Rick Wallace takes the traditional tenets of being an academic librarian seriously – he ensures students have the skills and access to information they need, and maintains a space for them to study and explore that information. But he also takes it a step farther by making the library a place they can go for help beyond academic. He’s affable, kind, energetic and intelligent.

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

SIS and CCI are fondly remembering the life and service of Donald W. King, a long-time supporter of the school and college and an SIS adjunct professor, who died in November at the age of 87.

King served on the CCI Board of Visitors from 2011-2014, was a member of CCI’s Bickel Society, and was the co-creator of the Tenopir-King Research Excellence Fund with SIS Chancellor’s Professor Carol Tenopir. Tenopir said one of the reasons she came to the University of Tennessee in 1994 was to have an opportunity to do research with King.

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.

When Regina Mays and Rachel Fleming-May get together, it’s a close camaraderie. They joke about which one of them is “the best” (each claiming it’s the other, and not themselves), and their interactions have that underlying trust and ease that takes years to build. In fact, it’s been about a decade since the two began their professional collaboration.