Wilkin wins 2019 Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award

John Wilkin
John Wilkin, Affiliate Professor

iSchool Affiliate Professor John Price Wilkin, Juanita J. and Robert E. Simpson Dean of Libraries and University Librarian, has been named the 2019 winner of the Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award. Wilkin will receive a cash award and citation during an ALCTS event at the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC.

Named in honor of one of the pioneers of library automation, the Atkinson Award recognizes an academic librarian who has made significant contributions in the area of library automation or management and has made notable improvements in library services or research.

"John Price Wilkin exemplifies the spirit of the Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award through leadership, risk taking, and innovation," said Bruce Johnson, Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award Committee chair and former senior library information systems specialist at the Library of Congress.

"John was an early adopter of structured markup languages such as SGML and XML in his work at the University of Michigan as head of the Humanities Text Initiative and head of digital library production service, providing access to digital texts as well as a means for searchability and textual analysis. This work later inspired online publishing efforts at other institutions, including the California Digital Library."

"John led the Mellon-funded Making of America project, and early groundbreaking effort to digitize 19th-century books, and then built upon this experience to help launch JSTOR," continued Johnson. "He managed the partnership with Google to digitize the University of Michigan's collection, eventually leading to the foundation of the HathiTrust. As executive director of the HathiTrust, John established a model for shared governance and large-scale collaboration that secured sharing provisions for member libraries."

"In his current role as university librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, John continues to lead innovation efforts, particularly in the area of research data curation,” noted Johnson. “All of these achievements have had far-reaching impact in the library profession and beyond, providing a foundation for transformation in publishing, research, and unprecedented access to digital content."

Wilkin received his BA in literature and English from Antioch College, his MA in English from the University of Virginia, and his MLS from the University of Tennessee.

The Hugh C. Atkinson Award is jointly sponsored by four divisions of the American Library Association: the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), the Library Leadership and Management Association (LLAMA) and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA). The award is funded from an endowment established to honor Hugh C. Atkinson.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Kemboi receives international award for digital preservation work

PhD student Gladys Kemboi has been awarded the 2024 Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Fellowship Award for her distinguished contribution to securing digital legacy to advance local and Indigenous knowledge in development in Kenya and across Africa. She received the award virtually during the DPC's biennial awards ceremony, which took place last month during the International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES 2024).

Gladys Kemboi

Professor, pioneer in Black studies, Black liberation movements donates papers to Archives

The faculty and personal papers of Gerald McWorter, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor emeritus of African American studies and of information sciences, show the arc of a freedom narrative, from his ancestors’ founding of New Philadelphia, Illinois — the first U.S. town to be incorporated by a Black man — to McWorter’s scholarly work in Black studies and his activism in the Black liberation movement.

Abdul Alkalimat (McWorter)

iSchool instructors ranked as excellent

Ten iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Summer 2024. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Only those instructors who gave out ICES forms during the semester and who released their data for publication are included in the list.

614 E. Daniel Street

Herrera and Ryan selected for ARL Kaleidoscope Program

Master's students Caitlin Herrera and Isabel Ryan have been selected to participate in the 2024-2026 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Kaleidoscope Diversity Scholars Program. With the goal of attracting MSLIS students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to careers in research libraries and archives, the Kaleidoscope Program offers financial support to scholars as well as leadership development through the ARL Annual Leadership Symposium, a formal mentoring program, career placement assistance, and a site visit to an ARL member library.

Isabel Ryan and Caitlin Herrera

New NSF project to integrate human and machine intelligence to address information integrity

Identifying whether online information is faulty or ungrounded is important to ensure information integrity and a well-informed public. This was especially challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic when misinformation spread like wildfire across the Internet. A new project led by Associate Professor Dong Wang will integrate diverse human and machine intelligence to examine multimodal data (e.g., text and image) that was produced during the pandemic. His project, "Crowd-Assisted Human-AI Teaming with Explanations," has been awarded a three-year, $599,999 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Dong Wang