School of Information Sciences

SIS Director Kelly’s Speaking Tour in China

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Tsinghua University Computer Science Department Professor Yiqun Liu (pictured on right) served as Director Kelly’s main host, where Kelly gave a talk as part of a series celebrating the 60-year anniversary of the department.

In the spirit of advancing cross-cultural research collaborations, SIS Director Diane Kelly toured Beijing, China last week and was a featured speaker at several academic institutions and China’s largest online retailer. She shared her expertise on interactive information search and retrieval, information search behavior, and research methods.

Her talk “On the Generalizability of Results from Interactive Information Retrieval Research” focused on reasons why it can be difficult to use results from one research study to make predictions about what will happen in another research study.

Professor Mehra’s Promotion Recognized at the UT Faculty Bookplate Reception

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The University of Tennessee, Knoxville School of Information Sciences Director Diane Kelly poses with SIS Professor Bharat Mehra.

The University of Tennessee Libraries and the Provost’s office honored SIS Professor Bharat Mehra’s recent promotion from Associate to Full Professor earlier this week at the Faculty Bookplate Reception. The Faculty Bookplate Reception celebrates faculty promotions by allowing honorees to choose a book to include in the University Libraries’ collections. A bookplate is placed in the book to commemorate the faculty member’s achievements, and the catalog record for the book notes it was selected to honor the faculty member.

Mehra selected Progressive Community Action, a book he co-edited with Kevin Rioux, because it represents the basic philosophy behind his work by detailing how action-oriented research strategies can generate socially relevant impacts through information work. His research has focused on the role of rural public libraries and librarians in the Appalachian region, and his grants have provided funding for the graduate education of more than 25 rural public librarians equipping them to better serve their communities.