Fall 2019 Newsletter

SCHOOL OF INFORMATION AND LIBRARY SCIENCE

@Carolina

Old Books, New Stories (Page ##)

SILS partners with NC State Archives to advance email curation (Page ##)

Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life launches with $5M gift (Page ##)

Project READY releases online racial equity curriculum for youth librarians (Page ##)

FALL 2019

NUMBER 86

Message from the Dean Greetings from Chapel Hill! I hope this annual newsletter finds you in good health and spirit. The UNC School of Information and Library (SILS) enjoyed another productive year with new research initiatives, impressive student and alumni achievements, and foundational planning for program evaluations and new academic offerings.

You can read about many of these accomplishments in the pages that follow, but as always, I encourage you to reach out, visit, and become engaged in our mission of information education, research, and service.

We currently have more students and faculty than any time in our history. SILS graduates are highly sought by employers and our faculty are addressing some of the key data and information challenges of our time. Our alumni continue to win awards, create new programs and enterprises, and serve the public in communities in North Carolina and around the world.

SILS’ research grants and contracts have set another record with 21 funded projects expending $6 million in 2019. To better focus our efforts and further expand the scope of our research, we have established the Center for Information Impact. This collaborative enterprise will study the effects of the ever-expanding digital environment on individuals, communities, and information systems.

The Center for Information Impact encompasses the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP), which launched in spectacular fashion this summer, thanks to a $5 million gift from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and additional support from Luminate and the Hewlett Foundation. Read how CITAP investigators – world-renowned experts in information science, media and journalism, communication, and law – are evaluating the impact of the internet, social media, and other forms of digital information sharing on democracy on pages ##.

UNC-Chapel Hill’s Strategic Plan, Carolina Next: Innovation for Public Good, lays out ambitious directives for the University and SILS to address key challenges of the 21st century. One element of this plan is to invest in new initiatives in data science that will prepare students from every discipline to succeed in tomorrow’s data-intensive workplaces and to leverage data resources to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. As an active partner in this initiative, SILS will need to redouble our collaborative spirit and practice, grow our faculty and staff numbers, and adjust and expand our curricula and programmatic offerings.

We are prepared to make consequential contributions to challenges like precision medicine, climate change, and social wellbeing, and we aim to do so by bolstering our technical capabilities and resources while honoring our human-centric perspective.

Our trajectory is steady and true to our values and to the needs of North Carolina and the world.

We are, however, at an inflection point in our journey to informed excellence and informed leadership. Thanks to increasingly powerful digital technologies, humanity has become more connected and more productive, but also more vulnerable. As SILS contributes to advancements in systems and technology, we must find new strategies that balance the benefits of accessible information and data-driven decisions with the consequences of data privacy violations, unchecked artificial intelligence, and the surveillance economy. These are substantial challenges but SILS is up to the task of preparing the next generation of information professionals who will advance the public good in this highly informated era.

Just before this newsletter went to press, I was one of nearly 100 Carolina faculty and senior administrators to travel across North Carolina as part of the Tar Heel Bus Tour. I returned inspired, energized, and amazed at the resiliency and diversity of North Carolina people and institutions. The tour gave me to opportunity to meet people who serve and collaborate with compassion and pride to meet the enormous challenges of poverty, racism, environmental disaster, and greed. UNC’s work in rural health, opioid addiction, economic disruptions, K-12 education, and natural disasters is truly remarkable. SILS already plays roles in many of these endeavors, but I look forward to working with faculty and students to find new opportunities for us to work with public libraries, museums, community archives, government offices, clinics, and hospitals in many more ways.

I hope you enjoy the stories and photos featured in this newsletter, and that you find ways in the next year to engage with SILS students, faculty, and fellow alumni to advance the social good. In addition, please continue your generous support of SILS through the Campaign for Carolina, so we can ensure that our future is as bright as our past and the present.

Gary Marchionini Dean and Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor

Background: A skyward view from the top of the Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower. Photo by Johnny Andrews, UNC-Chapel Hill.

sils.unc.edu @uncsils Join the UNC SILS Alumni Association group

CB #3360, 100 Manning Hall Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360

Connect your profile to the SILS LinkedIn page bit.ly/sils-linkedin

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (SILS) newsletter is published annually in the fall for the School’s alumni and friends.

Sign-up for the SILS alumni listserv by sending a message with the subject SUBSCRIBE to contactsils@unc.edu.

Once you have subscribed, you can send/ receive using sils-alumni@listserv.unc.edu.

KATHERINE PERALES Editor Communications Coordinator 919.843.8337

On the cover

kpearl@email.unc.edu

VI LE Communications & Marketing Assistant We welcome your submissions. If you’ve received an honor or award, started a new job, or have other news to share, please email contactsils@unc.edu Learn more about opportunities for giving to the UNC School of Information and Library Science by contacting: ANNE WEBB Deputy Director of Development 919.962.3499 Anne_Webb@unc.edu Online Gifts Please visit giving.unc.edu/gift/sils Checks Make checks payable to UNC-CH and notate “SILS” or a specific SILS initiative in the memo line. Mail your check to: UNC School of Information & Library Science PO Box 309 Chapel Hill, NC 27514-0309

Our Commitment to Diversity In support of the University’s diversity goals and the mission of the UNC School of Information and Library Science, SILS embraces diversity as an ethical and societal value. We broadly define diversity to include ability, age, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, gender expression, immigration status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status.

As an academic community committed to preparing our graduates to be leaders in an increasingly multicultural and global society we strive to:

• Ensure inclusive leadership, policies, and practices • Integrate diversity into the curriculum and research • Foster a mutually respectful intellectual environment in which diverse perspectives and experiences are valued

• Recruit and retain students, faculty, and staff from traditionally underrepresented groups

• Participate in outreach to underserved groups in North Carolina and beyond

Find links to update your contact information and ways to stay connected and involved with SILS at

sils.unc.edu/alumni/stay-connected

The statement is our commitment to the ongoing cultivation of an academic environment that is open, representative, and reflective of the concepts of equity and fairness. ~The Faculty and Staff of the UNC School of Information and Library Science

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IN THIS ISSUE

$1.1M grant from Mellon Foundation will facilitate advances in email curation..................6-7

SPRING

Zeynep Tufekci helps celebrate the Web@30 at CERN .............................................................8 Google Research Scientist Dan Russell talks search at SILS.......................................................8 SILS from coast to coast ...........................................................................................................9 Symposium on Social Good includes Kilgour Lecture by Meredith Clark................................10 SILS students share work and research at 2019 Project Fair...................................................11 Nadia Clifton (MSLS ’19) creates virtual tour of Wilson Library...............................................12 Spring Commencement....................................................................................................12-13 SILS Distinguished Alumni Gerald Holmes and Rose Dawson................................................14 Project READY releases online racial equity curriculum for librarians.....................................15

SUMMER

DataAware introduces high school students to health data analytics....................................14 ENABLE boot camp shows undergraduates opportunities in BMHI........................................15 NSF Cyber Carpentry helps researchers learn to manage big data..........................................15 New research center will study the impact of the internet and social media.....................5-16

FALL

SILS plays role in Lunar Library moonshot.............................................................................16 SILS welcomes new graduate students at orientation............................................................17 Students showcase tech-infused books.................................................................................17 FACULTY NEWS & RECOGNITION........................................................................................22-24 STUDENT NEWS & RECOGNITION.......................................................................................25-27 ALUMNI NEWS & NOTES...................................................................................................28-29 Emma Boettcher (MSIS ’16) makes headlines with ‘Jeopardy!’ triumph.................................28 SILS Development leadership transition................................................................................30 Claude and Sarah Snow make $2.6 million planned gift........................................................31

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$1.1M grant from Mellon Foundation will facilitate advances in email curation SILS and NC archives partner on Review, Appraisal, and Triage of Mail (RATOM) project Only time will tell if the U.S. State Department report released in October marks the end of official investigations into “her emails,” but the protracted controversy underscores the importance of email in modern communication, and by extension its value as a public record and historical artifact.

“Traditionally, in archive collections that are physical, correspondence has always been one of the most important groups of records,” said Glynn Edwards, Assistant Director of Special Collections and Archives at Stanford University. “Emails are what I see as modern day correspondence. It’s actually much more complex and all-encompassing than that because people use it for all kinds of stuff. It can reveal your social networks, your purchases and politics. It can contain documents, photos, and moving images.”

Unfortunately, the dynamic nature of the format also makes it more challenging to process and archive.

“Despite 47 years of email creation and the vital role of email as documentation of activities across all sectors of society, the professional curation of email is still relatively immature,” said UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) Professor Cal Lee. In early 2019, SILS and the State Archives of North Carolina launched a partnership aimed at advancing the technology and workflows used to archive emails.

The Review, Appraisal, and Triage of Mail (RATOM) project received a $1.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

RATOM is both an acronym and a tribute to Ray Tomlinson, who developed the messaging system that evolved into modern day email. The two-year project 6

UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS)

is building on the successes of BitCurator, BitCurator Access, and BitCurator NLP, projects led by Lee, as well as the Transforming Online Mail with Embedded Semantics (TOMES) project, which Camille Tyndall Watson, Head of the Digital Service Section at the State Archives, led from 2016-2017.

Lee is Principal Investigator for RATOM, with Tyndall Watson as co-PI and Research Scientist Kam Woods as Technical Led. In addition to assembling a staff, RATOM has convened an advisory board of international experts, including Edwards, who directs the Email: Process, Appraise, Discover, Deliver (ePADD) project at Standford.

Preserving what is important, protecting what is private The sheer volume of emails can be a significant obstacle for archivists. Like their federal counterparts at NARA, the State Archives has adopted a capstone approach, preserving emails from North Carolina governors, treasurers, and other members of the state’s executive branch during their time in office.

“Even though we don’t handle a huge number of email accounts, any given account has thousands and thousands of messages,” said Tyndall Watson. “It’s a really big challenge for processing and access.”

The need to redact personal information disclosed or discussed in email exchanges further complicates the work. Depending on state law and organizational policies, archivists must redact information ranging from social security numbers to personal health information to decisions regarding employment and beyond. This type of sensitive information can be prevalent in emails, as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush demonstrated in 2015 when he publish hundreds of thousands of emails from his years in office, exposing social security numbers, home addresses, phone numbers, and other private information his constituents had shared.

Given the vast number of emails a single person’s account usually contains, it is impractical bordering on impossible for a person to read each message and make the necessary decisions regarding its content.

Joanne Kaczmarek, a RATOM advisory board member and Director of Records and Information Management Services at the University of Illinois Library, has been working with the Illinois State Archives to process the email of the recent governor and his administration using commercially available software often employed by lawfirms.

To teach the software what kind of information to tag in the emails, Kaczmarek and her team spent time manually reviewing the messages. Based on this experience, Kaczmarek determined that it would take a person working 40-hours per week approximately 27 years to process the 5.4 million emails her group received from the state archives. By employing the software, the project took about four months.

FACULTY NEWS BRIEFS “The value of this kind of work is that we’re really trying to be accountable to the citizenry of the country, honoring the idea that the public does have a right to know and understand how the government is working – or not,” Kaczmarek said. “But we also have to be thoughtful about it, to balance people’s right to know with the right to privacy. Using these new techniques, we won’t have to embargo information for 10 to 20 years because we don’t have the time or the staff to review it. We can make it available to people while it’s still relevant to their lives.”

