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.

Melinda Sandkam has always had a heart for certain endeavors, including the education of children and youth, and also helping people find the answers they need. This has guided her career, which includes positions as a hotel concierge, church program director, and preschool director. So perhaps it’s not unusual that she decided to pursue information sciences and librarianship as the next branch of her career

“It has always been about seeking the right information, so it has come full circle,” she said.

“I just want students to fall in love with the space of the library and feel welcomed there and affirmed there,” said MSIS student Alissa Browning-Couch as she explained why she decided to make a career change and become a school librarian.

Browning-Couch doesn’t have a background in education or libraries but she fell in love with the work children and school librarians do when she started taking her own kids to the local library, and when they started attending elementary school.

When Joseph Winberry was still a master’s student at SIS, he was a graduate teaching assistant to Associate Professor Devendra Potnis and also assisted in research. Both Potnis and Winberry are interested in social innovation, social justice, and the role information sciences can play in both of those areas.

Celise Reech-Harper (’12) moved into her first library director position in January 2020 – so you can imagine that flexibility and innovation quickly became a necessity as she navigated overseeing one main library and nine branches of the Rapides Parish Library in Central Louisiana through a pandemic. But it was a challenge she handled deftly and with aplomb, which is why she is the recipient of the 2021 SIS Alumni Innovator Award.

Whiskey and metadata are two of Kyle Johnson’s favorite things, so it made sense to put them together for a project this last year in his metadata class. The result was “Whiskey Label Schema,” which has earned him the 2021 SIS Best Technical Project Award.

“It was easily my favorite project. It seems like every chance I get I try to impart whiskey into my projects because it’s just a lot of fun for me. I’m a second generation Scottish-American, my mom emigrated, so it’s like getting reinvested in the tangible aspects of my heritage,” he said.

Jesse Morris has been simultaneously working in a data management position at Oak Ridge National Lab while taking classes in the MSIS program for the last four years. One of the benefits of this has been aligning class projects with work she’s doing at her job. That’s the case for the paper she wrote that won the 2021 SIS Best Paper Award, “GIS for Knowledge Management: Leveraging mapping tools to address baby boomer ‘brain drain”.”

This paper, and some of her other projects, were inspired by a reoccurring issue within her department, which tests water samples throughout the area.