Director of Voices Out Loud and Research Librarian Donna Braquet 

Voices Out Loud is an archives and oral history project started by UT Research Librarian Donna Braquet, who felt like there needed to be a resource chronicling the history of LGBTQ+ people in East Tennessee. Various pieces make up the collection, including three projects SIS students have worked on over the past year.

SIS Student & Staff Member Hillary Tune (featured at 0:29) sews face masks for Knox Makes Masks

During this time, people are coming together (while staying apart), and doing what they can to support and inspire their community. The members of the SIS community are no different; alumni, faculty, students, and staff are already stepping up and embodying the Volunteer Spirit during this difficult time.

Julia Proctor and some fellow students have worked for months on reinstituting the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s student chapter of the Society for American Archivists (SAA). While at first it may have seemed that the timing of their inaugural special speaker wasn’t ideal – with it being the Sunday after Spring Break and in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis – the group decided that it would be a great distraction for other students during this tumultuous time. And they were right, Proctor said.

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

The School of Information Sciences is proud that four of its incoming students were selected for prestigious fellowships from the UTK graduate school.

“SIS students often receive fellowships from the Graduate School, but none of us can remember such a large number of students being recognized in the same year. This is just another testament to our students’ excellence,” said Associate Professor Rachel Fleming-May, who is also the SIS director of graduate studies.

The four students and the fellowships they received are:

• Brianna Blackwell, J. Wallace & Katie Dean Graduate Endowment Fellowship
• Erika Fitzpatrick, J. Wallace & Katie Dean Graduate

Recent SIS graduate Lauren Cole (Spring ’19) spent part of her last semester conducting a practicum through East Tennessee PBS and its “Black in Appalachia” project.

Lisa Ladd is a master of information sciences student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who was awarded the Marcellus Turner Student Travel Scholarship this year. She used it to go to the American Library Association 2019 Conference. Here is a recap from her of that experience.

I have just returned from ALA in Washington, D.C. Here are some of the highlights from this amazing conference.

In my mind, this year’s conference was all about accessibility, visibility and reaching out to those populations that are under-served or marginalized.