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 Swahili and related activities and supplies, with a curriculum Marler wrote herself.

Even the most skilled and advanced researchers in the world need to be able to access other information to support their work. So, when researchers at Oak Ridge National Lab need a journal article or technical manuscript, they know where to go: the ORNL library.

The library was established in 1943, with a history dating back to around the same time as the inception of the Manhattan Project, said Anna Galyon (MSIS ’09), the library’s manager and a School of Information Sciences alumna.

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.

Kelly Passek loads books into packages to be delivered to students via Wing drone delivery. Photo courtesy of Wing.

Imagine a middle school student looking out their front door to see a drone hovering above them, a long tether attached to a box extending from the small flying machine – when the box is released, the child opens it and inside is a library book from their middle school librarian. This small sci-fi adventure is playing out right now in the Christiansburg, Virginia area, after middle school librarian and SIS alum Kelly Passek (’11) brought the idea to fruition.

SIS alum and Seattle Public Library Executive Director and Chief Librarian Marcellus Turner credits the library’s staff for earning it the 2020 Gale/Library Journal Library of the Year Award.

“This is well-deserved recognition of their commitment to involving community voices in programs, reducing barriers to access and actively pursuing key partnerships. It’s our staff that has been leading the way,” Turner stated in a news release.

SIS and Chancellor’s Professor Suzie Allard delivers the keynote at the Empirical Librarians 2020 conference in Knoxville.

The Empirical Librarians conference is a small event that allows librarians to learn more about research, and how to support original research. The 2020 conference was hosted in Knoxville Feb. 27-28. Several SIS students, alumni and faculty attended the conference and many of them presented their research, including:

• SIS and Chancellor’s Professor Suzie Allard was the keynote speaker and she spoke about how to collaborate with researchers in other disciplines, and why a multi-disciplinary team can be helpful in information sciences research. She