PROMOTIONS

Mary Grace Flaherty and Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi were promoted to associate professor with tenure, effective July 1. Brian Sturm has been approved for promotion to professor, effective Jan. 1, 2020. Sturm has also been appointed to the editorial board for the journal Public Library Quarterly.

Open source options TOMES produced a natural language processor to help N.C. archivists identify which emails should be saved and which should be discarded, and if the preserved emails contained personally identifiable information. Although the results of this process could be made available to the public, Watson said the size and format of the file produced would make it difficult for people to use.

RATOM is developing new opensource software that will extend the natural language processing capabilities of TOMES and the BitCurator environment to help identify topics of interest within email collections, so messages can be tagged for easier retrieval. Watson foresees using the software to process emails based on records requests until entire databases have been sorted and organized into relevant categories.

The outcomes of the RATOM project will benefit libraries, archives, museums (LAMs) handling almost any collection with born-digital items.

“Email is often present in acquisitions that include other types of materials.” Lee said. “LAMs are increasingly looking for tools and methods to identify and document both the records and contextual relationships between them.”

Watson said she hopes the project produces more standardized processes that can be adopted by organizations, even if they don’t have digital specialists on staff, so that “e-mail archiving isn’t something that seems out of reach.”

ratom.web.unc.edu

Mary Grace Flaherty

Mohammad Jarrahi

Jarrahi wins best article award Associate Professor Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi won the Best Article Award for 2018 from Business Horizons for “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work: Human-AI Symbiosis in Organizational Decision Making.” The journal announced the selection in early 2019 and officially recognized Jarrahi in the May-June 2019 issue.

In addition to this recognition, Jarrahi and SILS Associate Professor Melanie Feinberg were co-authors on two of the five papers selected as finalists for the Lee Dirks Award for Best Paper at iConference 2019.

Gotz named RTIUx Scholar SILS Professor and Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP) Assistant Director David Gotz was selected for the RTIUx scholars program for 2019-20.

The program David Gotz provides support for distinguished academic researchers to spend scholarly leave time at RTI International, actively partnering with its experts.

Gotz is working with an interdisciplinary team at RTI’s Center for Data Science, which is led by Gayle Bieler, senior statistician and founding director of the center.

Brian Sturm

Flaherty awarded MLA research fellowship SILS Associate Professor Mary Grace Flaherty received a Lindberg Research Fellowship from the Medical Library Association (MLA) to study how information use affects timely diagnosis and health services utilization by patients with the alpha-gal food allergy.

“Results from this study will provide data on patient-provider communication with an emergent condition,” Flaherty said.

“It will also afford a better understanding of health communication between patients and clinicians, and how information exchange affects diagnosis and health care utilization.”

Alpha-gal syndrome is a recently identified type of food allergy to red meat.

Lee selected for IAH Academic Leadership Program SILS Professor Christopher “Cal” Lee was selected for the Institute for the Arts and Humanities Academic Leadership Program (ALP) for 2019-20.

Eight Carolina faculty members Cal Lee are chosen for the program each year based on their potential to contribute as academic leaders. ALP Fellows engage in a series of activities to help them develop leadership skills and networks.

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SPRING Zeynep Tufekci helps celebrate the Web@30 at CERN SILS Associate Professor Zeynep Tufekci was one of the featured speakers for the Web@30 celebration, hosted by CERN in March.

CERN partnered with the World Wide Web Consortium and the World Wide Web Foundation for the event, held at CERN’s headquarters in Switzerland.

The celebration commemorated Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s 1989 proposal to create a structure for linking information across different computers, a vision that would soon evolve into the World Wide Web. Tufekci joined Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and other internet pioneers and experts to discuss the challenges and opportunities of innovative technologies.

Tufekci talked with the Marketplace Tech podcast about the occasion, explaining that the web is at a turning point.

“It was built for a very different kind of vision. It was built for a small network,” she said. “The next 30 years will be about: How do we adjust course so we can keep all the magic but also deal with the real challenges of having this global kind of connectivity?”

Above, Web@30 panelists Lou Montulli, Zeynep Tufekci, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and Jean-François Groff and moderator Frédéric Donck. Left: SILS Associate Professor Zeynep Tufekci makes a point during the session, titled “Let’s Share What We Know.”

Photos courtesy of CERN.

Google Research Scientist Dan Russell shares techniques for better searching and teaching Daniel Russell, Google’s Senior Research Scientist for Search Quality and User Happiness in Mountain View, gave a talk at SILS on April 12 about what he has learned from teaching thousands of people how to find what they are looking for with Google and other online tools.

The talk included highlights from his new book, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the Basics (MIT Press). For the book, Russell said he worked to avoid technical jargon and explanations, instead conveying the lessons through a series of narratives. “This book is really a set of stories about how to effectively do online research,” he said.

A member of the SILS Board of Visitors, Russell’s current research focuses on understanding how human intelligence and artificial intelligence can work together to exceed their individual potentials. His MOOC, PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com, is currently hosting over 3,000 learners / week in the course. He also writes a blog at http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/.

Dan Russell’s talk, “Adventures in Teaching People How to Search,” is on the SILS YouTube channel, youtube.com/sils or go.unc.edu/search-talk.

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UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS)

Above: Dan Russell, far left, talks with SILS doctoral students and Associate Professor Rob Capra following his talk at SILS in April.

Right, the cover of Russell’s new book from MIT Press (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ joy-search).

NYC Career Trek

Information Science @ Work

RDU & San Francisco SILS offered the Information Science @ Work course for the second year in a row this spring. Led by Professor Paul Jones, the class visited local alumni at their places of employment, spoke with representatives of start-ups, and met with potential employers. Over spring break, students traveled to the Bay Area to visit SILS alumni and friends at Instagram, Facebook, IDEO, and Google, among others.

SILS students Sarah Albrecht, Andrew McClenney, Genna Crites, Cary Gentry and Anusha Suresh at the main branch of the New York Public Library.

Students network in New York’s financial district and libraries SILS students spent spring break 2019 in New York City, exploring special libraries, information management in the financial industry, and public librarianship. SILS Career Services Coordinator Lori Haight and Programs Officer Shirley Parker accompanied the students for the three-day trek. The group enjoyed tours and networking at the Boston Consulting Group, Dow Jones Factiva, the Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL), the main branch of the New York Public Library, and the NYPL’s 53rd Street Library.

SILS alumna Jessica L. Wood, PhD, (MSLS ’13) provided a behind-the-scenes tour of the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, and alumna Kristin McDonough (MSLS ’70), retired director of the SIBL, was instrumental in planning the trip thanks to her NYC connections.

Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP) doctoral students Terika McCall and Malvika Pillai at Facebook in San Francisco.

Alumni @ Amazon

SILS Dean Gary Marchionini caught up with several SILS alumni during a trip to Seattle in March. Following a tour of Amazon HQ, he and the group stopped for a photo inside The Spheres, three spherical plant conservatories on the Amazon campus.

From left: Chongrui Zhang (MSIS ’16), Dong Liang (MSIS ’16), Xiaohong “Sharon” Yang, PhD (MSIS ’00), Wei Gao (MSIS ’13), Gary Marchionini, Kelly Maniscalco (MSLS ’12), Xuxiang “Max” Mao (MSIS ’15), and Zekun Yu (MSIS ’15). The SILS grads all work for Amazon, except for Sharon Yang, who is president of Biomed DB Design.

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Dr. Meredith D. Clark, PhD, speaks at the Stone Center.

“Black Twitter is one space in which historically disenfranchised people are developing our own set of cultural values and filters for culturally competent reporting, information gathering and dissemination.”

Dr. Meredith D. Clark, PhD 2019 Kilgour Lecture

Reflect Reflect Reimagine magine Reimagine Rebuild Rebuild

Symposium on Social Good includes Kilgour Lecture by Meredith Clark SILS hosted its third annual Symposium on Information for Social Good on April 26. Several panel sessions were standing-room only and the 2019 Kilgour Lecture and keynote address by Meredith D. Clark, PhD, filled the Hitchcock Multipurpose Room at the Sonya Hayes Stone Center to near capacity.

Organized around the theme “Reflect. Reimagine.

Rebuild,” the 2019 symposium addressed topics including accessibility in physical and digital library spaces, ethics in the e-sports industry, representation of people of color and LGBTQ+ populations in adult romance sections of public libraries, and the datafication of childhood. Student presenters came from four courses: • Disability Informatics & Information, taught

by SILS Assistant Professor Amelia Gibson with support from SILS PhD student Laura March.

• Information Services in a Diverse Society, taught by SILS Professor Sandra Hughes-Hassell.

• Information Ethics (graduate level), taught by SILS Assistant Professor Maggie Melo.

• Information and Computer Ethics (undergraduate level), taught by Dianne Martin, Senior Faculty Fellow of the NC Study Center.

Meredith Clark is an assistant professor in the University of Virginia Department of Media Studies whose research focuses on the intersections of race, 10

UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS)

media, and power. Her award-winning dissertation on Black Twitter landed her on The Root 100, the website’s list of the most influential African Americans in the country in 2015. She earned her PhD from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

For the Kilgour Lecture, Clark delivered a talk titled “Black Women Tried to Tell Y’all: Race, Representation, and Self-Preservation through Digital Counternarratives.” Citing historical precedents and recent examples, she explained how people are using new forms of digital communication to challenge mainstream depictions of Black life and culture.

“Black Twitter is one space in which historically disenfranchised people are developing our own set of cultural values and filters for culturally competent reporting, information gathering and dissemination,” Clark said. “I would go so far as to say that centering these emergent values would help any creator of information systems contend with the perennial issues of dominance and subjugation by centering the perspectives of the vulnerable in their designs.”

Watch the Kilgour Lecture by Meredith D. Clark on the SILS YouTube channel, youtube.com/uncsils.

For presentation slides and more details about the the Symposium on Information for Social Good, visit info4socialgood2019.web.unc.edu.

Students share work and research at 2019 Project Fair SILS hosted its fifth annual Project Fair, showcasing the work of graduate and undergraduate students, on April 17 in Manning Hall. Four projects received special recognition: • The Best Project Award, chosen by a faculty panel of judges, was presented to Yukun Yang for his project titled “Dumping the Closet Skeletons Online: Guilty Information Disclosure Behavior on Social Media.”

• The People’s Choice Award, sponsored by LAUNC-CH and chosen by project fair attendees, was presented to Caleece Nash for her project titled “Is Mobile Work Really Location-Independent? The Role of Space in the Work of Digital Nomads.”

• The Community Impact Award, chosen by a faculty panel of judges, was presented to Rachel~Anne Spencer for her project titled “Creating Friendly Handouts: Towards More Accessible Materials in Digital Literacy Instruction” and Nadia Clifton for her project titled “Special Tours for Special Collections: 360-Degree Virtual Tours for Library Accessibility.”

MSIS student Yukun Yang discusses his research at the fair.

SILS Professor Cal Lee praised participants at the end of the fair. “Not only were the projects and research really impressive, your ability to articulate your work and findings were excellent,” he said.

“That’s not something you always encounter, even at professional conferences.”

Disability informatics lectures available online

Nadia Clifton (MSLS ‘19) creates virtual tour to help library visitors feel more welcome

As part of her spring 2019 “Disability Informatics and Information” course, SILS Assistant Professor Amelia Gibson hosted a series of guest lectures on topics such as disability and the law, designing assistive technology, and library services for people with disabilities.

