We are pleased to announce
the ALISE 2012 Award Winners!

The ALISE Board of Directors is pleased to announce the 2012 ALISE Award Winners.

These individuals exemplify the excellence that ALISE encourages and represents in the LIS community.

Congratulations to all of our Award Winners!

ALISE Award for Professional Contribution to Library and Information Science Education

Eileen G. Abels, Drexel University

Eileen G. Abels is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor at the iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology. Among her other administrative responsibilities, she helps manage the operations of the ipl2, a digital library that serves as a teaching/learning/research environment with a digital reference service (ipl.org). Dr. Abels received her MLS from the University of Maryland and her Ph.D. from UCLA. She was the recipient of the 2007 SLA Rose L. Vormelker Award and the 2008 ASIST ISI Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award. She is currently Vice President/President Elect for ALISE. To find out about Eileen, visit http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/Home/people/faculty/facultydetails/?facultyid=39

ALISE Award for Teaching Excellence in the field of Library and Information Science Education

Sandra Hughes-Hassell, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil

Sandra Hughes-Hassell, Ph.D., is a professor and coordinator of the School Library Media Program in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her current research she focuses on social justice issues in youth library services and the role of school library media specialists in education reform. Her most recent book is Urban Teens in the Library: Research and Practice (ALA, 2010) which she co-edited with Denise E. Agosto.

ALISE Service Award

Linda C. Smith, University of Illinois - Champaign/Urbana

Linda C. Smith is Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She joined the faculty in 1977. She works with graduate students on-campus (M.S., C.A.S., Ph.D.) and, since 1997, online (M.S., C.A.S.). She is a past president of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) and the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Section T: Information, Computing and Communication), and a UIUC Distinguished Teacher/Scholar.
To find out about Linda, visit http://www.lis.illinois.edu/people/faculty/lcsmith

ALISE/Pratt-Severn Faculty Innovation Award

Sponsored by Pratt Institute

Leanne Bowler, University of Pittsburgh

Leanne Bowler is an assistant professor at the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, where she is responsible for the specialization in children and youth. She teaches courses about new media literacy, technology for young people, children's literature and media, and early literacy and language development. To find out about Leanne, visit http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~lbowler/index.html

ALISE/Norman Horrocks Leadership Award

Renate Chancellor, Catholic University

Renate Chancellor is Clinical Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of America School of Library and Information Science. At Catholic, she oversees the number ranked law librarianship program in the nation. She is a graduate of the Department of Information Studies at UCLA where she received both her Ph.D. and Masters in Library and Information Studies. Dr. Chancellor has presented her research at numerous conferences and has published articles in the International Journal of Legal Information, the Journal of History and Culture and the American Chemical Society, among others. Her book on the life and legacy of E.J. Josey is scheduled for release in 2013. Dr. Chancellor’s research interests include legal information seeking behavior, social justice in library and information services, multicultural library and information services, transformative leadership, oral history methodology and library and information science education. She is a member of the ALISE Diversity Statement Task Force and has served as co-convener of the Special Interest Group for Multicultural, Ethnic, and Humanistic Concerns from 2010-2012. She is currently serving on the ALISE Nominating Committee.

ALISE/Bohdan S. Wynar Research Paper Competition

“Improvisation, Tactics, and Wandering: Urban Information Practices of Migrational Individuals”

Jessica F. Lingel, Rutgers University

Jessa Lingel is a PhD candidate in library and information science at Rutgers University. She has an MLIS from Pratt Institute and an MA from New York University. Her research interests include information practices of marginalized communities, social media technologies and intersections of post modern theory and librarianship. A California transplant to the East Coast, Jessa is currently located in Brooklyn, NY. To find out about Jessica, visit http://jessalingel.tumblr.com/

ALISE Research Grant

“Teaching in the Age of Facebook and other Social Media: LIS Faculty and Students ‘Friending’ and ‘Poking’ in the Social Sphere”

Carolyn Hank, McGill University; Cassidy Sugimoto, Indiana University; and Jeffrey Pomerantz, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Carolyn Hank, McGill University; http://www.mcgill.ca/sis/people/faculty/hank

Dr. Carolyn Hank is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Studies at McGill University. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) in May 2011. Her dissertation research looked at scholars who blog, and how blog characteristics and blogger behaviors, preferences, and perceptions impact digital preservation. In addition to serving as PI on the study funded through the ALISE 2012 Research Grant Program Competition, she is PI on a 2012 OCLC/ALISE funded project, “The Biblioblogosphere: A Comparison of Communication and Preservation Perceptions and Practices between Blogging LIS Scholar-Practitioners and LIS Scholar-Researchers.” She also serves as a consultant to BlogForever, a 30-month, co-funded European Commission project on blog preservation. Dr. Hank is an instructor in the Digital Curation Professional Institute: Curation Practices for the Digital Object Lifecycle. The Institute is a component of DigCCurr II: Extending an International Digital Curation Curriculum to Doctoral Students and Practitioners, a four-year project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Previously, she served as project manager for the DigCCurr I project (2007-2009) and program manager for the UNC-CH Digital Curation/Institutional Repository Committee (2005-2008), and Carolina Digital Repository (2008-2009). She teaches in the areas of digital preservation and access, digital curation, human information interactions, and research methods.

