We are pleased to announce
the ALISE 2014 Award Winners!

The ALISE Board of Directors is pleased to announce the 2014 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

Ling Hwey Jeng, Texas Woman’s University

Dr. Ling Hwey Jeng received both her Master's and Ph.D. degrees in library and information science from University of Texas at Austin. 

She is currently the Professor and Director of Texas Woman’s University, School of Library and Information Studies.  Before that, Dr. Jeng was on the faculty of University of Kentucky, School of Library and Information Science (Lexington, KY), UCLA, Department of Information Science (Los Angeles, CA) and University of Maryland, College Park, School of Library and Information Services (College Park, MD).  Dr. Jeng’s teaching areas include the role of information in society, organization of information, electronic searching strategies, and library technical services. 

 Dr. Jeng has more than 40 scholarly publications and more than 100 presentations on her research areas of cataloging expertise, database construction, knowledge representation, diversity, and leadership development.  She is a recipient of three federally funded grant projects, and is a frequent speaker on topics of library advocacy, diversity, leadership development and mentoring.

Dr. Jeng has been active in LIS professional associations.  More recently, she served three terms as an elected member on the governing Council of the American Library Association from 2002-2011, and as Representative-At-Large on the Texas Library Association, Executive Board, from 2008-2011.  She has chaired the Scholarship and Research Committee of Texas Library Association, and served as a member on the Task Force on Professionalism and Library Science Education, and the Task Force on Transforming Texas Libraries. Dr. Jeng was the Executive Director of Asian Pacific American Librarians Association from 2000-2005, and President of Chinese American Librarians Association in 1999-2000.

Dr. Jeng has received more than ten awards and honors for various accomplishments including the Distinguished Service Award at the 2012 Joint Conference of Librarians of Color to recognize her work on diversity in the LIS profession. 

What she finds most meaningful is how all her teaching, scholarly activities and professional services have helped shape who she is today. Learning from students, faculty, and colleagues, only expands her capacity to serve the LIS profession. She considers herself a work in progress and knows that she will continue to grow because of her students and professional colleagues.

ALISE Service

Sharon McQueen, Old Dominion University

Sharon McQueen is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Lecturer at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her dissertation, The Story of “The Story of Ferdinand”: The Creation of a Cultural Icon, garnered the 2013 Phyllis Dain Library History Award, bestowed by the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association, and the Jesse H. Shera Award, bestowed by the Library Research Round Table of the American Library Association. Sharon's post-dissertation research, a biography of childhood education legend May Hill Arbuthnot, has received the 2014 ALISE/LMC Paper Award. Sharon has taught materials for youth and library youth services courses for the graduate programs of Rutgers, UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, the University of Iowa, and the University of Kentucky, where she served as Director of both The McConnell Center for the Study of Youth Literature and the annual McConnell Youth Literature Conference.

ALISE Award for Teaching Excellence

Renate Chancellor, Catholic University of America

Renate Chancellor is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Library and Information Science at the Catholic University of America where she is currently serving as the director of the Law Librarianship Program of Study and Coordinator for Pre-Law Advising. She holds both a Master’s and a Ph.D. in Information Studies from the University California, Los Angeles. Earlier in her career, she was a law librarian at several law firms and the United States Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit Library. She has served on a number of ALISE committees including, convener of the Special Interest Group for Multicultural, Ethnic and Humanistic Concerns, the Diversity Statement Task Force and the Nominating Committee. In her current research she focuses on legal information seeking behavior and multicultural library and information services.  Her book on the life and legacy of E.J. Josey is scheduled for publication in 2014.

ALISE/Norman Horrocks Leadership Award

Shari A. Lee, St. John’s University

Shari Lee is an Assistant Professor at St. John’s University, where she earned her MLS with a concentration in children’s services. She received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2009 and has since earned an Advanced Certificate in School Library Media. Shari’s research considers the changing notions and physical structures of the public library as place and space. She is primarily concerned with how architecture and design elements affect human behavior and how this applies to the public library setting – specifically to teen spaces. This was the focus of her dissertation (Teen Space: Designed for Whom?), for which she received the 2011 Eugene Garfield/ALISE Doctoral Dissertation Award. Shari served as co-convener of the Multicultural and Humanistic Concerns SIG for three years and, more recently, as a member of the ALISE Diversity Taskforce. She was a recipient of the Library Scholars Program Fellowship at UCLA in 2004 and a Gates Millennium Scholar.