The talks were open to the public and are now available on the Community Engaged Disability Informatics (CEDI) lab website, cedi.web.unc.edu.

The lecture series was made possible by an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant that Gibson received in 2017 for her project “Deconstructing Information Poverty: Identifying, Supporting, and Leveraging Local Expertise in Marginalized Communities.”

“As I’ve been conducting research for the project, I’ve been hearing from many librarians who have been tasked with creating programs for people with disabilities, but who have had no training or guidance on how to develop that programming,” Gibson said. “I hope these lectures might give librarians in that situation a place to start.”

Having worked as a research assistant in Wilson Library since she arrived at Carolina, Nadia Clifton viewed the building as her “home base” on campus, but she knew not everyone felt as welcome when they first arrived. The marble floors, stone columns, wood-paneled walls, and security station can be a little intimidating for new visitors.

To help improve that initial experience, Clifton created a 360-degree virtual tour of the library.

“The project came out of a class about disability informatics, but I hope it will be useful for everybody, including people who have a lot of anxiety about being in new places,” she said. “I want people to feel comfortable in the space before they even get there.”

The project will also help people with disabilities identify accessible entrances, automatic doors, and elevators.

Clifton graduated with her MSLS and Diversity Advocate Certificate in May. While at SILS, she was an Association of Research Libraries/Society of American Archivists Mosaic Fellow, interning in Wilson Library’s Rare Book Collection

Nadia Clifton explains her virtual tour of Wilson Library at the Project Fair to SILS Assistant Professor Maggie Melo and another guest.

University Libraries appointed Clifton the Special Collections Engagement Librarian for Wilson Library in August. In this position, she will help ensure an excellent visitor experience for all users and develop programs that will share Wilson Library’s resources with communities on campus, in North Carolina, and beyond.

Adapted from a story by Emilie Poplett, University Communications.

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SILS Spring Commencement The UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) hosted its annual spring commencement ceremony on May 12. The event included recognition for exceptional student research, excellence in teaching, and outstanding service to the School, as well as the presentation of the 2019 Distinguished Alumni Awards to Rose Timmons Dawson (MSLS ’86) and Gerald Holmes (MSLS ’85).

Student speaker Sarah Beth Nelson (PhD ’19) welcomed guests and graduates to the Great Hall of the Frank Porter Graham Student Union and shared a story about the difficulty of uprooting her family and moving to Chapel Hill for the doctoral program. Her feelings of trepidation and loneliness began to ease when she entered the PhD “dungeon” of offices and met some of her colleagues.

“At SILS I have found mentors, collaborators, commiserators, babysitters,” she said. “This village has helped raise my children, who are now 9 and 7. This village has also raised me as an academic, supporting me on my journey here, to graduation.”

Anne Klinefelter, Director of the Law Library and Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, delivered the spring commence-

ment address, titled “Make a Plan. Then Change It.” Drawing on examples from her own life, Klinefelter demonstrated how “the world changes in mind blowing ways.” As a reference librarian in the late 1980s, she was focused on expanding access to information and combating censorship, but as the internet changed the information landscape, her priorities shifted as well.

“I did not foresee that the payment system for using the internet would be based on trading privacy for information,” she said. “I now draw both on my role as a librarian and a law professor to explore how to find practical solutions to balance information access and privacy.”

In closing, she told graduates they should be ready to change their plans because their education at Carolina has prepared them to continue learning and growing throughout their lives.

“If any group of graduates know how to keep learning, it should be this group, experts in information and library science,” she said. “You chose this very fine University and this outstanding School, and that was a great plan. Congratulations and best wishes to you all.”

AWARDS & RECOGNITION Dean’s Achievement Award Qu Jiaming Kimberly J. Reisler

Elfreda Chatman Research Award Meg Foster

Outstanding Service to the School Award Rachel~Anne Spencer (BSIS ’17, MSIS ’19)

Deborah Barreau Award for Teaching Excellence

Amelia Gibson - Full-time Faculty Patrick Hodges (BSIS ’15) - Adjunct Faculty

SILS Diversity Advocate Certificate

Top photo: Master’s program graduates enter the Frank Porter Graham Student Union for the commencement ceremony. Bottom photo: Graduating information science majors shake hands with Dean Gary Marchionini and other SILS faculty members.

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UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS)

Nadia Clifton Meg Foster Amelia Midgett-Nicholson Dezarae Osborne Jamie Ramos Mara Rosenberg Sarah Sculnick Brittany Soder Rachel~Anne Spencer Gina Wessinger

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Far left: Rachel~Anne Spencer accepts the Outstanding Service to the School Award from SILS Alumni Association President Claire Leverett. Left: SILS Assistant Professor Amelia Gibson accepts the Deborah Barreau Award for Teaching Excellence from 2018 recipient Mary Grace Flaherty. In her introduction of for the award, Flaherty quoted students who had nominated Gibson. One said Gibson’s commitment to teaching is “evident in the energy she brings to the classroom and to mentoring. She regularly demonstrates a true, infectious intellectual excitement about the material.”

to the full 2019 Commencement address, “Make a Plan. Then Change It,” by Professor and Director of the Law Library Anne Klinefelter on Soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/unc-sils

WATCH

highlights from the 2019 ceremony on the SILS YouTube channel at youtube.com/uncsils.

VISIT

Above: SILS Associate Professor Jaime Arguello hoods doctoral graduate Heejun Kim as Dean Gary Marchionini and other faculty and honorees stand nearby. PhD graduates Nina Exner, Sara Beth Nelson, Leslie Elizabeth Ann Thomson, and Shenmeng Xu were also hooded during the ceremony.

Graduates and faculty pose for a photo on the steps of Manning Hall.

sils.unc.edu/news/2019/ commencement for links to more photos and the full commencement program.

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2019 SILS DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARDS

SILS Distinguished Alumni Award recipients Rose Timmons Dawson (MSLS ’86) and Gerald Holmes (MSLS ’85) with former SILS Dean Barbara Moran and current SILS Dean Gary Marchionini.

Rose Timmons Dawson (MSLS ’86)

Gerald Holmes (MSLS ’85)

Trailblazing leadership and high-impact programming have been hallmarks of Rose Dawson’s career. She started as a children’s librarian with the District of Columbia Public Library, and rose through the DCPL ranks, successfully managing divisions and implementing programs and projects that benefited the entire library system and the community it served.

In 2005, she left the DCPL to become Deputy Director of the Alexandria Library in Alexandria, Va. After a nationwide search, she became the first African-American to be appointed Director of the Library. She now oversees a system with an annual budget of $7.8 million, four branches, and 150 staff members. During her tenure as director, Dawson has contended with budget cuts ranging from 4% to nearly 15%, but she has succeeded in maintaining her full staff and facilities.

In 2010, she received the Distinguished Service to the Library Profession Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

She is a life member of the Carolina Alumni Association and the SILS Alumni Association. In September, she and her family celebrated the 85th birthday of their mother, Beulah Tindal Timmons, by unveiling the naming of the Beulah and Edward M. Timmons Seminar Room in the Sonja Haynes Stone Center.

Read more about Dawson and hear her remarks from the spring commencement at sils.unc.edu/news/2019/dawson-alumni-award.

Gerald Holmes has devoted his much of his career to encouraging individuals from underrepresented backgrounds to choose the library profession and endeavoring to make that profession more inclusive.

As Reference Librarian and Diversity Coordinator at University of North Carolina at Greensboro Libraries, he has served on the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee for Equity and created a Post-MSLS Diversity Residency Program.

He has been co-investigator on Institute of Museum and Library Services grants, including one awarded in 2018 that is enabling UNC-G Libraries to pilot a national Library Diversity Institute program.

He has served on the Carolina Alumni Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity and helped found and chair the SILS Alumni Inclusion and Diversity Committee.

Multiple organizations have recognized him for his contributions to diversity and equity, including the American Library Association, which named him an Achievement in Library Diversity Research honoree, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, which recognized him with its Distinguished Service to the Library Profession Award.

Read more about Holmes and hear his remarks from the spring commencement at sils.unc.edu/news/2019/holmesalumni-award.

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Background image by Javier Gonzalez, Pexels.com

Project READY releases free online racial equity curriculum for youth services librarians After three years of collaboration, investigation, and development, researchers at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) have released a free online curriculum to help youth services library staff learn to create more inclusive and equitable programming.

Accessible at ready.web.unc.edu, the curriculum is the culmination of Project READY (Reimagining Equity and Access for Diverse Youth) and represents the work of more than 40 scholars, library and school practitioners, and youth from a wide variety of racial and cultural backgrounds.

SILS, the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University, and the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for Project READY in 2016. The project aimed to create new professional development opportunities that could enable youth services librarians to better serve their increasingly diverse populations.

SILS Professor Sandra Hughes-Hassell and Teaching Assistant Professor Casey Rawson led Project READY as Principal Investigator and Co-PI and developed the online curriculum with SILS doctoral student Kimberly Hirsh.

During the 2017-18 school year, researchers worked with school librarians, literacy coaches, and classroom teachers from WCPSS to implement and evaluate an initial version of the curriculum. The partnership made such a positive impact, Project READY received the UNC-Chapel Hill Provost Engaged Scholarship Award.

The face-to-face workshop and subsequent interactions with WCPSS participants helped the curriculum development team realize they needed to expand the scope of their plans.

“We had anticipated taking the five days that we did in Wake County and putting that content online,” Rawson said. “What we have is 10 times that, at least.”

To create a more comprehensive experience, the team reached beyond its initial partners by convening an advisory board and recruiting external reviewers. The finalized curriculum consists of 27 modules, designed to be worked through by individuals or small groups. While it can be beneficial for colleagues to work through the program together, the original concept of a short-term workshop for entire organizations had to be abandoned, Hughes-Hassell said.

“This isn’t content that you can drop on people in five days and have them know what to do next,” said Hirsh, who also emphasized this should not be used as a “train the trainer” program. “That’s one of the reasons that the online program is so expansive. You have to walk people through the process of their own growth and what to do next; how to take the abstract concepts that they’re learning about and apply them in their own professional environments.”

“You have to walk people through the process of their own growth and what to do next; how to take the abstract concepts that they’re learning about and apply them in their own professional environments.”

-Kimberly Hirsh (MSLS ’11) SILS Doctoral Student & Project READY Staff Member

Find the Project READY free online professional development curriculum at ready.web.unc.edu

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SUMMER

DataAware introduces high school students to health data analytics Instead of hanging with friends or binging on Netflix, 10 high school students spent part of their summers analyzing data and tackling health care challenges through the DataAware program hosted by the Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP).

DataAware, short for Data Analytics for Teen Advancement: Applications in the Workforce and Academics with Research Experience, ran for six weeks from July 8 to Aug. 16. Students from high schools in the Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh area traveled to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus each weekday to learn about health data analytics, digital health technology, machine learning, real-world problem solving, and academic research.

Supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), DataAware loaned each participant a laptop, equipped with the needed software and data sets, and provided a $1,000 stipend.

Students received intensive training through classroom instruction, field trips to companies and organizations working in health data analytics, and mentorship from faculty experts, who helped them develop research projects that they presented on the final day of the workshop.

