Family and community are at the heart of Janelle Ketcher’s work in library and information science.
Ketcher (MSLIS '25) works as the lead coordinator of publisher relations at ITHAKA. She is also the founder and director of Postal Service for the Dead, a collective project that allows people to send letters to anyone in their life who has died.
She cites her grandmother — "an avid library advocate, reader and lifelong learner," who worked as a volunteer at her local library — as inspiration for pursuing a career in library science. When her grandmother moved to an independent living facility, in response to the disorganized state of the facility's collection of books, she created a functional library and lending system that is still in use today.
But Ketcher's own path to a career in LIS was not quite as straightforward. After completing her undergraduate studies at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she studied painting, art history, and social practice, she worked for a variety of arts nonprofits, gaining experience in operations, logistics, and community engagement.
"To this day, I bring my art education and arts nonprofit experiences to everything I do — creative problem solving, listening to community needs, being flexible, collaborating with partners and colleagues, and dreaming up new futures," she said.
But after seven years in arts nonprofit, Ketcher said she "felt stuck with my professional options." Pursuing an LIS degree felt like an appropriate next step that "combined my love of resource sharing, community engagement, and the interest in archives that I hadn’t fully explored."
She selected the iSchool’s Leep program for the scheduling flexibility and course options that allowed her to explore her interest in the information science field while continuing to work. While helping her to pivot professionally, what Ketcher learned at the iSchool also gave her an opportunity to enhance a very personal project that she'd started years before, born out of a different family connection.
In 2019, grieving the death of her mother, Mary Susan Sineni, Ketcher became a virtual peer grief host for The Dinner Party, a now-closed organization for young adults who have experienced loss.
That work was the impetus for Postal Service for the Dead (PSD). During an independent study with Assistant Professor Travis L. Wagner, Ketcher created a metadata schema for the archive in collaboration with PSD's archival advisory committee.
"Through researching archival standards, having extensive ethical conversations, and creating new systems, we created a schema that allows users to search the archive and explore diverse expressions of grief," she said.
In addition to enhancing the PSD archive, her work led to her recognition with the iSchool’s Anne M. Boyd/Beta Phi Mu Award in May 2026.
Postal Service for the Dead continues to receive letters weekly and now includes over 800 letters in the archive. It has grown into a full-fledged organization that hosts programs and most recently became a fiscally sponsored project of SocialGood, making it eligible for donations and grants.
Ketcher is full of praise for PSD’s "incredibly talented volunteers, who are passionate about seeing this accessible grief resource thrive. We are beyond thrilled to continue sharing our story and connect with folks who want to support our mission!"
Just as her iSchool education helped Ketcher to build PSD into what it is today, the MSLIS program also helped her secure her day job. What began as an LIS internship at ITHAKA supporting the content strategies and relationships team in the summer of 2024 led to a full-time role, and today she supports the team at large, with a focus on journals, books, and Artstor on JSTOR. Her team works across the JSTOR corpus — journals, books, research reports, and images — to oversee publishing and the strategic management of publisher relationships, ensuring that the content is effectively curated, organized, and published to meet the organization’s objectives.
Ketcher creativity has emerged in her approach to amplifying Artstor's content and multidisciplinary educational approaches by researching and authoring blogs such as "What can we learn from depictions of grief?" and "Looking beyond Georgia O’Keeffe: How multidisciplinary research deepens understanding."