2014 Annual Conference Awards/Grants

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

Natalie Greene Taylor, University of Maryland 

Natalie Greene Taylor is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies. She is a Graduate Research Associate at the Information Policy & Access Center in Maryland’s iSchool, where she works on projects relating to e-government, digital literacy and inclusion, school libraries, and children's health literacy. She received her Masters of Library Science at the University of Maryland-College Park, specializing in e-government and school library media. Her current research interests include the intersection of information and health literacy, information seeking behavior in children, the efficacy of government resources targeted to youth, and school and public libraries' roles in literacy education.  

ALISE Doctoral Student to ALISE Award

Chaoqun Ni, Indiana University

Chaoqun Ni is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Information and Library Science at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington.  With background computational techniques, statistics and information science, her ultimate research goal is to utilize appropriate computational skills, statistical approaches, and visualization techniques for the curation, processing, analysis, display and interpretation of massive, longitudinal, heterogeneous data, to answer various research questions in social science in the era of Big Data.

At present, Chaoqun is concentrating on her dissertation that explores the impact of mentorship on protégés’ scholarly practice, focusing on whether the scholarly behaviors (concerning publication, citation, collaboration and grant funding) of doctoral advisers translate to similar practices of their acolytes, by examining the assortative mixing patterns in academic genealogy network, predicting protégés' scholar practice, and comparing these patterns across various disciplines.  Her dissertation, as those she has previously completed, involves using large-scale, heterogeneous data sources, and seeks to inform science policy related decisions.

Adriana McCleer, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Adriana McCleer is a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies.  She was a Knowledge River scholar and earned her M.A. in Library and Information Science from the University of Arizona.  She developed professional experience as a public librarian in Tucson, Arizona and community librarian in Phoenix, Arizona.  Her research addresses barriers to information access and intellectual freedom, with specific focus on multicultural populations.

ALISE/Jean Tague Sutcliffe Doctoral Student Research Poster Competition

Patricia Condon, Simmons College

Patricia Condon is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College in Boston, MA. Patti’s teaching and research specializations are archival studies and digital curation. She is a doctoral fellow of the IMLS-funded Building the Future of Archival Education and Research Initiative. She received her MLIS and MA in Anthropology from The University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, MS. Patti’s current research focuses on two main areas: the curation and stewardship of digital assets in archives and libraries; and the significance of place and sense of place in archives, community collections, and cultural heritage. Her dissertation explores the educational landscape of digital curation knowledge, practices, and skills, and investigates whether the area of digital curation, broadly conceived, is emerging as an independent discipline. Patti has more than ten years experience working in the information professions including positions in archives, academic libraries, and publication.

Jinxuan Ma, Florida State University 

Jinxuan Ma is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at Florida State University. She has a background in Archives Management and International Information Management. From 1990-2004, she worked as an archivist, a health science librarian, and a library associate director at Tianjin Medical University in China. Her MLS is from SUNY Buffalo in 2007. She is committed to health-related interdisciplinary research with a focus on health information-seeking behaviors, health information literacy, and health informatics. Her dissertation employs Dervin's sense-making theory to explore how undergraduate students' health information literacy shapes their health information seeking behavior and affects their daily self-care activities. She has received three major grants for her research, including a 2013 Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, an iConference 2013 Doctoral Colloquium travel grant from NSF, and a 2012 Dissertation Research Grant from the Graduate School at FSU. She becomes 2013 Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) fellow certified by the Graduate School at FSU.

John D’Ignazio, Syracuse University

John D'Ignazio is a doctoral candidate at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies. The defense of his dissertation study, "E-science Information Modeling: Investigating scientists’ information resources and structures for enhanced digital curation" is expected in May 2014. Working with his advisor, Professor Jian Qin, his research and teaching experience includes e-science librarianship curriculum development and evaluation, as well as specialization in topics that include science data management, metadata representation, and information reporting and presentation. His work experience and educational study has focused from different angles on human interaction with information systems. The goal is to understand and design to support people's agency with abstraction and complexity.

Jihee Beak, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Jihee Beak is a doctoral candidate at the School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). She earned a MLIS degree with a concentration in Information Organization from UWM, and a Bachelor degree in LIS with a school media specialist certification from South Korea. She has professional experience as a copy cataloger in South Korea. Her major research area is Information Organization including metadata, children’s information seeking behavior, domain analysis, social tagging, subject headings, classification theory, etc. Her dissertation topic is a child-driven metadata schema for children’s resources. She has taught INFOST 230 Knowledge Organization course at UWM.