Devesh Kasireddy, a rising junior of Granville High School in Cary, had a great time exploring the various aspects of data science and learning about topics such as Virtual Reality applications for health care.

“This was a really unique program to me,” he said.

“Usually, there’s stuff about pharmacy and medicine PHOTOS AT TOP OF PAGE, from left, DataAware student Devesh Kasireddy explains the data used in his project.

HiDAV student Ijeoma Okoro lists the areas of life that can be affected by depression. Cyber Carpentry participants Toktam Oghaz explains her groups’ findings. Ankith Kodali takes questions during the final DataAware presentation. Cyber Carpentry participants and instructors pose together on the steps of Manning Hall.

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Program Coordinator Claire Paulson, far left, with DataAware. students and instructors.

available, but data science is a new field, and I felt that if I had experience in this field, then I can apply it to many different fields. That will be useful for me in the future.”

Fei Yu, Assistant Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science and Health Technology and Informatics Librarian at the Health Science Library, served as one of the program’s faculty mentors. Yu said she was impressed by the level of interest and commitment the students demonstrated.

“These high school students are so dedicated to their research projects,” she said. “I can see many of them wanting to go beyond this time and continue to work with mentors and professors.”

For more information about DataAware, visit dataaware.unc.edu. Watch a video featuring students and instructors at go.unc.edu/data-aware-video.

For more information about the HiDAV boot camp and other ENABLE programs, visit enable.unc.edu. Watch highlights from the boot camp and interviews with students and instructors at go.unc.edu/hidav-2019.

HiDAV boot camp offers undergrads insights, experiences in emerging field Nine undergraduates spent seven weeks on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus this summer, learning about the emerging field of biomedical and health informatics (BMHI).

The 2019 Health Informatics Data Analytics and Visualization (HiDAV) boot camp gave students experience with text mining, data mining, data visualization, classification algorithms, and applications such as Jupyter Notebook. Guest lectures from industry professionals and field trips to RTI, Optum Health Technology, RENCI, SAS, and UNC’s Lineberger Cancer Center demonstrated how these concepts are shaping research and medicine.

“Actually seeing how it’ll be applied to the real world is really great for me the,” said Zipporah Melton, a rising junior at North Carolina Agricultural and The HiDAV boot camp is part of ENABLE, an initiative launched by the Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP) in 2018 with the support of a $1.6 million grant from the United Health Foundation. With additional funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), ENABLE covers the cost of housing and meals for the residential camp and awards selected students a scholarship stipend.

ENABLE is also developing an online master’s program and other tools to expand access to career opportunities in BMHI, particularly for students and professionals from populations that are underrepresented in science and technology. The participants in this summer’s boot camp represented four Historically Black College and Universities: N.C.A&T, N.C. Central University, Bennett College, and the Morehouse School of Medicine.

“We created the program mainly to provide a way of attracting students that otherwise may not consider health informatics as a potential career pathway,” said Professor Javed Mostafa, Director of CHIP and ENABLE. “Because it’s a relatively new area, an emerging area, not many universities have programs in that field.”

“We created the program mainly to provide a way of attracting students that otherwise may not consider health informatics as a potential career pathway.”

Professor Javed Mostafa, Director of CHIP and ENABLE

NSF Cyber Carpentry helps researchers learn to manage big data SILS hosted its second National Science Foundation (NSF) Cyber Carpentry Workshop this summer. The program brings doctoral students and post-doctoral associates to Carolina’s campus for two weeks to learn best practices, tools, and processes for performing end-to-end data intensive computing and data life-cycle management.

This year’s workshop drew early career researchers from institutions across county, including Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, MIT, Iowa State, and the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez.

SILS Professor Arcot Rajasekar is the Primary Investigator for the Cyber Carpentry NSF grant, but the 2018 and 2019 workshops brought together several investigators from the Datanet Federation Consortium (DFC) to teach the concepts of virtualization, automation, and federation that the DFC helped define.

With feedback from two cohorts of workshop participants, organizers will now consider ways to standardize the training and develop online learning modules, so even more scientists can benefit.

Learn more at abou the workshop at cybercarpentry.web.unc.edu.

2019 HiDAV boot camp students and instructors

Sumegha Godara explains her groups’ work on the final day of the Cyber Carpentry workshop.

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PhD candidate Megan Threats receives multiple fellowships and awards for research

Multiple national and international organizations recognized SILS doctoral candidate Megan Threats in 2019 for the quality and potential of her research.

Threats’ dissertation uses quantitative and qualitative methods to understand the influence of sociotechnical systems on the information practices and HIV protective and risk reduction behaviors of young, Black men who have sex with men.

Megan Threats Her accolades for 2019 include: • Beta Phi Mu Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.

• International P.E.O. Scholar Award.

• UNC Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

• First place in the ALISE Jean Tague-Sutcliffe Doctoral Student Research Poster Competition for her poster, “The Influence of Sociotechnical Environments on the Information Behaviors of Black Gay Men.” • First place in ASIS&T SIG HLTH student poster competition for her poster, “The Information Practices of HIV Positive Black Gay Men Post-Diagnosis.”

She was also accepted to the 2018/19 ASIS&T Doctoral Colloquium and 2019 iConference Doctoral Colloquium, and served on a 2019 Medical Library Association panel, “Microaggressions and More: Continuing the Conversation on Implicit Bias.” In addition, she had papers published in AIDS Care and the Journal of Patient Experience.

Matthew Johnson (MSLS ’18) wins ASIS&T’s Pratt Severn Award for best research paper SILS graduate Matthew Weirick Johnson (MSLS ’18) received ASIS&T’s 2019 Pratt Severn Best Student Research Paper Award for his paper, “Dating Apps, Categorical Fields, and Health Information Sharing: Exploring the Utility of Dating Application Features Related to HIV, STIs and PrEP for Promoting Regular Testing and PrEP Usage.”

In selecting Johnson’s paper, one juror said, “I believe that this paper makes a significant contribution to two LIS areas of increasing concern – health informatics and the sociocultural nature of information practices…I would cite it in conversation with some of my own research findings.”

Johnson is a Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian at the Matthew Johnson University of California, Los Angeles. at SILS in 2017.

More Student Recognition PhD student Megan Threats and Kristen Bowen were two of the four PhD students selected from a nationwide search to co-teach modules on research design and programming for the iSchool Inclusion Institute (i3).

MSLS student Jordan Wrigley received a $5,000 scholarship from the Medical Library Association (MLA). Wrigley also received the fall Elfreda Chatman Research Award for her research proposal, titled “A bibliometric analysis and mapping of maternal health publications associated with Millennium Development Goal 5.”

Miana Breed (MSLS ’19) and Betsy Ford (MSIS ’19) received scholarships to attend the 2019 Managing Electronic Records (MER) Conference in May. MSIS student Paul Khawaja and MSLS student Alexander Chisum received scholarships from Beta Phi Mu Epsilon Chapter for being the top performing students in the first year of their respective programs.

SILS awarded $1,000 scholarships to three information science majors in 2019: Jared Beavers, Shelby Poliachik, and Eshika Talukder.

Michael Doucette, a senior doublemajoring in information science and interdisciplinary studies, was profiled by Endeavors, Carolina’s research magazine. In the Q&A, Doucette shares how chose his academic path and discusses his research on the influence of digital technologies. Read the article at endeavors.unc.edu/michael-doucette.

PhD candidate Elliott Hauser receives dissertation research, best paper, and travel awards

SILS doctoral candidate Elliott Hauser received the 2019 Litwin Books Award for Ongoing Dissertation Research in the Philosophy of Information. In addition, Hauser and Joseph T. Tennis, Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the University of Washington iSchool, won the Best Paper Award at the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization conference (NASKO 2019) in June. The paper, titled “Episemantics: Aboutness as Aroundness,” will be revised for publication in the journal Knowledge Organization. Hauser also received the SIG HFIS (History & Foundations of Information Science) doctoral travel award to go to Melbourne for ASIS&T 2019.

Hauser’s research focuses on how information systems are used to produce certainty and thereby shape parts of social reality. He studies this phenomenon by applying philosophical and theoretical methods to position specific information systems within their social contexts.

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Elliott Hauser addresses participants in this year’s NSF Cyber Carpentry Workshop, hosted at SILS. Read more about the workshop on page 17.

“My name is Kristen Bowen. Currently, I am in my third year as a PhD student in SILS. I am a Black woman first-generation student pursuing a graduate degree. Nevertheless, I am a three-time Tar Heel and SILS has had a hand in each one of those degrees.

Thankfully, my mom was able to assist me with my undergraduate degree. However, for the rest, I was on my own. Without funding that had been specifically allocated towards students, I would have found myself in a very difficult situation trying to pursue any graduate degree. The funding that students receive isn’t taken for granted. This funding allows us to breathe and focus on the populations we seek to advocate for and the solutions to problems – like information access or system design – we are working towards.

Thank you for providing financial relief; for serving as hope for many who would not have this chance otherwise.”

Kristen Bowen

Kristen Bowen (BSIS ’13, MSLS ’14) Inaugural Recipient, Mae Lipscomb Rodney Fund

ABOUT THE MAE LIPSCOMB RODNEY FUND In 2019, SILS Distinguished Alumna Mae Lipscomb Rodney made a major gift to establish the SILS fund that bears her name. The Fund supports the School’s doctoral program, specifically to recruit and support PhD students. Additionally, it is the donor’s preference that while available to all students, particular attention be given to enhancing the social, economic, and cultural diversity of the student body. Dr. Rodney is a 1986 PhD alumna.

SILS STUDENT SUPPORT: MAXIMIZING THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE SILS students are extraordinary. As we help them develop their gifts and chart their professional paths, they, in turn, inspire us and challenge us to push harder, dig deeper and strive further.

SILS is using (or expects to use) these donor-funded, student-support funds in 2019 and 2020. Some funds have existed for decades. Other funds recently launched or will come on line soon because the donor recently made the gift or is finishing up a pledge.

Susan Grey Akers Scholarship Fund Donors: SILS Alumni Association members

Flora S. Lockridge Endowed Scholarship Fund Donor: Flora S. Lockrige (BSLS ’52)

While every gift for SILS makes a difference, we focus here, in this issue, on SILS donor-funded student support. Generally speaking, that means scholarships, fellowships, assistantships, and career services.

Lester Asheim Scholarship Fund in Library Science Donor: Lester Asheim, SILS Professor

Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Assistantship Donor: Charlotte Mecklenburg Library

Gary Fenton Barefoot Fund for Student Excellence ** Donor: Gary Barefoot (MSLS ’68)

Amy Elizabeth Morgan Assistantship Donor: NoveList

Mary Boone Bernsen Fund for the School of Information and Library Science Donor: Mary Boone Bernsen (MSLS ’73)

Irene Owens Fund for Diversity and Global Programs # Donor: Irene Owens (PhD ’95)

Thanks to donors, we have funded more than three dozen SILS students with significant awards this fiscal year, and last. SILS donors also fund learning opportunities and experiences. Talk about impact!

You can establish a SILS named fund with gifts over as many as five years. Donors use an array of assets: cash, credit cards, stock, real estate, more. They are current gifts.

Another way to create a SILS fund for the future, through your estate. Donors often ask us how to blend the ideas (some current giving now, future giving later).

Lisa M. Burmeister Fellows Fund Donors: various (Evelyn Daniel, as SILS Dean, pooled unrestricted gifts to create this memorial fund.)

