both the corporate and academic sectors to arrive at her current position as director of Kent State University’s School of Library and Information Sciences.