“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.
She joined the Tennessee Library Association in the middle of 2020 as a way to learn more from … Read more “MSIS Student Alissa Browning-Couch Awarded TLA Gleaves Scholarship”
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.
For Nancy Pack (’81), the last three decades of being a librarian has really been about one thing: the people. Whether it was her cohort at the School of Information Sciences, many of whom she’s stayed in touch with throughout the years, or the varied patrons she has served, it has been the people who have made it a career she loves.
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.
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”.”
Ashley Orehek came to SIS dreaming about becoming some sort of science librarian and was part of the very first CALL cohort at the School, which trains students to become liaisons between scientists and the rest of the world. That dream hasn’t faded a bit, but she’s since added onto her path towards it. It’s likely that her ability to be flexible and her propensity to give her all in everything she does is why she is this year’s recipient of the CCI Outstanding Information Sciences Student Award.
Kay P Maye never really noticed how information flowed and shaped the world prior to entering the MSIS program, but now he sees it everywhere, in everything he does. He’s particularly interested in how everyday people find information and how they judge whether or not it is good or bad information.
Julia Proctor spent her time in the MSIS program staying very busy with extracurricular activities related to the School and information sciences – so it should be no surprise that she is being given the 2021 SIS Outstanding Service Award. Nonetheless, Proctor, said she was surprised to get the news but also “really happy.”
When Cassidy Thompson was in her former career as a teacher, she would never have imagined that she’d find her true passion in cataloging. But that’s exactly what Thompson, one of this year’s 2021 Academic Achievement Award winners, hopes to be doing after she graduates from SIS this spring. She was offered a cataloging job at a small library in coastal Maine, which she felt was the perfect job, but it was not exactly the perfect situation for her family at this time – she already has more interviews lined up and is excited to see where her new degree …