Cassidy Sugimoto, Indiana University

Jeffrey Pomerantz, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

ALISE/Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Competition

“The Nature and Impact of Information Problem Solving in the Middle School Classroom”

Eric M. Meyers, University of Washington

Youth Information Interaction, Collaborative Information Seeking and Retrieval, Theories of Learning and Cognition, Youth Services, School and Public Libraries, New Media, Virtual Worlds. To find out about Eric, visit http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/emeyers/

ALISE/ProQuest Methodology Paper Competition

“Is There a Role for Physiological Methods in the Evaluation of Human-Information Interaction?”

Mahria Lebow and Heather L. O’Brien, University of British Columbia

Mahria Lebow, University of British Columbia

Mahria Lebow received her MLIS from SLAIS in May 2011. While at SLAIS, she chaired the American Society for Information Science and Technolgoy student chapter at UBC and served as a research assistant for Heather O'Brien. Mahria has been previously recognized for her research, as the 2011 recipient of the Medical Library Association's Rittenhouse Award for best student paper and the winner of the People's Choice Award for best student research presentation at SLAIS Research Day 2010. Previously, she was a Trustee Scholar at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Mahria is currently living in Iowa City, Iowa.

Heather L. O’Brien, University of British Columbia

Heather L. O’Brien is an Assistant Professor at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Dr. O’Brien’s research is focused on human information experience, specifically people’s engagement with technology. Her research questions include: What do we mean when we say that a user is engaged during their interaction with a computer application? How do we measure engagement? How do we understand engagement in diverse environments? Her research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, the Network Centre of Excellence Graphics, Animation and New Media Project, and the University of British Columbia Hampton Fund. To find out about Heather, visit http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/hobrien/

ALISE/LMC Paper Award

Sponsored by Libraries Unlimited/Linworth, imprint of ABC-CLIO

"The Group6: Toward the Development of an Information Problem Solving"

Eric M. Meyers, University of British Columbia

ALISE 2011 Best Conference Paper Award

"Are We There Yet? Results of a Gap Analysis to Measure LIS Students’ Prior Knowledge and Actual Learning of Cultural Competence Concepts"

Kafi Kumasi, Wayne State University, and Renee Franklin Hill, Syracuse University

To find out more about Kafi Kumasi, visit http://slis.wayne.edu/faculty/bio.php?id=43369

Renee Franklin Hill, Syracuse University

Renee Franklin Hill is an Assistant Professor in Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies where she teaches courses that prepare graduate students to enter the school library media profession.

Dr. Hill is committed to researching issues that involve examining methods for increasing understanding diversity issues in Library and Information Studies. Her work focuses on examining information needs and information access as they relate to diverse populations (e.g., members of various racial/ethnic groups, individuals with disabilities).

"What is the Value of LIS Education? A Qualitative Study of the Perspectives of Tennessee’s Rural Librarians"

Bharat Mehra, Kimberly Black, Vandana Singh and Jenna Nolt, University of Tennessee

Bharat Mehra, University of Tennessee

I am Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK). Broadly, my research philosophy and teaching practices bring in a deeper understanding of the users and their social and cultural contexts into library and information science education. Specifically, my work has focused on community informatics or the use of information and communication technologies to enable and empower communities to meet their needs and goals. This has involved creating awareness of social justice and social equity in the information professions for representing the needs of minority, disenfranchised, and international populations. To find out about Bharat, visit https://web.utk.edu/~bmehra/

Kimberly Black

Vandana Singh, University of Tennessee

Dr. Singh graduated with a PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2008. Her dissertation research is on Online Communities to Support the Users of Open Source Software. She holds two masters degrees, one in Computer Science from University of Chicago and the other one in Knowledge Management Systems from Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Her undergraduate degree is from Pantnagar University, in the foothills of Himalayas in India. To find out about Vandana, visit www.vandanasingh.com

Jenna Nolt, University of Tennessee

Jenna Nolt is a Library Technology Specialist at the United States Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia. She holds a Masters of Information Science from the University of Tennessee. She specializes in technological integration and streamlining workflow in modern libraries. She has publications in the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science.

