Renear delivers keynote at symposium in Armenia

Dean Allen Renear with officials in Armenia
Roubina Ter-Martirosyan, Director, Dijilan Community Center; Renear; Mankunts; Yates; Nerses Ter-Vardanyan, Deputy Minister of Culture; Denise Davidson, Head of School at UWC Dilijan
Allen Renear
Allen Renear, Professor

iSchool Dean Allen Renear was a keynote speaker at the symposium, "Libraries in the 21st Century: Best Practices and International Trends," on June 4 in Dilijan, Armenia. The symposium was part of the inauguration ceremonies for the Vartan Gregorian Learning Center at UWC (United World Colleges) Dilijan College.

Renear's talk, "The Role of Libraries in Preparing Students and Citizens for the 21st Century," addressed the potentially unique role of libraries in preparing students and communities for the challenges created by four forces shaping our future: information technology, globalization, demographic trends, and automation/artificial intelligence.
  
His visit to Armenia also included meetings with Lilit Makunts, the Armenian Minister of Culture in the newly formed Armenian Government; Anna Chulyan, head of library at the Yerevan Brusov State University of Languages and Social Sciences; Satenik (Bella) Avakian, director of the AGBU (Armenian General Benevolent Union) Papazian Library at the American University of Armenia and a 1995-96 Mortenson Fellow at Illinois; and Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, as well as an introduction to the innovative TUMO Center for Creative Technologies. Steven Yates, assistant professor in the College of Communication & Information Sciences at the University of Alabama and President of the American Association of School Librarians, gave the second keynote at the symposium, focusing on library programming.

Research Areas:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

New project improves accessibility of health information through AI

Assistant Professor Yue Guo has received a $30,000 Arnold O. Beckman Research Award from the U of I Campus Research Board for her project, "Optimizing Personalization in Plain Language Summaries: Comparing Predictive and Interactive Approaches for Tailored Health Information." 

Yue Guo

Han successfully defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Yingying Han successfully defended her dissertation, "Community Archives as Agency: Documenting Chinese American Experiences in the U.S.,” on May 28.

Yingying Han

Education of Things named a SHARP Book Prize finalist

A book by Associate Professor Elizabeth Hoiem, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children's Literature, 1762-1860, has been named a finalist for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) Book History Book Prize. 

Elizabeth Hoiem

Debnath datafies "The Bulletin"

MSIM student Tan Debnath, whose interests span data mining, statistical modeling, text mining, and digital humanities, joined the Center for Children's books as a research assistant. He was tasked with building curation processes that would datafy seventy-five years' worth of archival issues of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, one of the nation's leading children's book review journals.

Tan Debnath stands casually with his hands in his pockets and smiles broadly at the camera. It's a sunny day