Mary-Jo Romaniuk, Queensland University of Technology - San Jose Gateway PhD program

Mary-Jo Romaniuk has a BComm (University of Saskatchewan), MLIS (San Jose State University) and is a PhD Candidate at Queensland University of Technology – SJSU Gateway Program. For the past 16 years she has held a variety of positions at the University of Alberta Libraries including Associate University Librarian and Director of Learning Services although most recently she held the position of Acting Chief Librarian before commencing an Administrative Leave to complete a PhD. Mary-Jo is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Library Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta, developing and teaching courses in the broad areas of Library Administration, Leadership and Management, in particular, courses in Marketing and Financial Management. She has also guest lectured at San Jose State University – School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) and the University of Alberta – Introduction to Library and Information Science, Management, Collection Development, Human Resources and Leadership. Most recently, Mary-Jo has been engaged in new course development and instruction and is excited to be part of the new program at USC; the Master of Management in Library and Information Science program.

Mary-Jo’s areas of research interest are in the areas of leadership and management. Her PhD dissertation examined library leadership development and she continues to engage in research in the area of leadership and leadership development. She is also actively engaged in areas relating to library management, library human resource development, library marketing and user centeredness and financial management. Mary-Jo has additional research interests related to library partnerships and consortia and scholarly communication.

2014 ALISE Research Awards/Grants

ALISE Research Grant

Laurie Bonnici, University of Alabama 

Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator for Project ALFA (http://projectalfa.slis.ua.edu/), Laurie Bonnici holds her doctorate from Florida State University and her master’s degree from University of South Florida. Her teaching interests lie in the area of information technology, web multimedia, technology access for physically challenged populations, and administration and management. Closely related, her research falls into two distinct areas; accessibility for information and communication technologies (information behavior) and LIS Education (see http://www.slis.ua.edu/bonniciresearch.html).

ALISE/Bohdan S. Wynar Research Paper Competition

Virgil E. Varvel Jr., University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana 

Virgil has an M.S. in Biomolecular Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction, and a Ph.D. in Secondary and Continuing Education from the University of Illinois. For 5 years he served as a research analyst and educational program manager for the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. There he has managed or helped manage numerous programs including the PLDS and ACRL yearly reports, the Data Curation Education Program, Socio-technical Data Analytics Program, Site-Based Data Curation at Yellowstone National Park, and others. Before joining CIRSS, he served 8 years with University Outreach and Public Service as part of the Illinois Online Network performing instructional design, online course teaching and research, program evaluation, educational consulting, database programming, web design, and research. He has been conducting research ranging from biochemistry to educational evaluation to data curation for 20 years.

Yi Shen, Johns Hopkins University

Yi Shen is Associate Professor of research environments and informatics in the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Virginia Tech’s University Libraries. From 2011-2013, she was CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Research and Curation Center of the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University. During 2010-2011 Shen worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. Shen holds a Ph.D. degree in Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research examines cyber- infrastructure for interdisciplinary  scientific and engineering research, global engineering education and global competency,  and social informatics.  She has participated in several NSF funded research and education projects. In her multiple lines of research, Shen assesses learning and evaluates instruction in intercultural educational practice and global engineering programs. She also investigates cross-disciplinary data management, preservation and integration. You can find her work at https://johnshopkins.academia.edu/YiShen

ALISE/Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Competition

Youngseek Kim, University of Kentucky

Youngseek Kim is currently an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Kentucky. He completed his Ph.D. at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies in 2013. His current research efforts in eScience try to understand the nature of scientists' data practices, focusing on data sharing and reuse, the education of eScience professionals, and adoption and use of cyber-infrastructure.  

ALISE/ProQuest Methodology Paper Competition

Angela Pollak, Western University

I am nearing completion of my PhD at Western University, where my research focuses on the unique, experience-based information skills found in rural places. I am particularly interested in non-problem-based phenomena, informal information contexts, and leisure information behaviors. I am excited to say that I’ve been shortlisted twice for the K. Patricia Cross Doctoral Grant, and in 2012 received the Best Student Paper award at CAIS. I’m looking forward to presenting the 2014 ALISE/ProQuest Methodology paper. If you’d like to learn more about my research, please visit my website (www.AngelaPollak.ca) or follow me on Twitter (@IdeaTourist).

