Katie Knight has traveled from one end of the information sciences highway to the other – from public libraries to archives, and from archives to metadata.

As part of her job as an assistant librarian at the New York School of Design, she cataloged and archived items requiring metadata tagging. It was then that she found a new love within the information sciences, and pursued a job in Oak Ridge National Lab that focused on data and inventive solutions.

Lecturer: Janine Pino

Location: Knoxville, Tennessee

Academic Background: MSIS, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

When Cassandra Huang graduated from high school in her home country of Taiwan, her General Scholastic Ability Test results gave her several options as to what she could pursue in college. For her, it came down to a choice between Chinese literature study and library information science; she chose the latter.

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.

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.

When Will Biggs left the United States Marine Corps after 10 years of service, he started a job hunt that proved to be a bit rougher than he had anticipated.

“I was looking at county jobs and had probably applied to at least 15 positions, and nobody gave me a chance until the public libraries did,” he said. “I started working at the library and I realized I liked it.”