Betsy Wilson named winner of Atkinson Memorial Award

[image1-right]Alumna Lizabeth (Betsy) A. Wilson (MS ’78) has been named the winner of the 2013 Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award. The award, jointly sponsored by four divisions of the American Library Association, recognizes an academic librarian who has worked in library automation or management for his or her significant accomplishments towards improving library services or research.

Wilson serves as the dean of university libraries at the University of Washington. Larry P. Alford, committee chair for the Atkinson Award, writes of her nomination:

"Her colleagues use phrases such as 'adroitness in moving organizations forward,' 'personal warmth,' 'a strong sense of integrity' and 'ability to focus on what is truly important,' and note her knowledge that 'understanding and valuing individuals is the key to organizational improvement and survival' in describing her leadership. It was clear to the committee that over her career Dean Wilson has nurtured and inspired her colleagues and fostered innovation to strengthen the ability of the libraries she has personally led as well as libraries across the world to serve better users of libraries."

Wilson will be recognized during the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago this summer.

Research Areas:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Ochs and Fiedler featured in "Can’t Shelve This" podcast

School Librarian Licensure Coordinator Lauren Ochs and recent graduate Hannah Fiedler (MSLIS '24) are featured in episode six of "Can’t Shelve This," a podcast produced by Reaching Across Illinois Library System (RAILS) in collaboration with Illinois Heartland Library System (IHLS). 

Lauren Ochs

Faculty receive support for AI-related projects from new pilot program

Associate Professor Yun Huang, Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma, and Assistant Professor Haohan Wang have received computing resources from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a two-year pilot program led by the National Science Foundation in partnership with other federal agencies and nongovernmental partners. The goal of the pilot is to support AI-related research with particular emphasis on societal challenges. Last month, awardees presented their research at the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting.

Winning exhibits highlight evolution of music media and Uni High magazine

MSLIS students Monica Gil, Holly Bleeden, and Harrison Price were selected as winners of this year's Graduate Student Exhibit Contest, sponsored by the University of Illinois Library. Gil and Bleeden won first place for their exhibit, "Echoes of Time: The Evolution of Music Media," and Price won second place for his exhibit, "Unique-ly Illinois: Creative Writing from High School to Higher Education." The exhibits will be on display in the Marshall Gallery in the library through the end of March.

MSLIS students Monica Gil and Holly Bleeden standing next to their exhibit, "Echoes of Time: The Evolution of Music Media," at the Main Library.

Wei receives Amazon Post Internship Fellowship

PhD student Tianxin Wei has been awarded an Amazon Post Internship Fellowship, which will provide $20,000 in unrestricted funds and $20,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to support Wei's research with his advisor, Professor Jingrui He. For the past two summers, Wei has served as an applied scientist intern at Amazon in Palo Alto, California. He has been part of a team that is working on search query understanding within Amazon apps and services, as well as developing shopping foundation models.

Tianxin Wei

Youth-AI-Safety named a winning team in international hackathon

A team of researchers from the SALT (Social Computing Systems) Lab has been selected as a winner in an international hackathon hosted by the Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence. The LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon brought together over 3,000 students, researchers, and practitioners from 127 countries to build and showcase innovative work in large language model (LLM) agents, grow the AI agent community, and advance LLM agent technology.