Each year, GSLIS recognizes a group of outstanding students for their achievement in academics as well as a number of attributes that contribute to professional success. The following student awards were presented at the GSLIS Convocation on May 17, 2015.
Bryce Allen Award for Reference Services
Presented to Victoria L. Volckman by Professor and Associate Dean Linda Smith:
Victoria L. Volckmann distinguished herself as a top reference librarian for the Illinois Fire Service Institute Library (IFSI) during her time in the master’s program. She has worked tirelessly to ensure that Illinois firefighters receive the reference materials they need to serve the public. She provides excellent remote reference services to firefighters who might never get the chance to visit the IFSI Library in Champaign. She has made additional contributions as a practicum student and volunteer in the Adult Services department at the Champaign Public Library. Victoria has great promise for a career in reference services.
Berner-Nash Memorial Award
Presented to ShinJoung Yeo by Professor Emeritus Dan Schiller:
Drawing on a rich array of sources, “Behind the Search Box: The Political Economy of a Global Internet Industry” situates search engines within a wider field of Internet businesses; explains how search evolved into its present form; clarifies its labor-management relations through reference to the historical context of ‘welfare capitalism’; and explicates the geopolitical contests that are unfolding around the search industry internationally. In this dissertation, ShinJoung Yeo makes an exceptional contribution to scholarship.
Anne M. Boyd Award/Beta Phi Mu
Presented to Anna Trammell by Professor and Associate Dean Linda Smith:
Throughout her two years in the master’s program, Anna Trammell has distinguished herself not only through her outstanding performance as a student, but also through her leadership in GSLIS as an officer in the Society of American Archivists Student Chapter and MS student representative to the GSLIS Curriculum Committee and through her many contributions to the work of various units of the University Library. Highlights include her planning and coordination of the Town & Gown Speaker Series of the University of Illinois Archives and the Champaign County Historical Archives, her award-winning library exhibit titled “Assemble: A History of Student Protests at the University of Illinois, 1947-present,” and her contributions to the processing of the Gwendolyn Brooks Papers and participation in public programs at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In recognition of her many accomplishments, Anna Trammell richly deserves the Anne M. Boyd Award.
Edith Harris Camp Award
Presented to Ann Matsushima Chiu by Associate Professor Carol Tilley and Professor and Associate Dean Linda Smith:
Ann Matsushima Chiu has found a way to combine her talents as artist, writer, zinester, and crafter with archival studies and librarianship. Her research revolves around women of color and zines/self-publishing culture. As the coeditor and co-publisher of Eyeball Burp Press, she is involved with the Portland, Oregon underground comics and art scene. Additionally, Ann is working with other librarians of color on a new ’zine project, LIS Microaggressions. Ann Matsushima Chiu’s work will continue to be characterized by passion and creativity as she pursues the next stage of her career in libraries.
Jane B. and Robert B. Downs Professional Promise Award
Presented to Hanna Reside by K-12 Program Coordinator Georgeann Burch:
What does it take to demonstrate “professional promise” for a career in school librarianship? In order to create a dynamic learning environment that meets the needs of students and staff, we look for librarians with initiative, leadership, dedication, intelligence, and people skills. While at GSLIS, Hanna Reside has successfully developed the knowledge, skills and disposition required of today’s twenty-first century school librarian. Through her coursework and graduate assistant responsibilities, she has shown the flexibility and positive problem-solving attitude that will have a strong positive impact on students, teachers, and staff and result in her future success not only as a school librarian, but also as a school leader.
Entrepreneurial Promise Awards
Presented to Andrea Theresa Gannon by Professor Michael Twidale:
Andrea has seized the opportunities offered by GSLIS to put together a powerful and rare combination of skills. Although having little prior experience in User Experience design, she embraced it, focusing on the challenges of empathic design. She added considerable skills of corporate intelligence, team leadership, and project management. This enabled her to lead a student team of diverse skills and academic backgrounds to develop an improved design for an insulin pump that better fits into the lives of people with diabetes.
Presented to Christopher Robertson Nixon by Professor Michael Twidale:
Chris combines the skills of ethnographic inquiry, design thinking and innovative prototyping, testing and development. This has allowed him to undertake a number of projects while at GSLIS that explore how we can take advantage of new opportunities such as lower-cost components to develop new technologies to meet needs and uses. This is a classic entrepreneurial approach that can be of great benefit in both the commercial and nonprofit sectors.
