Candidate for Director of Membership Services

Denice Adkins
Associate Professor
University of Missouri

Candidate's Statement:
It is an honor to run for Director of Membership Services for ALISE. As a member-driven organization, ALISE depends on its members to provide the foundation and direction of the organization’s future. Members are the lifeblood of ALISE, and ensuring they are engaged and active within the organization is vital.

I support ALISE because of the support I have found from ALISE. My experience with ALISE goes back to 2000, when I first joined as a doctoral student and full-time practitioner. While I initially felt like a stranger, I found colleagues who shared my interest and concerns through the First Timers’ Breakfast, conference sessions, Youth Services SIG dinners, and Birds of a Feather lunches. Since then I have served on several committees and SIGs, including co-chairing the Youth Services SIG, serving on the ALISE-UW Student Travel Award Committee, chairing and serving on the Pratt Severn Award Committee, participating on various other committees, and convening panels for the New Faculty and Multicultural, Humanistic, and Ethnic Concerns SIGs. In 2014, I was honored to be elected as ALISE Secretary-Treasurer, a role which demonstrated how ALISE members contribute to the organization both financially and organizationally. I currently serve as co-editor of the Journal of Education for Library & Information Science, where I am able to support ALISE members by sharing scholarship about education in library and information science and its multiple cognate areas.

As Director of Membership Services, I hope to build off several initiatives put into place by previous directors, such as featuring new and long-time members and their research on our web site and newsletters, encouraging member meet-ups at other conferences, and working with members to get feedback on what they need from ALISE to succeed in their teaching, research, and service roles, as well as developing and supporting opportunities for like-minded people to meet and exchange ideas. 

Biography:
Denice Adkins is an associate professor at the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies, University of Missouri, and co-editor of Journal of Education for Library & Information Science. She has been a Fulbright Scholar to Honduras, president of REFORMA (The National Association to Promote Library & Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-Speaking), secretary-treasurer of Association for Library and Information Science Education, and councilor-at-large for the American Library Association. Her research interests include public libraries, services to the Latinx community, and services for diverse library users.

Prior to joining the University of Missouri, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo, and a public librarian at Denver (CO) Public Library and the Las Vegas-Clark County (NV) Library District. Her MLS and Ph.D. degrees are from the University of Arizona, where she worked in the Office of Bilingual Projects in the College of Education.

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