Candidate for Vice President/President-Elect

Linda Lillard
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Information and Library Science, School of Information Sciences, College of Business Administration and Information Sciences
Clarion University

Candidate’s Statement
I joined ALISE as a doctoral student and really enjoyed networking with faculty who were the recognized researchers and educators in our field. It served as a great mentoring experience for me. Consequently, I’ve always viewed ALISE as our “home” organization in LIS education, and one should always be comfortable in one’s home. That is how ALISE has been for me. I always say that it is a small world in “library and information science education land” and we are like a family. I look forward to seeing everybody at our yearly conference and participating in all of the events. One of my strongest beliefs, and one that I practice in my own institution as a now senior faculty member, is that mentoring by experienced faculty is an essential and fulfilling process that helps new faculty become productive members and strong contributors to the teaching, research, and service community in LIS education.

The word “mentorship” appears in several of the ALISE strategic directions statements but is inherent in all of our strategic directions. Building and broadening our mentorship activities to include individual mentoring activities that can help our doctoral students, new members, and newly minted faculty get involved in the organization and in the broader profession is a worthy goal and one that we should continue to expand. Library and Information Science Education is often not understood by the university community, and our mission of promoting “innovation and excellence in research, teaching, and service for educators and scholars in Library and Information Science and cognate disciplines internationally through collaboration, advocacy, and knowledge creation” shows that providing mentorship in these areas is what we strive to accomplish. Consequently, it is important that we nurture our new faculty to become involved and productive in order to call attention to the great things we do as LIS educators.

In these days of shrinking budgets and resources, and as Chair of the Department of Information and Library Science in the College of Business Administration and Information Sciences, I realize daily how much we have to advocate for what we do, the interdisciplinarity of our field, and the important role that we play in the information society.

ALISE needs to continue nurturing new faculty members and working to draw in our cognate areas to become valuable members and leaders of our organization so that we can enrich and expand library and information science education.

Biography
Linda Lillard is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Information and Library Science, School of Information Sciences, College of Business Administration and Information Sciences at Clarion University where she has been on the faculty since August, 2008. Prior to that, she was assistant professor, School of Library and Information Management at Emporia State University, assistant professor in the School of Information Science, College of Communication and Information, University of Kentucky and assistant professor of Library Services at University of Central Missouri. As a member of ALISE since 1995, she has served as convener of the Curriculum SIG, chair of the Jean Tague Sutcliffe Doctor Poster Competition Judging, organizer of the Works in Progress Poster Session, member of the Juried Papers and Presentations Committee and member of the Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Competition Committee. She was also conference co-chair for the 2014 Philadelphia Conference with the theme of Educational Entrepreneurship. An ALA member since 1993, she has been very involved in a variety of committees for ACRL, has served as chair of the Library Research Roundtable, and just finished a term as chair of the Library and Information Science Education Interest Group.