Faculty Responses to Library Service Innovations: A Case Study

Susan E. Searing, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana and Alison M. Greenlee, McFarlin Library

Susan E. Searing, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana,

Susan E. Searing is an associate professor of library administration at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is the full-time Library & Information Science Librarian with a joint appointment in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Earlier in her career she was a reference librarian at Yale, the Women’s Studies Librarian-at-Large for the 26-campus University of Wisconsin System, and the Deputy Director of the General Library System of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published research on topics related to library services and reference sources, and is currently the subject editor for LIS for the ALA Guide to Reference database. To find out about Susan, visit http://www.library.illinois.edu/people/bios/searing/

Alison M. Greenlee, McFarlin Library

Alison M. Greenlee, is currently the Special Collections Librarian at the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library. Before coming to Tulsa, she was a Certificate of Advanced Study student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, during which time she served as a graduate assistant with the Library and Information Science Library Services. Greenlee earned her MSLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her BA in German and International Studies from Wayne State University.

Hands on from a Distance: The Community-Embedded Learning Model Contextualizes Online Student

Linda R. Most, Valdosta State University

Linda Most is an assistant professor in the Master of Library and Information Science program at Valdosta State University in Georgia. Her research interests include public libraries in society and the teaching of library and information studies in the online environment. An excerpt from her 2009 dissertation The Rural Public Library as Place in North Florida: A Case Study” was recognized as the best conference presentation of 2011 by the Canadian Association for Information Science, and her paper Hands on From a Distance was selected as one of four best conference papers for 2011 by the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE). Linda received her BA from Goucher College, her MSLIS and PhD from Florida State University, and the MA in History from Florida Atlantic University. She has worked in the field as a reference librarian at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland, and as the Business Reference Librarian for the Palm Beach County Library System in Florida.

OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant Competition

“A New Unsupervised Approach to Automatic Topical Indexing of Scientific Documents According to Library Controlled Vocabularies”

Abdulhussain Mahdi, and Arash Joorabchi, University of Limerick, Ireland

Abdulhussain Mahdi, University of Limerick, Ireland

        Abdulhussain E. Mahdi is a senior lecturer at the Department of Electronic &
        Computer Engineering, University of Limerick – Ireland. He is a
        Chartered Engineer (CEng), Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology - UK
        (IET), Member of the Engineering Council - UK, and Founder Member of the
        InternationalCompumag Society (ICS). Dr. Mahdi is a graduate in Electrical Engineering from
        University of Basrah (BSc 1st Class Hon. 1978) and earned his PhD in Electronic
        Engineering at University of Wales – Bangor, UK in 1990. He is also a SEDA Accredited
    Teacher of Higher Education (University of Plymouth, UK 1998). His research interests
        include speech and natural language processing, data mining,
        machine learning & applications in text analytics, telecoms & biomed; real-time DSP tools for
        domain transformation, time-frequency analysis, and DSP-based controllers for power
        conversion systems. He has authored and co-authored more than 106 peer-reviewed
        journal articles, book chapters and conference papers, and has edited one book. His
published work has been cited in more than 86 journal articles.

Abdulhussain Mahdi

Arash Joorabchi, University of Limerick, Ireland

Arash Joorabchi is a currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering, University of Limerick, Ireland. He earned his 1^st Class Honours BSc in Computer Science from Griffith College Dublin, Ireland in 2006 and received his PhD in 2010 from the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering, University of Limerick, Ireland. The main focus of Arash’s current research is on developing and deploying text mining\analytics algorithms and techniques to automate the process of metadata generation in digital libraries and repositories. His major areas of interest include: Data Mining, Knowledge Organization, Text Analytics,Digital Libraries, and Linked Data. To find out about Arash, visit http://www.csn.ul.ie/~arash/

“Reference Competencies from the Practitioner’s Perspective: An International Comparison”

Laura Saunders, and Mary Wilkins Jordan, Simmons College

Laura Saunders,Simmons College: http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/people/faculty/full-time/saunders.php

       Laura Saunders received her PhD from Simmons College Graduate School of Library and
       Information Science in May 2010. She holds an M.S.L.I.S from Simmons as well as a B. A.
       from Boston University in English Literature and Italian. She worked as a reference
       librarian and branch manager of the Career Resource Library for Simmons College from 1999
       to 2003, where she provided reference and instruction services, as well as participated in
       collection development, Web page maintenance, and marketing of library services. While
       completing her PhD, she worked as an adjunct faculty member. Currently, she is an Assistant
       Professor at Simmons College, teaching in the areas of reference, evaluation of information
       services, information literacy, and academic libraries. Her first book, Information Literacy as a
       Student Learning Outcome: The Perspective of Institutional Accreditation comes out in June
       2011. Her research interests include information literacy, assessment, accreditation,
       reference services, and the place of libraries in higher education. She has had articles
       published in The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Library & Information Science Research,
       College & Research Libraries, and portal: Libraries and the Academy.