Isaac and Rita Chao Fund for SILS Student Support Donor: Isaac Chao (MSLS ’69) Doralyn Hickey Fund * Donor: Lynda Herman Thomas (MSLS ’74) Michael Hooker Graduate Fellowship in Applied Networking Donor: Cisco Systems

Mattie U. Russell Endowed Fund for Student Success ** Donors: Russ Davidson (MSLS ’79) and Revathi Davidson (MPH ’78) Barbara B. Moran Fund for Global Programs ** Donors: Barbara Moran, SILS Professor, joined by others Mae Lipscomb Rodney Fund *# Donor: Mae Lipscomb Rodney (PhD ’86) Louis Round Wilson Fellowship Donor: Dean Edmonds Foundation. Trustees include the grandsons of SILS founder Louis Round Wilson, Dean Edmonds III (BSBA ’76) and Louis Round Wilson Edmonds (BSBA ’78).

*inaugural use in 2019 **inaugural use expected in 2020 #established in 2019 Carolina degree information is noted in the listing.

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New research center will study the impact of the internet and social media on people and politics For the first time, social media surpassed newspapers as a news source for Americans last year. Nine in 10 Americans say they get at least some of their news digitally, and U.S. consumers are expected to spend more time looking at their mobile devices than at their televisions by the end of the year.

What does that mean for the way we make sense of the world? A new center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill intends to find out.

With $5 million in support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Carolina has established the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. Drawing on some of the world’s leading experts in information science, media and journalism, communication, and law, CITAP will answer defining questions about the changing nature of society and politics in the digital age.

The new funding is part of a broader Knight Foundation initiative that is investing nearly $50 million for research around technology’s impact on democracy.

The center’s charge to produce empirical research on these topics for the first time is a critical step forward for democracy in the digital age, Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen said in a press release.

“The internet has changed our lives and is changing our democracy. We have to take a step back and a step forward,” said Ibargüen. “To understand what is actually happening, we need independent research and insights based on data, not emotion and invective. To go forward, citizens must be engaged, and including university communities in the debate is a step in that direction.”

An additional $750,000 contribution from Luminate and $600,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will expand the center’s impact.

“We’re in a time where anyone can create information and put it out on the internet. Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, rumors, fake news — these things are all rampant,” said Alice Marwick, Assistant Professor of Communication in the College of Arts & Sciences.

Keep up with CITAP announcements and research at citap.unc.edu.

Follow CITAP on social media at Facebook.com/citapunc and on Twitter @unc_citap.

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Marwick, Deen Freelon and Daniel Kreiss from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, and Zeynep Tufekci from the UNC School of Information and Library Science will lead research at the center. Additional faculty members, post-doctoral scholars, and research assistants will join CITAP in the coming months. The center will be physically housed in Manning Hall following renovations to a space adjacent to the SILS Library.

CITAP will combine a variety of disciplines and research methods to understand digital media’s impact on people, communities and social systems.

“These are complicated problems,” said Gary Marchionini, Dean of the UNC School of Information and Library Science and principal investigator for CITAP, “so if we’re not looking at it through the lenses of sociology and psychology and technology, then we’re going to miss things.”

CITAP faculty members will share their research with policymakers, journalists, tech companies and citizens, allowing Carolina to act as a leading hub for information on emerging technologies and artificial intelligence.

“We have one of the most prominent groups of scholars who have been working on digital media and politics issues over the last decade, all together at one university,” said Kreiss. “We want to make research-informed recommendations for what platforms can do differently, for how government should approach regulation and ultimately what citizens can do.”

The center will also give students valuable insights into emerging fields and prepare them to critically analyze information as technology evolves.

“We need new technological and political solutions,” said Tufekci. “We can definitely keep most of the conveniences and possibilities of the digital world and keep our privacy, but there has to be regulation, innovation and effort to get there.”

Adapted from a story by Emilie Poplett, University Communications.

More to the Story

Kevin M. Guskiewicz, Interim Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and SILS Associate Professor Zeynep Tufekci both penned columns for the Knight Foundation supporting the establishment of CITAP and other research centers across the country.

Read what they said at go.unc.edu/Guskiewicz-Knight and go.unc.edu/Zeynep-Knight.

Background image by Naji Habib from Pixabay. Photo of Zeynep Tufekci by Ryan Lash / TED. Photo of Daniel Kreiss by Dan Sears, UNC-Chapel Hill. Photos of Deen Freelon and Gary Marchionini by Johnny Andrews, UNC-Chapel Hill. Photo of Alice Marwick from www.tiara.org The iSchool @Carolina

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FALL

Building a library on the moon When the spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the surface of the moon in April, it scattered debris that included a small nickel disc bearing a huge trove of information. This Lunar Library was the latest effort by the Arch (pronounced Ark) Mission Foundation to preserve and disseminate humanity’s knowledge across time and space.

SILS Professor Paul Jones is an advisor to the founders of the Arch Mission Foundation (AMF) and helped curate the contents of the Lunar Library. Because of Jones’ involvement, SILS is listed as a named partner on the foundation’s website.

One of the AMF’s co-founders, Nova Spivack, came to Carolina on September 13 to deliver the 2019 Lucille Kelling Henderson Lecture, “Building a Library on the Moon.”

“The idea is to create a permanent record of all human knowledge that lasts for at least a billion years,” Spivack explained in his talk. “And it’s in so many places that somebody someday will find it, at least some of these will get through.

We’re building the billion-year archive, which treats the solar system as a library where the buildings and stacks are the planets and moons.”

To ensure their archives can survive harsh conditions and endure for billions of years, the AMF is recording information using new technologies and materials, Nova Spivack including quartz, nickel, and DNA. The Lunar Library was recorded on nickel-based Nanofiche, which is 4,800 times more space efficient than microfiche. With Nanofiche’s capacity and durability, Spivack said organizations like the Library of Congress could convert their microfiche to a non-degradable format that would take only a fraction of the space and energy to maintain.

“With Nanofiche, you can turn buildings into shelves,” he said.

Watch a recording of Nova Spivak’s talk at go.unc.edu/lunar-library to learn more about the Arch Mission Foundation and how it placed a quartz disc with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy in the glove compartment of a Tesla Roadster that is now orbiting the sun.

Nova Spivack (far left) shows storage devices used by the Arch Mission Foundation to students, faculty, and other audience members who attendend the 2019 Henderson Lecture .

SILS PROFESSOR PAUL JONES discusses his contributions to the Lunar Library and his 40 years of information science and journalism instruction in a “Newsmaker” profile by American Libraries. Read the Q&A at http://bit.ly/jones-newsmaker. Popular Mechanics tapped Jones for a November article exploring how the internet will evolve in the next 50 years. Read the predictions at http://bit.ly/pop-mech-jones. Carolina’s Well Said podcast interviewed Jones about the first radio broadcast streamed over the internet in 1994. Listen at go.unc.edu/wxyc-simulcast.

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STORYTELLING WITH TECH-INFUSED BOOKS Students from Assistant Professor Maggie Melo’s Information Professionals in the Makerspace course used laser cutting, 3D printing, augmented reality, circuitry, and other makerspace skills to transform old books into new, techinfused stories. They showcased their creations on Oct. 16 in Wilson Library.

Melo and several of the students have been documenting their progress and work on other projects for the class on Twitter using #INLSMakes.

Top right photo:

Zeynep Tufekci in Hong Kong SILS Associate Professor Zeynep Tufekci has made multiple trips to Hong Kong in recent months to observe the protests there and has been chronicling her visits on Twitter @zeynep. She has also written columns about the protests for Wired and The Atlantic, which appointed her a contributing writer in September. Read “The Hong Kong Protesters Aren’t Driven

by Hope” at http://bit.ly/hong-kong-hope.

Zeynep Tufekci visiting Hong Kong in October.

INFORMATION SHARING Publication and presentation highlights from SILS faculty and graduate students in 2019.

Assistant Professor Amelia Gibson gave the keynote address at the Big Ten Academic Alliance Library Conference in May at the University of Michigan. Her talk, “Justice, Equity, or Charity? Ethics and Responsibility in Inclusive Library Design,” is on YouTube at http://bit.ly/btaa-gibson.

Professor Barbara M. Wildemuth, Dean Gary Marchionini, Xin Fu (PhD ’08), Jun Sung Oh (PhD ’10), and Meng Yang (PhD ’05) co-authored “The Usefulness of Multimedia Surrogates for Making Relevance Judgments about Digital Video Objects,” published in Information Processing & Management, 56(6), Article 102091. doi: 10.1016/j.ipm.2019.102091.

PhD student Kelsey Urgo co-authored a paper with Associate Professors Jaime Arguello and Rob Capra. Urgo presented the paper, “Anderson and Krathwohl’s Two-Dimensional Taxonomy Applied to Task Creation and Learning Assessment,” at ICTIR 2019 in Santa Clara, Calif., on Oct. 4. doi: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3341981.3344226.

Associate Professor Brian Sturm had two publications appear in recent issues of the Journal of Tar Heel Tellers: “How Much Description Is Too Much?” (2019) 25, 2, 9-12, and “The Paradox of Participation” (2018) 25, 1, 9-10.

2019 iConference, March 21-April 2, Washington, D.C. “Automating Documentation: A Critical Perspective into the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Clinical Documentation,” paper presentation by Associate Professor Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi and Matt Willis from the Oxford Internet Institute.

“Investigating Health-Self Management among Immigrant College Students with Depression,” paper presentation by SILS grad Jordan Dodson (BSIS ’18) and other i3 program scholars.

“Understanding Change in a Dynamic Complex Digital Object: Reading Categories of Change out of Patch Notes Documents,” paper presentation by Ayse Gursoy, doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, Karem M. Wickett of University of Illinois, and SILS Associate Professor Melanie Feinberg.

“Algorithmic Management and Algorithmic Competencies: Understanding and Appropriating Algorithms in Gig work,” paper presentation by Associate Professor Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi and SILS graduate and current University of Washington PhD student Will Sutherland (MSIS ’17).

“Information Science Beyond the Information Age,” panel with ASIS&T Chair Elaine Toms, Lynn Silipigni Connaway at OCLC Research, Professor Javed Mostafa, and Diane Kelly from University of Tennessee.

“Lessons Learned from the Investigation of Academic WeChat Official Accounts,” poster presentation by SILS PhD candidate Shenmeng Xu and Associate Professor Bradley M. Hemminger.

“Unmapped Privacy Expectations in China: Discussion Based on the Proposed Social Credit System” paper presentation by SILS PhD student YuanYe Ma.

Continued on page 24

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INFORMATION SHARING CONTINUED 2019 ALISE Conference, Sept. 24-26, Knoxville, Tenn.

“Dark Arts: Artists’ Information Practices in the Care of Digital Artworks and Archives,” poster presentation by SILS PhD candidate Colin Post.

Nina Exner (PhD ’19) presented her poster, “Development of Research Competencies Among Academic Librarians,” and served on a panel titled “Innovative Pedagogies SIG: Exploring Innovative Pedagogies in a Global Information Context.”

“They Don’t Even See Us/I’m Afraid All the Time: Intersectional Approaches to Understanding Disability in LIS,” poster presentation by Assistant Professor Amelia Gibson and PhD student Kristen Bowen.

“Technologies in LIS Education: Developing LIS Curricula for Information Professionals in Library Makerspaces,” presentation by Assistant Professor Maggie Melo.

