I am definitely not a traditional student. I did not take a straight path to complete my college degree or getting into the SIS graduate program. I started college in 1998 seeking a pre-veterinary degree from Georgia Southern University (GSU) in Statesboro, GA. I dropped out to gain work experience and focus on myself. My spouse and I moved around the country for work, fell … Read more “Student Spotlight: Jessica Woofter on Databases and Data Analysis”

The School of Information Sciences recently added another graduate certificate to its offerings, the Research Data Management Certificate (RDMC).

“At SIS, we tailor our programs to the workforce needs of employers and provide a relevant curriculum that benefits our students,” said SIS Professor and Director Abebe Rorissa. “The new Research Data Management Certificate and our existing certificate offerings in Health Informatics and Youth Informatics will create ample opportunities for students and practitioners to expand their skillsets.”

This certificate combines various courses offered by SIS into a comprehensive program that will showcase student’s ability to manage research data for a … Read more “SIS Launches Research Data Management Certificate Program”

Yuan is the first author for the paper that resulted from … Read more “SIS Professor Dania Bilal Works with PhD Student & Others to Learn How to Use Social Robots to Help People with Dementia”

One of those things was planning and assessment, which she describes as a cycle wherein an organization recognizes a need, creates an evidence-informed plan to address it, launches the planned initiative, evaluates the initiative’s success, then uses data to revise … Read more “SIS Associate Professor Rachel Fleming-May Writes Planning and Assessment Book with SIS Alum & Hodges Librarian Regina Mays”

Jill Grogg and Teddy Gray were in the same cohort and both graduated from SIS in 2001 and went their separate ways but into the same career path: academic librarianship. Several years later, their paths converged again when both departed their academic librarian positions and began working for LYRASIS. It’s a job that combines their passions for making information accessible with building up communities in information sciences organizations.

Working at a Consortium

LYRASIS is a consortium, which means it does the work for its library, museum, and archives members when it comes to negotiating licenses, getting the best price … Read more “Alumni Jill Grogg and Teddy Gray Talk About Working at a Consortium”

CCI doctoral student Jessica Barfield’s recent research with SIS Professor Dania Bilal looked at diversity and how that affected the way people interact with AI-powered voice digital assistants. Now, in collaboration with SIS Assistant Professor Jiangen He, she’s building on that research by taking similar principles and applying it to human-robot interaction. The two will be able to buy a robot for this research with funding they were recently awarded through a University of Tennessee, Knoxville Student/Faculty Research Award.

The aim of this project, “Diversity as a Factor in the Design of Human-Robot Interfaces,” is to see how people … Read more “Phd Student Jessica Barfield & Assistant Prof. Jiangen He Get Award to Fund Diversity in Robot-Human Interaction Research”

At her heart, Songhee Kim is an artist, and she’s found ways to incorporate that into her career path over the years. She earned an undergraduate degree in 3D animation and visual effects from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and went on to work for projects such as Disney Junior’s “Sophia the First” and CBN’s “Superbook.” Now she is the College of Communication and Information’s User eXperience Lab manager and graphic designer, as well as a graduate student at the School of Information Sciences.

Kim met her now-husband in Seoul, Korea, when he was stationed there with … Read more “SIS Grad Student Songhee Kim Becomes CCI’s UX Lab Manager and Graphic Designer”

Children’s picture book author and school librarian Alice Faye Duncan (’91) looks for those moments in history that define generations yet are not often discussed—and especially aren’t stories typically told via picture book.

She was the first-ever picture book author to delve into the Memphis Sanitation Strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in her book “Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop,” and now she’s taken on Juneteenth and the Tent City civil rights movement in Fayette County, Tennessee, in her next two books to be released in January 2022.

Becoming a Writer

As a child of two teachers, … Read more “SIS Alum, Children’s Author & School Librarian Alice Faye Duncan to Publish Two New Books”

Like any good story, Stacey Smith’s (’14) has a thread of repeated themes; throughout her adult life she would be pulled back to her hometown of Memphis and she would consistently gravitate to libraries. The satisfying ending is that she went full circle and became the director of the library at her undergraduate alma mater, LeMoyne-Owen College, in 2019.

As many information and library science professionals do, Smith fell into library work by proximity. She was getting her master’s in English from the University of Mississippi but was at Oxford while conducting thesis research (which focused on Mary Shelley … Read more “Alumna Stacey Smith on Being Library Director at LeMoyne-Owen College, Her Alma Mater”

For the past couple of years, SIS Associate Professor Vandana Singh has been increasingly sought after to speak about her research on women and marginalized people in software engineering—namely how those groups often face a toxic culture of inequity, exclusion, discrimination, and even outright bullying in their field.

Singh recently won the highly competitive Google Award for Inclusion Research 2021. Through this award, Singh plans to continue her research and teaching by developing and implementing an undergraduate course aimed at teaching diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) topics to information technology students. Singh and University of Alabama Professor Jeffery Carver… Read more “Associate Professor Vandana Singh Wins Google Award for Inclusion Research”