Faculty Special Award of Merit
Presented to Sarah Crissinger, Nicole Helregel, Alice Logue Mitchell, Kate Rojas, Madison Elizabeth Sullivan, Svetlozara Stoytcheva, and Jamie Viva Wittenberg by Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre, Professor and Associate Dean Linda Smith, Associate Professor Carol Tilley, and Associate Professor and Assistant Dean Kate McDowell:
The planning committee for the student-led LIS Education Symposium held at GSLIS on April 10-11, 2015, created a well-organized and implemented event that embodies the axiom “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Sarah Crissinger, Nicole Helregel, Alice Logue Mitchell, Kate Rojas, Madison Elizabeth Sullivan, Svetlozara Stoytcheva, and Jamie Viva Wittenberg each have demonstrated deep passion for LIS. Additional activities include regular participation in the biweekly #critlib chats on Twitter and continuing involvement in the GSLIS community through their participation in various student groups. Sarah, Sveta and Madison provided instrumental leadership in organizing last fall’s Forum on Academic Freedom, Intellectual Freedom, and Salaita. The faculty at GSLIS is consistently impressed with their dedication to the GSLIS community, their active engagement with the profession, and the breadth and depth of the experiences each of these students sought during their time at GSLIS. For their passions, dedication and leadership, we are proud to grant these students the Faculty Special Award of Merit.
Herbert Goldhor Award for Public Librarianship
Presented to Kim Elizabeth Naples by Senior Research Scientist Martin Wolske:
Through Kim’s work at The Urbana Free Library as part of the Digital Literacy for ALL Learners project, she has honed a keen interest in informal learning spaces and teen programming at public libraries. Quoting Kim from a panel about the project at the Public Engagement Colloquium on which she participated last November: “I will go into the ‘real world’ not knowing everything about librarianship. But this space has taught me that not knowing everything is OK and in fact, a good thing. Being comfortable with saying ‘I don’t know’ has allowed me to look to the teens for knowledge, which is empowering for them. And if they don’t know either, then we figure it out together.”
Peggy Harris Award
Presented to Kate Rojas by Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke and Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre:
Many people have remarked how positive, proactive, and proficient Kate Rojas is during interactions with faculty, staff, and students in her role as a Help Desk GA/LEEP TA. Kate always greets you with proficiency and a smile. She demonstrates care for those she assists, consistently offering additional help and going the extra mile to make sure things are in good working order so that everyone has a good experience with technology. Her instructors note how she has excelled at her studies in her steadfast and serious way. Kate definitely exemplifies a spirit of concern for others and for the welfare of the School. She enriches and makes our GSLIS community a better place, every day.
Health Sciences Information Management Award
Presented to Sneha Agarwal by Assistant Professors Vetle Torvik and Jana Diesner:
As a master’s student in the Bioinformatics program, Sneha Agarwal has made outstanding contributions to research in health sciences at GSLIS. She brought technical and substantive expertise to this area, which she expanded to include advanced data mining, machine learning, and text analysis projects in the domain of health analytics. Her work contributed to several projects, including bibliometrics of biomedical literature for an NIH-funded grant as well as sentiment analysis for health-related social movements.
Information Systems/Technologies Award
Presented to Sophie Wen-Ling Young by Research Associate Professor Jon Gant and Associate Professor Catherin Blake:
The GSLIS faculty is very proud to select Sophie Wen-Ling Young for the Information Systems and Technologies Award, which recognizes a GSLIS student for significant achievement in information systems. Sophie completed the Socio-technical Data Analytics specialization, and she embodies an enthusiasm and rigor that combine to achieve truly purposeful learning in data analytics. Excelling in courses such as data mining, social network analysis, and evidence based discovery, Sophie demonstrates, through her course projects and an internship with the Department of Commerce, technical leadership skills to help organizations efficiently navigate a large space of candidate technologies in an ethical manner to select the set that together address a specific need. This computational thinking will enable her to thrive in a world where our only guarantee is that technologies will change.
Frances B. Jenkins Award
Presented to Aleshia Huber by Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre and Professor and Associate Dean Linda Smith:
From her first term at GSLIS, Aleshia Huber continued to hone the expertise stemming from her Bachelor of Science in Chemistry degree with a minor in Informatics. Her final project in LIS 501, a Lib-Guide about Data Management Plans, provided an exemplary resource for those in need of a central storehouse of information. In addition to her coursework, Aleshia has gained experience as a graduate assistant at Grainger Engineering Library. She is well prepared to pursue her ideal job as a physical sciences or chemistry librarian.