ALISE/LMC Paper Award

Sharon McQueen, Old Dominion University

Sharon McQueen is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Lecturer at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her dissertation, The Story of “The Story of Ferdinand”: The Creation of a Cultural Icon, garnered the 2013 Phyllis Dain Library History Award, bestowed by the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association, and the Jesse H. Shera Award, bestowed by the Library Research Round Table of the American Library Association. Sharon's post-dissertation research, a biography of childhood education legend May Hill Arbuthnot, has received the 2014 ALISE/LMC Paper Award. Sharon has taught materials for youth and library youth services courses for the graduate programs of Rutgers, UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, the University of Iowa, and the University of Kentucky, where she served as Director of both The McConnell Center for the Study of Youth Literature and the annual McConnell Youth Literature Conference.  

OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant Program

Denise Agosto, Drexel University

Denise E. Agosto, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the College of Computing & Informatics at Drexel University.  Her current research focuses on youths’ use of social media and the implications for public and school library services.  She has published more than 100 articles, book chapters, and other scholarly items based on her research, as well as two books.  Dr. Agosto has won numerous teaching and research awards.  Most recently she was the recipient of the 2011 ALISE Award for Teaching Excellence in the Field of Library & Information Science and the 2010 ASIS&T SIG USE Best Information Behavior Conference Paper, jointly with June Abbas.  She is the editor of YALSA’s Journal of Research on Libraries & Young Adults and the recipient of several federal and association grants to support her work, including a 2011-2014 research grant entitled “Libraries and the Social Web: Developing the Next Generation of Youth Information Services,” funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). 

June Abbas, University of Oklahoma

Dr. June Abbas, PhD, is a Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Oklahoma, Norman campus. Her research focuses on children and teens and their use of technology, and the intersection between information behavior, information retrieval, and structures for organizing knowledge. She also conducts research on the development of user-centered digital libraries, institutional repositories, and other knowledge organization structures. The courses she teaches include those related to the organization of information and knowledge resources, cataloging and classification, indexing and surrogation, digital collections, and digital information retrieval. She has presented widely on her research areas and has recently published two books “Structures for Organizing Knowledge: Exploring Taxonomies, Ontologies, and Other Schema” with Neal Schuman and co-authored with Denise Agosto, “Teens, Libraries and Social Networks: What Librarians Need to Know” for ABC-Clio. She has also received several federal and association grants to support her research.  Recently she served as the Chair of the ALA RDA Conference Forums and Programs Taskforce.

Leanne Bowler, University of Pittsburgh

Leanne Bowler, PhD, is an assistant professor at the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. Her research and teaching interests lie in the area of youth information behavior, with a focus on new media literacies and their relationship to intrapersonal knowledge and metacognitive practices. She received her PhD and two master degrees (MLS, MEd) from McGill University, in Montréal, Canada and has worked as an information professional in a variety of settings, including public, school, and academic libraries, hospitals, and literacy organizations.

Jung Sun Oh, University of Pittsburgh

Jung Sun Oh is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. She earned her PhD degree in Information and Library Science from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests center on understanding people’s information behavior as manifested in their use of the Web, especially in the context of social media.

Daqing He, University of Pittsburgh

Dr Daqing He is an associate professor at the School of Information Sciences (iSchool), and associate professor at the Intelligent Systems Program, both of which are at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his PhD degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Prior joining the University of Pittsburgh in 2004, he served on the research faculties of the Robert Gordon University, Scotland and the University of Maryland at College Park, United States. Dr. He’s main research interests cover information retrieval (monolingual and multilingual), information access on the social web, adaptive Web systems and user modeling, interactive retrieval interface design, and Web log mining and analysis. Dr. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) and Co-PI for more than ten research projects, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), University of Pittsburgh, and other agencies. He has published more than 100 articles in internationally-recognized journals and conferences in these areas. Dr. He has served as a member on the program committees for more than 20 major international conferences in the area of information retrieval and web technologies, and has been called upon to be a reviewer for many top-ranked international journals in the same areas. Dr. He services in the editorial board of SCI/SSCI indexed journals Internet Research and Aslib Journal of Information Management.

Lynne McKechnie, Western University

Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie is a Professor and faculty member at the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. She served, as a Visiting Scholar, as the first Beverly Cleary Professor in Youth Services and Literature at the Information School at the University of Washington. Dr. McKechnie worked as a children’s librarian for almost twenty years and holds an MLS from the University of Toronto (1979) and a PhD (LIS) from the University of Western Ontario (1996). Dr. McKechnie teaches children’s literature, library services for children, everyday life information practices and research methods. Her research focuses on the intersection between children, public libraries and reading. She has published in many journals including Libraries & Culture, Library and Information Science Research, Library Quarterly, Library Trends and JASIST. Her book Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals About Libraries, Reading and Community, co-authored with Catherine S. Ross and Paulette M. Rothbauer, was published by Libraries Unlimited in 2006. Dr. McKechnie was a keynote speaker at Researching the Reading Experience international conference held in Oslo in June 2013.