Mary Wilkins Jordan, Simmons College

       Jordan is an Assistant Professor at Simmons College. Her teaching and research areas
       revolve around effective administration of libraries. Prior to entering academia she worked as
       a public library director and administrator, and was an attorney.

“The Biblioblogosphere: A Comparison of Communication and Preservation Perceptions and Practices between Blogging LIS Scholar-Practitioners and LIS Scholar-Researchers”

Carolyn Hank, McGill University, and Cassidy Sugimoto, Indiana University – Bloomington

Carolyn Hank, McGill University

Cassidy Sugimoto, Indiana University – Bloomington

ALISE/Jean Tague Sutcliffe Doctoral Student Research Poster Competition

Sponsored by University of Western Ontario

1st Place: Lysanne Lessard, University of Toronto

Lysanne’s research interests revolve around the study and design of business service relationships. Specifically, her work concerns the design of knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS) engagements such as those found in information services; computing services; and, research and development services. Her current work focuses on the development of a modeling technique that can be used for the design of organizational relationships and information systems in the domain of KIBS. In line with a socio-technical perspective, Lysanne’s work is grounded in studies of real-life KIBS engagements. Results of these studies enable a better understanding of how value is collaboratively created through business service relationships, and support the development of a modeling technique well aligned with core characteristics of KIBS engagements. To find out about Lysanne, visit lysanne.net

2nd Place: Peter A. Hook, Indiana University

Peter A. Hook is currently a doctoral student at Indiana University—Bloomington where he is a member of Dr. Katy Börner's Information Visualization Laboratory. He has a J.D. from the University of Kansas (1997) and a M.S.L.I.S. from the University of Illinois (2000). He has also been an academic law librarian for the last ten years. His primary research focus is information visualization. Peter is interested in utilizing knowledge infrastructures to obtain big picture, global perspectives. These allow a novice to more quickly become familiar with a domain and experts to contextualize their research in a broader perspective. Domain maps reveal avenues of inquiry previously unknown to a researcher as well as opportunities for collaboration. Peter’s additional interests include the visualization of knowledge organization systems, concept mapping, the spatial navigation of bibliographic data in which the underlying structural organization of the domain is conveyed to the user, social network theory, scientometrics, legal informatics, and legal bibliography. To find out about Peter, visit http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~pahook/index.html

3rd Place: Shannon M. Oltmann, Indiana University

Honorable Mention: Nouf Khashman, McGill University

Nouf Khashman is a PhD candidate in the School of Information Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Under the supervision of Professor Andrew Large, Nouf’s research interests lay in human-computer interaction, web usability, cross-cultural interface design, and ICT in the Arab world.

ALISE/University of Washington Information School Youth Services Graduate Student Travel Award

Robin Fogle Kurz, University of South Carolina

Robin Fogle Kurz is completing her PhD in Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina, where she has been a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Teaching & Research Fellow since August 2007. Her teaching, research, and service focus on library services for youth, particularly in communities of color. To find out about Robin, visit http://sc.academia.edu/RobinKurz

Doctoral Students to ALISE Grant

Sponsored by Libraries Unlimited/Linworth, imprint of ABC-CLIO

Jackie Brodsky, University of Alabama

Jackie Brodsky is a doctoral student at The University of Alabama College of Communication and Information Sciences and received her MLIS at The University of Alabama School of Library and Information Studies. She is employed as the Graduate Research Assistant to Project ALFA (Accessible Libraries for All). Her publications include "Attitudes Toward Patrons with Physical Challenges: A Survey of Members of the Public Library Division of the Alabama Library Association" with co-author Muriel K. Wells and "Physiological Access as a Social Justice Type in LIS Curricula" with co-authors Laurie J. Bonnici, Stephanie L. Maatta, Muriel K. Wells, and Charles W. Meadows III. Her research interests include social support of information seeking and technology adoption, and her teaching interests include information technology and reference sources and services. Jackie spent over 20 years in the medical transcription field before beginning her doctoral studies, which contributed to her interest in technology adoption and health information seeking.

We are pleased to announce
the ALISE 2012 Award Winners!

ALISE Award for Professional Contribution to Library and Information Science Education