Library School Alumni Association Award
Presented to Kristin D. Petersheim by Professor and Associate Dean Linda Smith:
As Assistant Librarian at Evangelical Seminary of Southern Africa and an archiving assistant for Pietermaritzburg Agency for Community Social Action prior to beginning her master’s program, Kristin D. Petersheim “caught the spirit” of library and archival work. While a master’s student, she gained additional experience in her assistantships with both the Illinois Fire Service Institute Library and the Asian Educational Media Service. In her final semester in her role as research coordinator for Business Intelligence Group, she has coordinated the work of other students developing their business research expertise while supporting two student consulting firms on campus. Kristin Petersheim is well prepared to pursue a career that includes helping others “catch the spirit.”
Alice Lohrer Award for Literature and Library Services for Youth
Presented to Amy Broadmoore by Associate Professor Carol Tilley:
Amy came to GSLIS having worked in the sciences and with an earned JD — not the typical profile of someone who becomes a youth services librarian. Motivated by a growing interest in serving young people, Amy has applied the precision and thoughtfulness from her education in science and law to her more recent passion of providing young people with all kinds of literature that meets their social, intellectual, and emotional needs, and fuels their imaginations. Through her work in classes such as Youth Services Librarianship and Comics Reader’s Advisory as well as through her blog, Delightful Children’s Books, and her volunteer work in an elementary school library, Amy has demonstrated that she has knowledge, ideas, and enthusiasm to offer kids, their parents, and their teachers in whatever library is fortunate enough to claim her.
Hazel C. Rediger Award
Presented to Svetlozara Stoytcheva by Associate Professor Catherine Blake:
Sveta has a remarkable ability to transform a set of highly unstructured general interests into a well-formed research question. The research question she formed demonstrated a level of critical thinking that you would expect from a well-seasoned researcher, so it was no surprise that her work was welcomed at the ASIS&T conference. Sveta embodies an enthusiastic intellectual questioning and a commitment to libraries as institutions that is sure to serve her well in her future career and makes her well deserving of the Hazel C. Rediger Award.
Joseph Rediger Librarian as Humanist Awards
Presented to Brian Sol Davidson by Associate Professor Bonnie Mak:
We recognize Brian Sol Davidson with the Joseph Rediger Librarian as Humanist Award for his commitment to scholarly explorations of the past, present, and future of the book. Brian’s paper, “Leaves of Glass: Shattered Books and their Reflections,” examined the different strategies used by libraries to represent Otto Ege’s portfolio books of the early twentieth century, and how these techniques are shaping the readerly reception of the materials today. His paper was awarded the T.W. Baldwin Prize by the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois in 2013. Also keenly interested in new trends in the profession, Brian focuses much-needed critical attention on digital initiatives that purport to serve bibliographical study and historicizes the changing functions of the library for the twenty-first century and beyond. He is also commended for his notable outreach activities that helped raise the profile of the librarian-as-scholar — as not only an assistant at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library but also as a contestant on the nationally broadcasted television show, “King of the Nerds.”
Presented to Jamie Viva Wittenberg by Professor and Associate Dean Linda Smith:
Jamie Viva Wittenberg began her master’s program with a bachelor of arts in literary studies, including a year of study at Oxford University, and a Master of British Studies from Humboldt University in Berlin. While in GSLIS, she has pursued her interests in the digitization of cultural heritage institutions, user experience and usability assessment, and international libraries through such activities as an internship project related to research objects within the Oxford e-Research Centre, a practicum project on designing disaster recovery for digital collections, and collaboration on the Illinois Distributed Museum Project focused on engineering and technology innovations at the University of Illinois. All of these activities are enriched through Jamie Wittenberg’s perspectives as a humanist.
Social Justice Award
Presented to Heidi R. Johnson by Assistant Professor Nicole Cooke and Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre:
Heidi may have begun her studies with some trepidation, but she has captured the spirit of this award throughout her time at GSLIS. From her enrollment and work in 501 on Tattoos as Narratives: Medium and Message, a project that focused on an often-misunderstood demographic, to her thoughtful and honest work and reflection in Information Services to Diverse Users, Heidi has blossomed during her time at GSLIS. Heidi became a volunteer for the Books 2 Prisoners (B2P) program in Urbana, and she is a member of the Progressive Librarians Guild student chapter. She has made multiple efforts to further link GSLIS with B2P, encouraging her classmates to volunteer and tour the facility. Heidi is a wonderful example of making her interests actionable and getting involved in the larger life of the library community.