ASIS&T Annual Meeting, Oct. 19-23, Melbourne, Australia PhD candidate Megan Threats won the ASIS&T SIG HLTH student poster competition for her poster, “The Information Practices of HIV Positive Black Gay Men Post-Diagnosis.”

Leslie Thomson (PhD ’19), Amy Vanscoy (PhD ’12), Associate Professor at the University of Buffalo, and Jenna Hartel, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, received the 2019 Elfreda A. Chatman Research Award from ASIS&T SIG USE for their paper, “Information and the Lens of Leisure: Needs, Practices, and Resources Over the Serious Leisure Career.”

Professor Javed Mostafa presented a tutorial on developing successful publications for peer-reviewed forums and served on a panel about data science education.

Mostafa, SILS Assistant Professor Fei Yu, and UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media Associate Professor Laura Ruel presented a panel, “Innovative UX Methods for Information Access Based on Interdisciplinary Approaches: Practical Lessons From Academia and Industry.” Fei Yu also presented a poster, “Research on Voice Search Behavior in the Last 10 Years.”

Shenmeng Xu, doctoral candidate, organized a workshop, “Metrics 2019: Workshop on Informmetric and Scientometric Research,” and presented a paper, “Understanding the Peer Review Endeavor.”

PhD student Yuanye Ma presented two papers, “Lack of the Normative Lens: Discussions on Research on Micro-Targeted Ads Explanation of Facebook” and “Relational Privacy: Where the East and the West Could Meet.”

PhD student Kristen Bowen presented a poster, “Health Information at Intersections: Toward More Inclusive Personal Health Records for Marginalized Users.”

Yukun Yang, Master of Science in Information Science (MSIS) student, presented a paper “When Power Goes Wild Online: How Did a Voluntary Moderator’s Abuse of Power Affect an Online Community?”

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VACLab researchers Arlene Chung, Bryce Morrow, and David Gotz following Morrow’s presentation of their award-winning paper at IEEE VIS 2019.

VACLab wins best paper at IEEE VIS The Visual Analysis and Communication Laboratory (VACLab) team from UNC-Chapel Hill won the Best Short Paper Award at the IEEE VIS 2019 Conference in October.

SILS Associate Professor David Gotz leads the VACLab and co-authored the winning paper with Bryce Morrow, a master’s student from the UNC Computer Science department, Arlene E. Chung from the UNC School of Medicine, and Trevor Manz and Nils Gehlenborg from Harvard Medical School.

The paper, “Periphery Plots for Contextualizing Heterogeneous Time-Based Charts,” proposes a new approach for more effective data visualization in time-based charts. The periphery plot framework enables users to see how multiple categories of data change over time, and to see changes at multiple timescales.

VACLab researchers also presented two journal articles at the conference. Learn more about the VACLab at vaclab.web.unc.edu.

In addition to his roles with SILS and the VACLab, Gotz is Assistant Director of the Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP). He was recently appointed to the Editorial Board for the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) journal.

Mary Grace Flaherty talks health promotion with Public Libraries SILS Associate Professor Mary Grace Flaherty discusses some of the findings and recommendations in her book, Promoting Individual and Community Health at the Library (ALA Editions 2018), in the July/August edition of Public Libraries. Flaherty talks about the many ways that public libraries can assist patrons who want to improve their health or become more knowledgeable about medical conditions.

“While we’re not doctors, we are information providers,” Flaherty says. “Our patrons are looking for health information and visit libraries in search of reliable and authoritative resources.

While we can’t provide medical advice, we can easily steer folks to no-cost, credible consumer health resources.”

Flaherty’s book had previously received positive reviews in the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science and Medical Reference Services Quarterly, which highly recommends the book for “all academic, hospital, and public libraries that field healthrelated information requests and inquiries.”

UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS)

New leadership at EPA-RTP Library Anthony Holderied became Director of the Environmental Protection Agency Library in Research Triangle Park in August.

Holderied follows Susan Forbes, who joined the EPA-RTP Library in 2005 and became director in 2013. She accepted the role of Assistant State Librarian for North Carolina over the summer.

Holderied had been Assistant Director of the EPA-RTP Library since 2013. He Anthony Holderied has 14 years of professional librarian experience, and prior to joining the EPA-RTP Library, he was an Instructional Technology Specialist at NC State University. He holds an MLS from North Carolina Central University and an MA in Educational Media from Appalachian State University.

In November, Taylor Abernethy Johnson (MSLS ’16) became Assistant Director of the EPA-RTP Library, transitioning from her previous role as User Taylor Abernethy Johnson Services and Research Librarian.

University Librarian Elaine Westbrooks champions changes in academic publishing Elaine L. Westbrooks, Vice Provost for University Libraries and University Librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill, issued a statement on March 20 supporting the University of California (UC) system’s decision to cancel their $50 million subscription deal with publishing giant Elsevier. Read her statement at library.unc.edu/2019/03/statement-uc-elsevier.

In the fall, the University Libraries hosted a series of town hall meetings to gather input from faculty and students prior to contract renewal negotiations with Elsevier and other publishers.

“In an era of rising costs and declining revenues, the traditional model of academic publishing is unsustainable for universities,” Westbrooks said in a feature published by Carolina’s The Well on October 11. Read more about her concerns and plans at go.unc.edu/westbrooks-open-research.

Above, Mélina Mangal talks with students and faculty at the SILS Library. Right, the cover of Mangal’s picture book.

Mélina Mangal (MSLS ’94) visits SILS to share picture book biography Author, school librarian, and SILS alumna Mélina Mangal (MSLS ‘94) visited Chapel Hill in early April to share her new book, The Vast Wonder of the World: Biologist Ernest Everett Just.

She read and discussed the picture book biography at the SILS Library in Manning Hall on April 3.

Illustrated by Luisa Uribe, The Vast Wonder of the World tells the story of African-American scientist Ernest Everett Just, who overcame hardships and discrimination to become a successful professor, embryologist, and cytologist in the early 20th century.

Since its publication in the fall of 2018, the book has received favorable reviews from School Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews, which describes it as “More than a story of triumph against the odds, this book shows the necessity of opportunity for brilliant minds to reach their potential.” The book also received the 2019 Carter G. Woodson Book Award from the National Council for the Social Studies.

A Minneapolis Public Schools librarian, Mangal and her book were featured on KARE11, the NBC affiliate in Minneapolis, shortly before the book’s publication. Watch the interview at http://bit.ly/vast-wonders-interview and learn more about the author at www.melinamangal.com.

IN DEEPEST SYMPATHY SILS extends condolences to the family and friends of alumni who passed away during the previous year. The following were drawn from obituaries published from November 1, 2018. to November 1, 2019.

Joyce L. Croom – November 4, 2018 Kenneth C. Elmore – December 3, 2018 Abigail Lippincott – December 7, 2018 Joe A. Hewitt – December 19, 2018 Erik D. France – December 28, 2018 Carolyn L. Shelhorse – December 28, 2018 Patricia J. Powell – January 14, 2019

Emily M. Gerstbacher – March 1, 2019 Martha S. Evatt – March 31, 2019 Peggie C. Byars – April 23, 2019 T. J. Dickerson – April 25, 2019 Ann S. Smith – May 6, 2019 Margaret S. Atkins – May 16, 2019 Delia S. Stark – July 20, 2019

Gene D. Lanier – August 14, 2019 Mary A. Brown – August 21, 2019 Isaac I. Chao – August 27, 2019 Shirley M. Tarlton – September 9, 2019 Robert C. Russell – October 8, 2019 Jean L. Humber – October 20, 2019 The iSchool @Carolina

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ALUMNI ALUMNI NEWS NEWS Lisa Howorth (MSLS ’77) visited Chapel Hill to discuss her new book Summerlings with UNC History Professor & Grammy winner William Ferris at an event hosted

by Flyleaf Books in August. A Cold War coming-of-age story, Summerlings was named an Amazon Best of the Month pick.

Howorth lives in Oxford, Miss., where she and her husband, Richard, founded Square Books in 1979.

Don Welsh (MSLS ’80) has retired from the College of William and Mary after 28 years, having served as Head of the Research Department and Acting Associate Dean for Research and Public Services. He previously worked at Boston University, and he now lives in New York City.

Robert G. Anthony Jr. (MSLS ’82), Curator of the North Carolina Collection and Director of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center for University Libraries, received the C. Knox Massey Distinguished Service Awards from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019.

Anna Yount (MSLS ’86) retired in May from her position as Director of the Transylvania County Library in Brevard, N.C. In a profile by The Transylvania Times, Yount shared reflections on her career and the importance of libraries.

“It’s a place where people can have access to information and can convene, discuss, and learn about issues not only facing their communities, but the world,” Yount told the newspaper. “We are really the last civic place where people can come and nothing is expected of you. You don’t have to pay to get in the door, and you can learn anything you want to learn.” Read the profile at http://bit.ly/yount-profile.

Robert “Bob” Martin (PhD ’88), a SILS Distinguished Alumnus, was profiled as part of the University’s 225th anniversary retrospective series, which highlights Tar Heels who have made impact on campus, communities, the state, the nation, and the world. Read the feature at http://go.unc. edu/martin-225.

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Timothy Owens (MSLS ’92) was appointed State Librarian of North Carolina in January 2019. A native of Harbinger, N.C., Owens began his library career at Neuse Regional Library in Kinston, followed by service at Perkins Library at Duke University and in Library Development at the State Library of North Carolina.

He has served as President of the Association for Rural & Small Libraries. Before returning to North Carolina to become Assistant State Librarian in Timothy Owens 2017.

Miriam Intrator, PhD (MSLS ’03), authored a book, titled Books Across Borders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945-1951, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in the New Directions in Book History series over the summer. More at www.springer.com/us/ book/9783030158156.

David Singleton (MSLS ’92) has been appointed Executive Director of Live Oak Public Libraries, a system of 16 library locations serving a three-county region in southeast Georgia. Each year, the Library checks out almost 1.3 million items, answers in excess of 650,000 questions, registers more than 450,000 computer sessions, and presents programs to nearly 80,000 patrons.

Emily Weiss (MSLS ’05), Head of Reference Services at the Bedford (NH) Public Library, was elected Junior Director of the New England Library Association in fall 2018. This fall, she will become the Association’s Senior Director.

Donna Nixon (MSLS ’01) published “The Integration of UNC-Chapel Hill – Law School First,” in the North Carolina Law Review (https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/ nclr/vol97/iss6/6/). The article tells the story of the five African-American men who integrated the UNC-Chapel Hill student body and how their legal challenge to segregation at the University fit into a broader civil rights campaign that culminated in Brown vs. Board of Education. The article complements a Kathrine R. Everett Law Library digital collection that Nixon curated titled “Law School First – The African Americans Who Integrated UNC-Chapel Hill” (integration.law.unc.edu). The collection includes photographs, university correspondence, legal documents from the case, news articles, and links to audio and transcripts of oral history interviews at the Southern Oral History Program. Wilson Library’s many rich collections were instrumental in both endeavors.

Hannah Rains (MSIS ’01) is now Associate Director of Learning & Development at BD, a global medical technology company with over 65,000 associates. Rains has been with the company for 18 years.

UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS)

Jason Griffey (MSLS ’04) joined the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) as Director of Strategic Initiatives in June. Prior to this appointment, Griffey ran his own technology consulting company for libraries. He has been an affiliate at metaLAB and a fellow and affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Megan Oakleaf (PhD ’06), Associate Professor and Director of Instructional Quality at Syracuse University, won the 2019 Association of College and Research Libraries Instruction Section’s Miriam Dudley Award in recognition of her dedication to student learning, assessment strategies, and program development.

Anne Fleming Less (MSLS ’08) has been appointed Knowledge Manager at Google.

Kendra Allen (MSLS ’08) was promoted to Director of Library Media Services for the Wake County Public School System in September. Before the promotion, she had been WCPSS’ Coordinating Teacher for Secondary Libraries since February 2015.

Chirag Shah (PhD ’10) joined the University of Washington’s Information School as an associate professor and Amazon Scholar in 2019. He had previously been an associate professor and Director of the InfoSeeking Lab at Rutgers University. His work while at Rutgers generated funding from National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Institute of Museum and Library Services as well as Amazon, Google, and Yahoo. Read more about his research – and his competitive ballroom dancing – at https://ischool. uw.edu/news/2019/08/chirag-shah-joinsfaculty-focusing-fairness-systems.

Sofía Becerra-Licha (MSLS ’12) was appointed lead archivist at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. this spring. The Kennedy Center created the position to help organize and preserve its historical holdings in preparation for its 50th anniversary season in 2021-22. The disarray of its materials, as well as that of the National Theatre, are highlighted in a story

by The Washington Post (https://wapo. st/372jZpH). Prior to joining the Kennedy Center in April, Becerra-Licha had been Associate Director of Archives at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Though she’ll be facing a scenario that The Post reporter compares to the final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Becerra-Licha said she was looking forward to the new challenge.

Rebecca Carlson (MSLS ’12) became Health Sciences Librarian and Liaison to the Eshelman School of Pharmacy for the Health Sciences Library at UNC-Chapel Hill, effective May 13.

Sarah Joy Arnold (MSLS ’13) is now a Digital Accessibility Consultant with UNC-Chapel Hill’s new Digital Accessibility Office.

Courtney Bailey (MSLS ‘13) is serving as the Chair of the Society of American Archivists Records Management Section, May 2019-August 2020.

Megan England (MSLS ’13) has been promoted to Branch Manager of the Scottsville branch of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library. Previously, England was the YA Librarian at the Crozet Branch.

Anagha Hanumante (BSIS ’14), Senior Intelligence Analyst at CB Insights, delivered a presentation about the future of wellness at CB Insights’ TRANSFORM conference in Dec. 2018. Watch her talk on YouTube at http://bit.ly/next-in-wellness.

Liz Bellamy (MSLS ’15) and three collaborators received the 2019 Academic Innovator Award from the Virginia Library Association. The VLA recognized the team for their initiative to re-envision and renovate an information literacy center in Radford University’s McConnell Library through the Active Learning Center (ALC) Steelcase Grant program. With $67,000 in grant funding, they were able to transform a traditional classroom into a beautiful and flexible new space for collaboration

Wei Gao (MSIS ’01), VP at Amazon, named one of National Diversity Council’s Top 50 Women in Tech Wei Gao (MSIS ’01), SILS alumna and Vice President, Technical Advisor to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, was named one of the Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology by the National Diversity Council.

The list features executive female leaders in the technology industry who drive change, innovate, and inspire others to succeed while contributing to business growth. The 2019 honorees were recognized at the 15th Annual Diversity and Leadership Conference on April 11 in Dallas.

In September, Gao was honored at the Asian American Luminary Awards (AALA) ceremony on in Bellevue, Wash. Organized by the Chinese Institute of Engineers/ USA-Seattle (CIE-SEA), the annual event celebrates outstanding Asian American professionals and leaders with high achievements and contributions in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) within the Pacific Northwest.

Gao received the 2019 Asian American Corporate Leadership Award. A strong advocate of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, Gao serves as an executive board member of the Asians-at-Amazon affinity group. She also serves on the board of the Robert Chinn Foundation, the SILS Board of Visitors, and the Pacific Science Center.

in learning. An instruction and research librarian, Bellamy was at Radford during the project but has since joined William & Mary Libraries.

Kai Ewing (MSLS ’15) had their first chapter in a monograph published on May 1. “Beyond Dewey: Creating an LGBTQ+ Classification System at the LGBTQ Center of Durham” appears in LGBTQ Librarianship in the 21st Century: Emerging Directions of Advocacy and Community Engagement in Diverse Information Environments, edited by Bharat Mehra and published by Emerald Group Publishing.

Ebony McDonald (MSLS ’15) joined the Louisiana State University Libraries faculty in January as African and African American Studies Librarian. The appointment is part of LSU Libraries’ participation in the ACRL Diversity Alliance residency program. In October, McDonald was awarded the Outstanding Early Career Librarian Award at the 2019 LOUIS Users Conference. Prior to joining the LSU

Wei Gao

Gao was promoted to her VP Technical Advisor role in November 2018. Executives in the position are often referred to as Bezos’ “shadow” because they accompany him to all meetings, ac-cording to a report from CNBC. In her 13-plus years at Amazon, Gao has launched products and run projects in eCommerce, Kindle, and Supply Chain technologies. Before her 2018 promotion, she led the Forecasting and Strategic Planning organization, a team that provides customer-demand forecasts and long-term business outlooks for Amazon’s consumer business worldwide. Her technical expertise spans artificial intelligence, deep learning, big-data analytics, and cloud computing.

faculty, McDonald was the Research & Learning Librarian at Salem Academy & College in N.C., where she received the Student Government Association’s Most Outstanding Faculty & Staff Award in 2018.

Julie Stivers (MSLS ’15) has been named a 2019 “Mover & Shaker” by Library Journal for her efforts to increase equity and inclusion at the Mt Vernon Middle School Library and beyond with the #LibFive program and #TrueBookFAIRS. Read the full LJ profile at http://bit.ly/lj-stivers and read Stivers’ YALSA blog post about the five key foundations for building inclusive libraries at http://bit.ly/yalsa-lib-five.

Danielle Thornton (MSLS ’15), Branch Manager for the Greenville County (S.C.) Library System, received the 2018 South Carolina Library Association New Professional Award, which recognizes librarians making significant contributions to their field early in their career.

Continued on page 28 The iSchool @Carolina

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Latia Ward (MSLS ’15) spoke at CALIcon 19, the annual conference hosted by the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, in June. Ward is a Research Services Librarian and Diversity Fellow at Cornell University Law Library. Her talks, “What Can Librarians Do to Faciliate Access to Justice?” and “Backwards Design: Assessment, Alignment, Quality Matters, and Online Learning Consortium” are available on YouTube.

In September, she was interviewed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions about her work with GOALI - Global Online Access to Legal Information. Read the Q& A at https://www.ifla.org/node/92562.

Spencer Bevis (MSLS ’19) joined the UNC-Chapel Hill University Libraries as a Project Librar-ian, effective Oct. 7. He will oversee day-to-day operations of the North Carolina Historic Newspapers project, a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded effort to provide scanned pages of significant North Carolina newspapers to Chronicling America. Prior to this ap-pointment, Bevis was digitization specialist at Duke University Libraries.

Christina Cortland (MSIS ’19) became a Library Software Applications Developer at UNC-Chapel Hill University Libraries, effective July 15. Cortland will design, implement, and support software projects, evaluate new technologies and services, and support the University Libraries’ online services and collections. Before this appointment, she worked as a Carolina Academic Library Associate (CALA) and had previously worked as a software engineer at Indiegogo in San Francisco.

Hongyi Dong (MSIS ’19) started a new position in September as a UX Engineer in a data analytics consulting firm called Evalueserve based in Raleigh, N.C. Caleece Nash (BSIS ’19) was interviewed

by WIRED magazine for a story on digital nomads published in July. Read the article at http://bit.ly/wired-nomads. Nash graduated with highest honors from SILS for her undergraduate theses, “Is Mobile Work Really Location-Independent? The Role of Space in the Work of Digital Nomads,” advised by SILS Associate Professor Mohammad Jarrahi. Nash is currently a Cyber Security Analyst at Broadridge.

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Alex Trebek and Emma Boettcher (MSIS ’16) on the set of “Jeopardy!” in March.

SILS alumna Emma Boettcher (MSIS ’16) makes headlines with ‘Jeopardy!’ triumph Emma Boettcher (MSIS ’16), an alumna of the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), became a media sensation in early June after her defeat of “Jeopardy!” phenomenon James Holzhauer. Before Boettcher’s debut, Holzhauer had enjoyed a 32-game winning streak and amassed $2.46 million, putting him within striking distance of Ken Jennings’ all-time record of $2.52 million. Boettcher won their match-up by betting big on a Double Jeopardy question and in the Final Jeopardy round.

Boettcher, a UX Librarian at the University of Chicago and long-time “Jeopardy!” fan, had focused her SILS master’s paper on determining the difficulty of “Jeopardy!” questions using textual features.

“Because I was planning to go into UX after graduation, my first thought was to do a UX-related master’s paper,” Boettcher told American Libraries.

“But at the same time I was developing a proposal for that topic, I was also completing my final project for a textmining class, and I realized I wanted to take that work a little further. What I loved about using the ‘Jeopardy!’ clues as a dataset was that it was measuring in part the cognitive effort required to process text, which is an important concept in UX as well.”

She included nearly 22,000 different “Jeopardy!” clues in the analysis. Her

research proposal received the SILS Elfreda Chatman Research Award, and her resulting paper, “Predicting the Difficulty of Trivia Questions Using Text Features” won the Dean’s Achievement Award for best master’s paper at her graduation from SILS in 2016.

The narrative of a librarian unseating Holzhauer, a professional gambler, captured the attention of dozens of national media outlets, including the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News, and TIME.com.

Boettcher, who “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek nicknamed the Giant Killer, won two more games after her victory over Holzhauer, earning a total of $97,002.

Boettcher and Holzhauer faced off for a second time in November during the show’s Tournament of Champions.

Boettcher scored victories in the first two rounds of the tournament, but lost the first of two games in the final round to Holzhauer. Though she won the second game, Holzhauer’s overall winnings exceeded hers, giving him the championship title. Coming in second, however, snagged Boettcher another $100,000.

While members of the SILS community were thrilled by Boettcher’s wins, they weren’t surprised that a SILS grad excelled on “Jeopardy!”. The School has seen several alumni compete and win on the show over the years, including Margaret Miles (MSLS ’83), whose banter with Trebek went viral in 2016.

Photo courtesy of Jeopardy Productions, Inc.

ALUMNI NEWS

SILS PROFESSOR PAUL JONES:

“The Science Behind the ‘Jeopardy!’ Giant Killer” Emma Boettcher is a user experience librarian who won at “Jeopardy!” ending the rich run of James Holzhauer.

(Google, or Siri, or Alexa): “What is a user experience librarian?”

Just answering this question can be a challenge to a machine – and to a human.

But this question is exactly what we ask at the UNC School of Information and Library Science – along with: “What is the question?” and “What is a question?”

What do we do at our school? We used to teach people how to use technology.

Now we teach technology how to use people.

It sounds like a joke and in a way it is. But more and more the essence of our interactions with technologies is through natural language, speaking to our devices.