2014 Featured Presentations

Jen Pecoskie, Wayne State University

Jen Pecoskie is an Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.  She holds a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science and MLIS from The University of Western Ontario (Canada).  Her research interests home in on the theme of engagement through investigations of pleasure reading activities and readers’ advisory, contemporary print culture, and LIS education. Recent topics of investigation include social and solitary pleasure reading for lesbian and queer female readers; communication and informational ties between readers and authors; and the changing nature of publishing in contemporary times, including self-publishing studies and user-generated content for reading culture.

Heather L. Hill, Western University 

Heather Hill is an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests focus on two areas - public libraries and 'fringe' publishing. Her research on public libraries focuses on large-scale outside forces that affect public libraries like privatization and accessibility legislation. Her research on 'fringe' publishing looks at self-published materials, fanfiction, and sexually explicit materials and how these materials intersect with libraries.

Sheila Corrall, University of Pittsburgh 

Sheila Corrall worked as a senior manager at The British Library and as director of library and information services at three UK universities. In 2004, she was appointed to a Chair in Librarianship and Information management at the University of Sheffield, where she served as head of the iSchool for four years. She is currently Professor and Chair of the LIS Program at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches courses on academic libraries and research methods. Her research areas include collection development, strategic management, and professional roles and skillsets.

Jessica Lamb, University of Pittsburgh

Jessica Lamb has worked as a music teacher (piano, guitar, and pre-school), a student tutor (writing, English, Spanish, and SAT), and library intern (summer reading in a public library, and reference in a college library). She began her MLIS at the University of Pittsburgh in Fall 2012, and worked remotely as a customer solutions intern with Credo Reference from January through June 2013. She is currently Public Services Manager at Bridgeville Public Library.

Rose Medlock, University of Pittsburgh

Rose Flores Medlock is the Instructional Design & Library Specialist at Credo Reference, where she develops a variety of information literacy and instructional design materials for library customers in the United States and abroad. Last year, she and colleagues Shiva Darbandi and Carolyn Waite had a case study—“The Learning Continuum: Economical Best Practices for Implementing and Achieving a Community’s Information Literacy Goals”—published in Library and Information Research. She also is a peer reviewer for the Journal of Western Archives. Prior to earning an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh, she worked as a managing editor and freelance writer for media corporations, magazines, and newspapers.

Lauri Watt, University of Pittsburgh 

Lauri Watt will receive her MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh in April 2014. She served as a multimedia intern for Credo Reference from June 2013 to February 2014. Lauri currently serves as an intern for CourseWorld.

Paul T. Jaeger, University of Maryland

Paul T. Jaeger, Ph.D., J.D., is Associate Professor and Diversity Officer of the College of Information Studies and Co-Director of the Information Policy and AccessCenter at the University of Maryland. Dr. Jaeger’s research focuses on the ways in which law and public policy shape information behavior, particularly for underserved populations. He is the author of more than one hundred and twenty-five journal articles and book chapters, along with seven books. His most recent books are Information Worlds: Social Context, Technology, & Information Behavior in the Age of the Internet (Routledge, 2010) with Gary Burnett; and Public Libraries and the Internet: Roles, Perspectives, and Implications (Libraries Unlimited, 2011) with John Carlo Bertot and Charles R. McClure; and Disability and the Internet: Confronting a Digital Divide (Lynne Rienner, 2012). His research has been funded by the Institute of Museum & Library Services, the National Science Foundation, the American Library Association, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others. Dr. Jaeger is Co-Editor of Library Quarterly, Co-Editor of the Information Policy Book Series from MIT Press, and Associate Editor of Government Information Quarterly. 

Mega Subramaniam, University of Maryland

Dr. Mega Subramaniam is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies, and Associate Director of the Information Policy and Access Center (iPAC) at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Subramaniam’s innovative research focuses on enhancing the role of school libraries in fostering the mastery of information and new media literacy so essential to the learning of science and mathematics among underserved young people. Specifically, she conducts research in creating socio-culturally relevant learning environments that leverage the strengths of school library programs, where the library programs can engage young people in inquiry experiences, utilize technology for effective learning experiences, and make connections to their interests in media, health and the environment. She serves as the co-editor of the School Library Research journal. More information about her research and teaching interests can be found at: http://www.terpconnect.umd.edu/~mmsubram/

John Carlo Bertot, University of Maryland 

Coming Soon