They are expected to understand our accents, our pauses and our phrasings. But more so, as we interact with them, we are training them how to understand us – and we are being trained how to ask questions effectively to those devices.

That interaction between computers and people is called in our school and in jobs “User Experience” – “UX,” or “Human Computer Interaction” – “HCI.” It has become more important in our daily lives as the ways of working with complex data improve, and as masses of data are collected. And as computers and phones increase in speed of processing and accessing it all.

Speed, code, big data, and personalization have made the field of Information Science more urgent and meaningful than ever before. We expect answers from our phones in less time than it takes to hit the “Jeopardy!” buzzer. We want our machines to anticipate our questions and have answers ready instantly and clearly.

Research and work in UX are essential to provide such fast, effective responses.

We depend on it for success in health care, business, education – in all parts of our daily lives.

When Emma Boettcher proposed to work on “Jeopardy!” answers to her advisor, Dr. Stephanie Haas, Haas was intrigued. What a great dataset to work with. What nuances. And questions and answers already rated and weighted.

A wonderful proposal for Information Science research.

Boettcher’s research proposal received the school’s Elfreda Chatman Research Award in 2015. Her resulting paper, “Predicting the Difficulty of Trivia Questions Using Text Features” won the Dean’s Award for best master’s paper at her graduation from UNC SILS in 2016. She continues to use what she learned from her classes and research in her job – and in winning ‘Jeopardy!”

But her research has further impact.

We need to understand how tricky and even deceptive phrasing of a question or an answer can mislead us and mislead our friendly devices. We need to be better at analyzing what we are being asked and what we’re being told.

Whether applied to a message on Twitter from a Russian bot or from Siri/ Alexa/Google, Boettcher’s work helps us move closer to better and better answers.

So, back to our original question.

What is a user experience librarian?

A “librarian,” as Parker Posey learned in the movie Party Girl, is someone who completes a master’s degree program accredited by the American Library Association (ALA), such as UNC SILS. Working in UX means improving the interface between humans and devices.

(UNC SILS is the only school in North Carolina offering an ALA accredited degree in Information Science and the only school in North Carolina that is part of the global iSchool consortium).

Someone with a master’s degree in Information Science need not work in a library, but they may. They also may work at Google, Instagram, GE, MetLife, government, and small startups. Even at Duke University.

Our relationships with our smart devices are still developing and maturing.

We have a long and interesting way to go.

Language was our first link to other intelligences, then books, then the internet.

Now it is with our machines in their own extended data rich network. Each becomes a more intimate yet unique conversation.

We need more user experience experts – librarians and others – like Boettcher to help us grow in our relationships with information and our devices.

Congratulations, Emma!

Paul Jones

“What do we do at our school?

We used to teach people how to use technology. Now we teach technology how to use people. It sounds like a joke and in a way it is. But more and more the essence of our interactions with technologies is through natural language, speaking to our devices.”

SILS Professor Paul Jones

This column originally appeared as a Capitol Broadcasting Company, Inc., op-ed on June 9.

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SILS Development Leadership Transitions Anne Webb, former Assistant Dean of Advancement at the UNC School of Nursing, joined the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) in August as the School’s first Deputy Director of Development. She has been working in close partnership with Director of Development Stephanie Kretz, who will retire in December.

Webb is a Carolina alumna (BA ’94) and holds a Master of Public Administration from UNC-Greensboro. During her time with Nursing, she secured more than $30 Million in private resources for the School and built relationships that will sustain the organization’s future for years to come.

At SILS, she will focus on major gift solicitation, alumni relations, stewardship, board management, special events, and annual giving.

“Anne is an excellent fit for the SILS environment and culture – where we are today and how we will grow,” Dean Gary Marchionini said in an email to the SILS community.

Kretz has led SILS’ development efforts since 2010. Marchionini credits her with establishing and executing a long-term fundraising strategy for SILS that was more comprehensive and effective than any previous effort. She negotiated new roles for SILS Board of Visitors members, helped establish new advisory groups such as the SILS Alumni Inclusion and Diversity (SAID) and Information Trends Advisory Roundtable (ITAR), and secured several major gifts for SILS, including the first named deanship at Carolina.

“Through her energy, enthusiasm, and professionalism, SILS exceeded its Campaign for Carolina goal three years ahead of schedule,” Marchionini said.

“Stephanie is a consummate development professional and is leaving an exceptionally strong legacy at SILS. This School will long benefit from the foundational work that she has done over the last 10 years.”

In November, SILS launched a search for an Associate Dean for Development with plans to conduct interviews and select a canidate by January.

SILS Development Director Stephanie Kretz will retire in December.

Anne Webb joined SILS as the first Deputy Director of Development in August.

SILS welcomes new foundation partnerships Support from three philanthropic foundations enabled Carolina to launch its new Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (see story pages 20). The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation made a $5 million committment as part of a broader initiative to invest nearly $50 million for research around technology’s impact on democracy.

An additional $750,000 contribution from Luminate and $600,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will expand the center’s impact.

SILS was honored to work with these organizations to advance this important work and looks forward to future collaborations:

John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation is a national foundation with strong local roots. We invest in journalism, in the arts, and in the success of cities where brothers John S. and James L. Knight once published newspapers. Our goal is to foster informed and engaged communities, which we believe are essential for a healthy democracy. For more, visit kf.org.

Luminate

Luminate is a global philanthropic organisation focused on empowering people and institutions to work together to build just and fair societies. We support innovative and courageous organisations and entrepreneurs around the world, and we advocate for the policies and actions that will drive change across four impact areas: Civic Empowerment, Data & Digital Rights, Financial Transparency, and Independent Media. Luminate was established in 2018 by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and his wife Pam. For more, visit luminategroup.com.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is a nonpartisan, private charitable foundation. For more than 50 years, the foundation has supported efforts to advance education for all, preserve the environment, improve lives and livelihoods in developing countries, promote the health and economic well-being of women, support vibrant performing arts, strengthen Bay Area communities, and make the philanthropy sector more effective. For more, visit hewlett.org.

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UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS)

SILS reaches 150% of its 2019 #GiveUNC goal In its first year of participation, the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) blew past its goal of 40 donors during the #GiveUNC event on April 9. More than 60 SILS alumni and friends contributed, unlocking an $8,000 challenge gift to bring the grand total for the day to $22,730.

SILS efforts got a boost from alumni and current students who helped promote #GiveUNC on social media and in person around campus. Thanks to everyone who made this day such a huge success!

The next #GiveUNC event is set for March 31, 2020. Look for more information in the spring.

Snow family bequest will benefit SILS, UNC Libraries, and the Rams Club For All Kind: the Campaign for Carolina is the fifth fundraising campaign Claude Henry Snow Jr. ’76, ’78 (MA) and Sarah Turnbull Snow ’04 (MSIS) have contributed to in support of their alma mater — this time, in the form of a bequest.

“We’ve given as we are able through all four previous campaigns, and now this one,” noted Claude. “In one sense, that should probably demonstrate our love for Carolina, and it also shows we’re experienced givers,” he added, laughing.

The Snows love Carolina — so much that they moved from Atlanta, Georgia, to Chapel Hill to be closer to their alma mater, reinforcing their commitment to the University they hold dear. In addition to supporting five consecutive fundraising campaigns, the Snows have served on more than a dozen University boards and committees over the years.

“We were coming here four to five times a year, not counting football and basketball,” shared Sarah. “We kind of laughed and said, ‘Why are we doing this?

Let’s just move to Chapel Hill.’ And here we are.”

Twenty years later, they’re still here in Chapel Hill, supporting Carolina.

Widespread Funding

The Snows’ planned gift, totaling more than $2.6 million, is allocated to three entities on campus: University Libraries, the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and the Rams Club.

The Snows have given to the libraries in all five campaigns. Their most recent planned gift supports the Southern Historical Collection at the Wilson Special Collections Library. Claude was a workstudy student for the libraries in this collection throughout his four years as an undergraduate at Carolina.

“The library touches the entire campus, and it impacts both undergraduate and graduate students,” Sarah said. “You cannot be a student at Carolina and not, at some point, have an interaction with the library.”

Their gift to UNC Libraries allows for much flexibility for future leaders, highlighting the Snows’ trust in Carolina.

The Snows gift to SILS supports the undergraduate curriculum and was made in memory of William S. “Bill” Powell and his wife, Virginia, both MSLS. graduates of SILS. The late Bill Powell was a mentor of Claude’s, directing part of his undergraduate honors curriculum as well as his master’s thesis. Virginia has been a close friend of the Snows for decades.

The gift to SILS also reflects Sarah’s personal experience as a student in the graduate program. After moving to Chapel Hill, she was looking to do consultant work and wanted to stay relevant in her field. SILS was the best match for her skillset.

“I was, truly, a non-traditional student,” she laughed. “I was the oldest student walking the halls in Manning and I knew that. I had a great experience.”

The Snows feel strongly about the importance of supporting athletics, even though they weren’t, technically, student-athletes themselves — Claude played club rugby, and Sarah proudly wears the moniker of “the token nerd” on the Rams Club Advisory Board. Their gift to the Rams Club is intended to support women’s Olympic sports.

“People forget that there are athletes on our campus — notably female athletes — who don’t necessarily go on to play professional sports,” Sarah said. “Their athletic ability allows them to have an almost debtfree college experience, and we believe in supporting that kind of initiative.”

Lifelong Learners

The Snows recognize the importance of supporting Carolina, in part, because of how their liberal arts education and graduate student experience have positively impacted their lives and careers. Sarah and Claude both started their careers in network computing and communications.

“Having a background in liberal arts gave us the ability to constantly learn and to continually want to learn,” explained Sarah, whose work in the technology field required constant effort to keep up or risk being obsolete.

Ultimately, Claude took a different path when he joined Deloitte & Touche. He said his graduate studies helped him become a successful management consultant.

“Across my life, it’s made me a better strategist and operations analyst. I was going into troubled companies, re-strategizing particular areas and creating new operating models. I was almost always successful, and I credit that to really honing my analytic and strategic thinking skills while in graduate school.”

Nowadays, when the Snows aren’t volunteering as board members or serving on committees, they spend their time reading, traveling and playing with their three grandchildren.

“While we are blessed, the idea of a planned gift appealed to us,” said Sarah.

“We can delay the monetary outlay until we are no longer around, and our bequest will benefit others going forward.”

“Carolina has a special meaning to us because we believe in many of the things the University has come to stand for and the good works that it does,” added Claude.

Story by Angela Harwood, University Development Office The iSchool @Carolina

Fall 2019

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The School of Information and Library Science The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill CB# 3360, 100 Manning Hall Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360

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Amplifying voices that were silenced The Coalition of Youth Librarians (COYL) and UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) hosted the annual Banned Books Reading on Sept. 24.

SILS master’s students were joined by SILS Professor Brian Sturm and Wilson Library Director Maria Estorino to share passages from books that have been challenged or banned in the United States.

To increase visibility, organizers staged the event in the Davis Library Courtyard and readers used a small PA to amplify their voices. The reading is held in conjunction with Carolina’s First Amendment Day celebration, sponsored by the UNC Center for Media and Law Policy and scheduled to coincide National Banned Books Week

#BannedBooksWeek

Above: Brian Sturm shares poems from A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein. Below, right: COYL President Kat Zimmerman reads The Lorax by Dr. Seuss. Below, left: Maria Estorino reads from Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas