Spheres Magazine

U n i v e r s i t y o f M i c h i g a n

s c h o o l o f i n f o r M at i o n

sPheres

t h e M a g a z i n e o f t h e


s c h o o l o f i n f o r M a t i o n

Fa l l 2 0 0 9

In the fall of 2010, the School of Information will be moving to its new home in the North Quad on the central campus of the University of Michigan. While the architecture of this majestic build-ing is reminiscent of a traditional university, with its brick and stone façade and enclosed court-yards, what we foresee happening once we’re inside those walls will be nothing short of revolution-ary. We are, after all, a school that embraces technology and exem-plifies the future of information education and research. When fully equipped, our new location will allow us to flex our muscles, spread our wings, and showcase the power and value of the work that we do in unprecedented ways.

Occupying a full city block, North Quad consists of a seven-story academic tower and a ten-story residential tower con-nected with a shared first floor and interlocking courtyards. The desirable location at the corner of East Huron and State Streets will give the School of Information a new visibility and prominence on campus and in Ann Arbor. Inside the building, two of the struc-

ture’s most innovative areas will also focus attention on the School. Although considered common spaces, there is actually nothing

“common” about them — they will form the epicenter of our future, living laboratories where students can create, discover, col-laborate, and explore.

At the entrance to the 460- student residential tower is the Media Gateway, a dramatic two-tiered foyer with screening rooms, workspaces and interac-tive display monitors to showcase new projects and research. On the State Street side, the spacious first floor “image gallery” will have large street-level windows, allow-ing passers-by to see some of the exciting works in progress. In this space students can demo video projects, brainstorm on a team assignment, hold design jams, and explore new media, all with the latest information technology at their fingertips.

We’re looking forward to reunit-ing our faculty, students and administration under one roof for the first time in many years. And for the very first time, we will be

moving into a building where the classrooms and labs are specifi-cally designed for our purposes. We will have four dedicated classrooms but the opportunities for educational interaction will permeate the building in formal and informal ways, in multime-dia labs and lounges, and in the interactive media gateway and image gallery.

Our vision is a building-wide living laboratory, a place where the brightest people are given the right tools and inspired to create their best work — a place where faculty and students are immersed in the mutually reinforcing activi-ties of using, improving, creating, and analyzing the impact of infor-mation technology on the world of today and tomorrow.

The new quarters for the School of Information will be the academic home for the next generations of scientists, scholars and researchers tackling the chal-lenges of collecting, archiving, or-ganizing, analyzing and dissemi-nating information in the digital age. Our new facilities are ideally suited to enable us to remain a

true leader in the field of informa-tion education and research. We can hardly wait.

These marvelous new resources for learning also offer numerous opportunities for donors interest-ed in contributing to the School’s future success. Classrooms, faculty and student lounges and meeting spaces will need furnish-ing. We have extensive audio/visual technology requirements as well. For more information about specific giving opportunities, please contact the Office of Development and Alumni Relations at (734) 647-8031 or [email protected].

A New Space in a New Place

The architect’s rendering of the North Quadrangle Residential and Academic Complex, viewed from Huron and State streets.

f r o M t h e d e a n 3U n i v e r s i t y o f M i c h i g a n


Encouraging Growth in Challenging Times

Dean Martha E. Pollack

Spring is the season typically as-sociated with rejuvenation, but in academia it’s fall that generates the most excitement for us, as we greet the new faces and the fresh opportu-nities of a new school year.

We welcomed 157 students into our MSI program in September. They’re an incredibly bright and diverse group, including, for example, a dual major in chemistry and psy-chology from New York State, a journalism major from Taiwan, and a political science major from here in Michigan. I’m very optimistic about the professional future that awaits them. Our recent graduates entered the job market in the worst economy in decades, and yet by May of this year, an amazing 97 percent of our 2008 MSI survey respondents were either in professional jobs or continuing their education. Clearly, the world needs students who know what we teach at SI.

Our educational programs at other levels are also thriving. Our 50 doctoral students are actively conducting research on all aspects of the information world. The undergraduate program in infor-matics, launched last fall, now has more than 40 declared majors. This program — jointly administered by SI, the College of Engineering, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts — offers undergraduate students the chance to study infor-mation and the ways it is used by and affects human beings and social systems. These students get the same exposure to multi-disciplinary perspectives as our master’s students, within the context of a liberal arts framework.

We are delighted to welcome three new SI faculty members this fall. Eytan Adar is an expert in tem-poral informatics — the study of how information and our use of it changes over time. Erin Krupka specializes in social norms and the ways in which they affect behavior, a topic that can inform the design of more useful information systems. Qioazhu Mei is a leader in informa-tion retrieval, particularly within the context of scientific literature and related text data. The School select-ed these outstanding young faculty members after a highly competitive national search. You can read more about them on page 7.

The year ahead promises to be an especially active one for us. We are undergoing our accreditation review, something that happens every seven years, and as part of that process we are completing an extensive self-study. Our faculty members continue to bring in ever-increasing funding to support research on topics ranging from effective data re-use in E-science, to the develop-ment of better metrics for govern-ment archives, to the analysis of how amateurs and professionals interact on websites like Flickr and YouTube.

We were fortunate to be awarded not just one, but two new fac-ulty positions in a campus-wide competition developed by President Mary Sue Coleman to encourage the hiring of clusters of faculty in interdisciplinary areas of study, and we will be looking to fill these posi-tions in the coming year. Finally, we are busily preparing for our move to North Quad: please be sure to read about the wonderful new home we will be moving to next fall (page 2).

As you can see, SI is humming with activity. Still, you may wonder how the weak economy is affect-ing us. While neither the School of Information nor the University of Michigan is immune to the effects of the global economic downturn, we have so far weathered the storm comparatively well, thanks to a combination of fiscal prudence, careful planning, and cost cutting.

The University has worked enor-mously hard over the past six years to reduce annual general-funds expenditures by $135 million, and efforts are underway to identify even more savings and efficiencies across all of its operations. At the same time, it remains committed to maintaining the world-caliber qual-ity of its academic programs and to ensuring continued accessibility to students.

These are also our priorities at SI. Over the next few years, we face a very tight budget situation, and, like the rest of the university, we will need to make some changes in the ways we do business. We have already begun to implement significant cost-cutting measures, like foregoing visiting days for prospective doctoral students and moving low-enrollment courses to an alternate-year schedule.

At the same time, we will move for-ward with our highest priorities, and I am confident that by doing so, and working together in the “SI Way,” we will maintain our excellence as leaders in the information field, and stay on track to achieve our long-term goals and aspirations.

sPhe resfa l l 2 0 0 9

r e s e a r c h W i t h a t W i s t4

If all the bloggers in the world lived in one country, it would be the fifth most populous nation on Earth. That startling statistic caused Professor Dragomir Radev to start thinking about the potential for bloggers to use their collective might to create positive social change.

To help achieve this end, he and some like-minded colleagues are creating BlogoCenter, a system for tracking personal blogs and mining the data they hold.

Working with scientists at the University of California-Los Angeles, Radev and a team at U-M are developing BlogoCenter to combine the tools of the linguist and the computer scientist to monitor, col-lect, and track updates to millions of personal blogs. The plan is to ana-lyze this data for hidden structures and trends in the ways information and people connect, making these insights available to anyone, includ-ing the bloggers themselves.

No doubt the need is there. In 2008, two surveys revealed more than 20 million blogs in the U.S. alone, with almost 10 times that number worldwide.

Corporations, newspapers, librar-ies, you name it — most institutions publish their own, official blogs these days. The majority of bloggers, about 80 percent, are individuals posting reflections on what they consider of interest not associated with their work.

Collectively personal bloggers paint an enormous digital collage of what it is to be alive early in the 21st century. Never before have so many people recorded their thoughts and observations in a form so widely accessible.

This sort of detailed record of how people are connected — to each other, to larger communities, even to ideas — is a gold mine for those who study society and human behavior.

Essentially, Radev is leading one of the early mining operations.

BlogoCenter will help bloggers achieve their potential for inspiring social change while at the same time helping make this treasure trove of data available to social scientists.

Radev’s expertise in computational linguistics is a guiding force behind developing methods and tools for making computers produce, under-stand, and learn human languages.

“Imagine that you can go and talk to your search engine in a human language and get back answers in a human language,” says Radev.

The sea of data accessible via the Internet offers innumerable oppor-tunities for projects that apply com-putational linguistics to information retrieval problems.

Radev’s success in mapping new routes into massive data stores has not gone unrecognized. In 2006, Radev was among the winners of the American Political Science Associa-tion’s Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology for work automating the analysis of U.S. Congressional transcripts. Radev applied natural language processing methods to speeches, meeting min-utes, committee reports, and more to identify main topics and link them to individual legislators, giving political scientists a powerful new analytic tool.

He was also honored as a distin-guished scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery, an honor that recognizes researchers “… for significant advances in computing technology that have dramatically influenced progress in … many other areas of human endeavor.”

Radev coordinates the MSI special-ization in Information Analysis and Retrieval at the School of Informa-tion, and is also a professor in the Division of Computer Science and Engineering and in the Department of Linguistics.

Dragomir Radev

Mining Blogs for Social Good


r e s e a r c h W i t h a t W i s t 5U n i v e r s i t y o f M i c h i g a n


Making a Game of LearningTwo seemingly unrelated facts were the inspiration for an unusual research project of Professor Karen Markey, who devised a computer game to build college students’ information-literacy skills.

Many students enter college not knowing the difference between Wikipedia and a citation index. At the same time, according to a study by the Pew Internet and American life project, 97 percent of American teens play electronic games. Putting these two pieces of information together, Markey figured she could use students’ well-developed gaming skills to shore up their information literacy.

“We opted for a game in lieu of other approaches because what people are doing when they are playing good games is good learning,” Markey says.

With SI Associate Professors Victor Rosenberg and Robert Frost, Assis-tant Professor Soo Young Rieh, and English Department Lecturer Fritz Swanson — and several master’s and doctoral students — Markey developed Defense of Hidgeon. Col-leagues from other University of Michigan academic units also lent expertise to the online board game. The Delmas Foundation provided financial support.

In the game, students were dropped into 14th Century Europe as the Black Death laid waste to the continent’s population. The secret to keeping the plague from decimating their town of Hidgeon was hidden in the local monastery libraries.

Students had to find bits of informa-tion, gain ever-higher levels of access to more advanced collections and

more valuable information, and uncover their grail. If successful, they were named Lord Researcher, Defender of Hidgeon.

Markey evaluated the gamesman-ship of undergraduate students from Frost’s undergraduate course, SI 110: “Introduction to Information Studies.” The result was the develop-ment of eight premises for the design of future information-literacy games. Markey says.

Guided by these eight premises, Markey’s research team was award-ed funding for three years from the Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington, D.C., to de-velop the new BiblioBouts game that students play while they research a topic for a class project.

BiblioBouts enables students to work together to build a focused and shared online collection of digital readings on a chosen topic, and, using social tagging and rating capabilities, compete with fellow classmates to evaluate the focused collection and choose the very best readings for their final project. The project includes students at Chicago State University, Saginaw Valley State University (who are playing the game right now), Troy Univer-sity-Montgomery, the University of Baltimore, and U-M.

One of Markey’s larger goals is to determine whether information

literacy skills can be taught in this way. If so, that would free faculty and librarians to work with students on higher-order skills that can’t be honed in a game.

Karen Markey

You can visit the BiblioBouts Project Web site at bibliobouts.si.umich.edu. Contact Professor Markey at [email protected] to play a demonstration BiblioBouts game.

Mining Blogs for Social Good


h e a d l i n e r s at s i6Assistant Professor Steven Jackson of the School of Information has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award to further his work in cyberinfrastructure.

The five-year, $462,249 award will be used to study “Governing Collaborative Science: Cyberinfrastructure, Scale, and Governance in the Networked Ecological Sciences.”

Jackson is the fourth SI faculty member to win a CAREER award. Previously, Professor Mark Ackerman, Assistant Professor Lada Adamic, and former Assistant Professor Marshall Van Alstyne received the awards.

Jackson, who coordinates the Information Policy special-ization in the Master of Science in Information program, sees collaborative science as a critical component of national policy debates on directions for teaching and research.

The project contributes to NSF goals of broadened and more equitable public participation in science through extensive educational and outreach components. Those include cross-disciplinary primary, undergraduate, and graduate training components; public lectures and a “science cafe” at the University of Michigan Exhibit Museum of Natural History; and a multi-part “The En-vironment Report” series on Michigan Radio, the U-M public broadcasting station (available on podcasts for those outside the area).

These efforts will extend the project’s impact to a wider educational and public audience, including members of groups traditionally underrepresented within the sci-ences.

Investments in advanced computational cyberinfrastruc-ture represent a large and growing percentage of the U.S. science budget. This is important to the nation in that the country is in transition technologically, from the long-standing tradition of “big science” (such as sending astro-nauts to the moon) toward “networked science” (bringing research and teaching to you, wherever you are).

With networked science, sociotechnical issues of scale, integration, and governance are central. Jackson says sociotechnical issues are routinely underappreciated by the computational backers and builders of the present cyberinfrastructure movement.

Underwriting such investments are a number of broadly transformational claims:

• That new computational resources and paradigms will enable new modes of data-driven discovery and innovation

• That new capacities for data storage and exchange will render scientific stocks of knowledge more du-rable, open, and accessible

• That cyberinfrastructure will extend and improve sci-ence teaching and training at all educational levels

• That cyberinfrastructure will lead to new and efficient modes of distributed collaborative working in the sci-ences, notably in the form of novel “virtual organiza-tions”

• That cyberinfrastructure will improve the efficacy and openness of the science-society interface, better connecting researchers to citizens and public decision-makers

This NSF CAREER Award will allow Jackson to explore the dynamics and tensions of governance within two lead-ing examples of highly distributed networked science:

• The long-standing Long-Term Ecological Research Network, oriented to producing locally grounded, multi-decadal, and cross-disciplinary ecological research

• The emerging National Ecological Observatory Net-work, presently under construction with the ambitious goal of practicing interoperable, computationally-intensive, and continental-scale ecology

“This study leads to both design- and policy-level pre-scriptions, and contributes directly to NSF and other sci-ence funder efforts to develop more effective, dynamic, and responsive cyberinfrastructure for the sciences, both within and beyond the ecological sciences,” Jackson explains.

Bringing Science to Everyone

Steven Jackson


h e a d l i n e r s at s i 7U n i v e r s i t y o f M i c h i g a n


Three recent graduates of doctoral programs across the country — whom Jeff MacKie-Mason, associate dean for academic affairs, lauded as “stellar” individuals with an already-growing list of accomplishments — have joined the School of Information faculty.

Eytan AdarPh.D., University of Washington

Adar is already viewed as an international leader in Internet-scale systems. He works on temporal informat-ics: the study of the change of information — and our consumption of it — over time. As one example, he is the principal designer of Zoetrope, a way of interacting with the Web that takes into account the fact that Web pages change frequently and it is nearly impossible to find data or follow a link after the underlying page evolves.

For example, the New York Times Web page shows different news content that is updated nearly constantly. In current search engines, all that one can do is access a snapshot of the current state of a Web page. That fact limits the kinds of questions the user can ask on the Web. Zoetrope enables interaction with the historical Web that would otherwise be lost to time by allowing users to interact with content streams. That is, users can look back though previous versions of Web pages and gener-ate visualizations and extractions of the temporal data.

At the University of Washington, Adar had both a National Science Foundation Fellowship and an ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) Fellowship. He has been employed at the Information Dynamics Lab at Hewlett Packard and as an intern and consultant at Microsoft Research. Although he just completed his Ph.D., he has already been author or co-author on more than 30 peer-reviewed publications, including two that won best paper awards.

Erin KrupkaPh.D., Carnegie Mellon University

Krupka is an experimental behavioral economist who explores the ways in which social and environmental factors influence behavior, using both laboratory and field experiments. Her research on social norms suggests why individuals might engage in behaviors that appear inconsistent with self-interest and suggests why trivial modifications to a decision context can change behavior significantly.

She has shown in lab experiments that individuals behave in a manner consistent with social norms, even in settings where there is no strategic advantage for doing so. Broadly, her work contributes to the emerging litera-ture that models the sway of nonwealth factors on choice, by using social norms to raise the “psychological cost” of selfishness. This work is directly relevant to the incentive-centered design of information systems, an approach pioneered by faculty at the School of Information.

For the past two years, she has been a research associ-ate at IZA in Bonn, Germany. She is the author of three journal publications and a half dozen additional work-ing papers and works in progress.

Qiaozhu MeiPh.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Mei is an expert in real-world problems related to text information management, and in particular he specializ-es in information retrieval and text mining, applications on the Web, scientific literature, and other genres of text data. The dramatic growth of textual information available online has enabled both advanced research — for example, through the broad availability of scientific literature — and increased ease of everyday activities.

Search engines, as the most useful tools to help find and access text information, have already made a huge impact in the real world. However, many challenges remain to be solved to make search more accurate, efficient, and intelligent, and to go beyond to discover, analyze, and summarize useful knowledge from the in-formation found. Mei’s research is aimed at developing both principled methodologies and innovative applica-tions for automatically processing, managing, accessing, analyzing, discovering knowledge from, and summariz-ing large-scale text information.

At Illinois, he held a number of prestigious scholarships, including the Yahoo! Ph.D. Student Fellowship, for which he was one of five recipients in the nation. He has held research internships at Yahoo! Research and Micro-soft Research and been author or co-author of nearly 20 peer-reviewed publications.

Qiaozhu Mei

Erin Krupka

Eytan Adar

Rising Stars Join FacultyBringing Science to Everyone


h e a d l i n e r s at s i8Hedstrom Team to Share $2.8 Million E-Science Grant

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $2.8 million Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) Grant to the University of Michigan to train young scientists on how best to share and reuse data.

Open Data is a multi-year project designed to create a core set of tools and practices that support open shar-ing of data in two fields: bioinformatics and materials research.

SI Associate Professor Margaret Hedstrom is the principal investigator and will head an interdisciplinary team of 14 Michigan faculty members to train the next generation of scientists in responsible data sharing and data reuse in E-science.

According to Hedstrom, graduate students in bioin-formatics, materials science and engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, and information science will be selected to participate in the program, learn-ing methods of generating, acquiring, and managing research data so that it can be widely shared and reused. A summer undergraduate program is expected to attract diverse students and spread the impact of the project to other programs and universities.

IGERT was developed to meet the challenges of educat-ing U.S. doctoral scientists, engineers, and educators to become leaders and change agents. Its goal is to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education through collaborations that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Conway’s Project Explores Ways to Validate Digital Objects

A $49,000 grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation will help find and test new procedures for validating the quality and usefulness of digital objects in the Hathi-Trust shared digital repository, according to principal investigator Paul Conway, associate professor in the School of Information.

According to Conway, “This planning project will lay the groundwork for significant research on new ways to con-duct quality assurance in large scale digital repositories.”

The HathiTrust (pronounced HAH-tee trust) was launched at the University of Michigan in 2008 and has a current membership of 25 university research libraries. It was conceived as a way for universities to preserve and share their digitized collections. The

repository already has more than 3.8 million digitized volumes, with millions more in the pipeline. The funded project will document the technical characteristics of HathiTrust content and establish stakeholder consensus on the multiple uses to which these digital volumes may be put, including on-demand printing, online browsing and reading.

The project is a collaboration between the School of Information, the University Library, and the partners of the HathiTrust, whose executive director is Associate University Librarian John Wilkin.

CHI Cites Ackerman’s Achievements with Induction into Academy

Professor Mark Ackerman has been elected to the dis-tinguished CHI Academy by the Special Interest Group of Computer-Human Interaction of the Association of Computing Machinery. The ACM is the largest profes-sional organization serving the human-computer interac-tion scholarly community.

Ackerman is one of only seven distinguished profes-sors and researchers nationally who received the CHI Academy honor for 2009. He is on the faculty of both the School of Information and the Division of Computer Science and Engineering of the College of Engineering.

Ackerman is highly regarded for his research in com-puter-supported cooperative work and social comput-ing, having first gained acclaim for his Answer Garden expertise sharing system. His research includes systems dealing with expertise finding and sharing, collaborative information access, privacy, and, increasingly, pervasive computing.

“Throughout his work,” the ACM noted, “he has exam-ined how to incorporate elements of the social world within software systems (such as with collaborative sys-tems) and also to consider how those systems will affect their social settings in return. It is this expertise in both system design as well as the social analysis of system use that sets Mark apart.”

The CHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. These are the principal leaders of the field and are cited for their cumulative contributions to the field, impact on the field through development of new research directions and/or innova-tions, and influence on the work of others.

Preserving History, a Postcard at a Time

MSI student George Ishii played a role in preserving 17,000 historical postcards, collected in 1908-10 by Detroit architect Leonard Willeke. The treasure trove on the U-M North Campus docu-ments art and architectural monuments from Europe, including monuments as they existed in pre-World War I and pre-automotive Europe. The significance? The postcards depict the monuments without the scars of war and pollution. Approximately 10 percent of the postcards include personal drawings and/or notations by Willeke that relate to the image on the front. Ishii’s SI skills were put to test in setting up a model system for others to catalog and digitize the cards. He had to figure out how to best capture the recto and verso of the cards and present them to the user, which led to decision-making about Web access and us-ability.




John King Appointed Bishop Professor at U-M

Former SI dean John L. King has been appointed the William Warner Bishop Collegiate Professor of Information at the School of Infor-mation by the University’s Board of Regents. King, who since 2006 has also served as vice provost for aca-demic information, joined the U-M faculty in 2000 as professor and dean of SI. His distinguished career includes teaching appointments at the University of California and the Harvard Business School.

The author of 12 books and over 150 papers, King has been widely recognized for his leadership in research and field development. He was named a fellow of the Asso-ciation for Information Systems in 2005 and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007. His international recognition includes the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies and an honorary doctorate in economics from the Copenhagen Business School.

The Bishop professorship is named in honor of the scholar and librarian who started the University’s library science program in 1926. In making her recommendation, Dean Martha E. Pollack observed “it is a fitting honor for Professor King, who has had a distinguished career in the field of information and is a former dean of the school that grew out of the program Professor Bishop began many years ago.”

SI Tops $1 Million in Stimulus Funds

The School of Information has received more than $1 million in stimulus funds through the Ameri-can Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, according to Tom Finholt, associate dean for research and innovation. The funds come via two

National Science Foundation grants to SI faculty members.

Associate Professor Paul Edwards is a principal investigator on an in-terdisciplinary team exploring how virtual organizations can support community Earth system modeling. The focus of the work is key to un-derstanding and addressing critical societal questions about the effects of climate change.

Assistant Professor Steven Jack-son’s “Governing Collaborative Science: Cyberinfrastructure, Scale, and Governance in the Networked Ecological Sciences” project (fea-tured on page 6), contributes to NSF goals of broadened and more equitable public participation in science through educational and outreach efforts.

Do You Set Trends?

Research by Assistant Professor Lada Adamic and doctoral student Eytan Bakshy aims to answer an age-old question: How do trends become trends and why do some seemingly promising ones fizzle out?

For example, do friends wear the same style of shoe or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, which is why they became friends in the first place? Or once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors?

Social scientists don’t know for sure. They’re still trying to understand the role social influence plays in the spreading of trends because the real world doesn’t keep track of how people acquire new items or prefer-ences. But the virtual world Second Life does.

Adamic and Bakshy took advantage of this unique information to study how “gestures” make their way through this online community. Ges-tures are code snippets that Second

Life avatars must acquire to make motions, such as dancing, waving, or chanting. Roughly half of the ges-tures the researchers studied made their way through the virtual world, friend by friend.

“We could have found that most everyone goes to the store to buy gestures, but it turns out about 50 percent of gesture transfers are between people who have declared themselves friends. The social networks played a major role in the distribution of these assets, ” says Adamic, who in addition to holding an appointment in SI is an assistant professor in the Department of Elec-trical Engineering and Computer Science.

Bakshy presented the research to the Association for Computer Machin-ery’s Conference on Electronic Com-merce in Stanford, CA, in July.

Experts on the National Stage

Two School of Information faculty members have been named to the National Educational Technology Plan Technical Working Group for the U.S. Department of Education.

President Obama has asked this group to create the nation’s Edu-cational Technology Plan. Faculty tabbed for the panel were Daniel E. Atkins, the Kellogg Professor of Community Information at SI, and Barry Fishman, an associate profes-sor of information at SI and an associate professor of educational studies and learning technologies in the School of Education. Atkins also serves part-time as U-M associate vice president for research, cyberin-frastructure.

Doctoral student Eytan Bakshy studies what makes a trend with Assistant Professor Lada Adamic.

John L. King is now William Warner Bishop Collegiate Professor of Information

10 sPhe resfa l l 2 0 0 9

h e a d l i n e r s at s i

c . o l i v i a f r o s t

A Lifetime of DedicationShe chose Michigan.

And hundreds of alumni are grateful

for all she did to ensure library science

had a strong voice in the digital age.

10




The first day she set foot on the University of Michigan campus, she was dressed for suc-

cess. You can’t go wrong wearing maize and blue.

“Fate meant me to have this job,” C. Olivia Frost says, thinking back as she enters a new chapter in her life as professor emerita of the University of Michigan.

“The assistant dean, Ken Vance, about as avid a Michi-gan fan as you can imagine, instantly took a liking to me,” she remembers. “The interview went splendidly. I never did become a football fan, but I went to all of Ken Vance’s legendary post-game parties, and he was a great friend and colleague.”

Those who know her can imagine her taking in life at Michigan in 1977, thinking about the consequences of this and that, and then offering a reasoned and mea-sured opinion.

That was Olivia then. That is Olivia now. Always the one who surveys the landscape before acting thoughtfully.

Now, after more than three decades as an educator, researcher, associate dean, and calm influence at the School of Information, Frost has stepped down as an active faculty member. The road from there to here had a few twists and turns.

”Most of my major career moves came about rather for-tuitously,” she recalls. “For example, I had four years of experience as an instructor teaching elementary German at the University of Illinois to reluctant freshmen, and after that experience I was not looking forward to teaching again.”

Regardless of what she chose, she was going to be well-prepared. She completed a bachelor’s degree in German literature from Howard University, a master’s degree in German language and literature from the University of Chicago, a master’s in library science from the Univer-sity of Oregon, and a doctorate in library science from the University of Chicago. Frost also studied for a year at the Freie Universitaet in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar.

Frost started work on a doctorate in German language and literature after earning her first master’s, but recon-sidered while working on a dissertation on medieval German, especially after considering the job prospects. A chance change of scenery sparked another career outlook.

“I stumbled on Library and Information Services acciden-tally in a casual conversation in of all places, Moscow.

After hearing about what librarians do, I gave it some brief reflection and decided that evening that this was the career for me,” she says.

“On completing my doctoral program it was a toss up between three great offers; Michigan won over North Carolina and Columbia because the dean, Russ Bidlack, was so persuasive and wrote such a wonderful offer letter. My beloved Aunt Emma was so enthused with the letter that she showed it to all her friends and anyone who happened by. I remember the TV repairman coming by Aunt Emma’s house and having to sit and read the three offer letters and declare that Michigan’s was the best.”

At Michigan, Frost got an early start on her career — lit-erally. “For my first term, I taught four classes that started at 8 a.m. I walked to work every day, about 45 minutes each way, often starting out when it was barely daybreak, but I enjoyed the pearl gold winter light,” she says.

Frost rose through the ranks to full professor, and then took on the added responsibility of associate dean. That breadth of experience was rewarded when she was ap-pointed interim dean of SI in 2006-07.

“Although I’ve spent almost all of my professional career at SI, it’s as if I’ve been at many different places, consid-ering how the School has evolved in that time, and the different faculty and dean roles I’ve had,” she says.

“SI is now an entirely different place from when I joined the faculty, and the changes have been cultural, intel-lectual, physical, social, and programmatic. The most amazing thing to witness has been the sea change in li-braries and library practice and the impact this has had on education for the information profession. I’m proud that SI has been a leader. It’s gratifying to take stock of the evolution of SI into an information school and to have had the opportunity to work on this venture with our founding dean, Dan Atkins.”

Now in retirement, Frost is looking forward to making time for reading, traveling, learning new languages, and polishing her cooking skills. She’ll also lend a hand professionally where needed.

“SI and information education have been a part of my life for so many years that I hope to stay a part of it for many years to come,” she says.

And who knows, maybe she’ll watch a Michigan foot-ball game — and raise a toast to Ken Vance.

SIDELIGHT…

C. Olivia Frost and SI stu-dents created the online Cultural Heritage Initiative for Community Outreach (CHICO) with the support of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

CHICO’s purpose was to celebrate the arts and cultural expressions within and across communities, worldwide. Bradley Taylor (Ph.D.’01), now associate di-rector of the Museum Stud-ies Program at U-M, was a member of the teams of master’s and doctoral stu-dents who created CHICO.

“Those of us lucky enough to work for her learned from the strong example she set as a researcher and educator,” Taylor says. “Her enthusiastic support of these projects led to my doctoral research in the human response to surro-gate images and has greatly influenced my own teaching and ongoing research.”

a n s i s ta n d a r d b e a r e r


h e a d l i n e r s at s i1212




On Common GroundAlumni librarians Gary E. Strong and Richard Kong graduated decades apart. They share personal thoughts on how their education at SI influences their professional lives and how much things have — and haven’t — changed over the past 40 years.

Gary E. Strong (AMLS ’67) University Librarian University of California-Los Angeles

SI: What are the primary differences in librarian educa-tion between when you were a student in the 1960s and today?

GARY E. STRONG: In the 1960s, America was at war, there was national upheaval about priorities for the country, and the economy was challenged. On the library education side, I memorized seemingly thou-sands of reference books by actually handling them and searching for answers to professorial-generated questions. Catalog records were created on 3x5 cards on a typewriter, and reference and book selection courses covered how to build collections and service them. There was a hard focus on public service and social responsibility. Faculty lectured and symposia encouraged attendance and participation.

Today, America is at war (or so it seems), the economy is challenged, and there is a broad-based discussion of national priorities. Library education has shifted away from print and service, to electronic and social network-ing. Of course, there are still emerging librarians who want to work with people, do reference work, build col-lections, and change people’s lives, but the course work focuses their attention differently.

Library school faculty were primarily librarians in the ’60s; today librarians and have been joined by informa-tion scientists, archivists, among other professions. The

scope of exposure has broadened to include employment opportunities beyond traditional libraries.

SI: How should we educate librarians to serve diverse communities?

GES: I learned quickly when I began at Queens [Public Library in New York] that most of our users and poten-tial users did not have a history of using libraries. Many didn’t know what a public library was. By reaching out and bringing them in for cultural and educational pro-grams, bringing their children into the library to supple-ment their schooling, and by helping them with getting jobs, starting small businesses, figuring out the medical care system, we captured them as customers.

When I look at the profile of entering UCLA freshmen, I see much the same opportunity. Only 35 percent of our freshmen admissions are Caucasian, 21 percent have a language other than English as their first language, and 29 percent have English and another language as their first languages. How we help these students use a large research library with over 8.5 million books and thou-sands of electronic databases and resources is the core of our challenge. But most important, these students see the library as a key player in their campus life, through exhibits, symposia, programs, etc.

SI: What one program you’ve implemented or directed over your career has changed the greatest number of lives, or had the most profound effect?

GES: This is like asking a father to tell you which of his

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c o n v e r s at i o n s : o n c o M M o n g r o U n d14children he likes best. I would go back to my time as state librarian of California. The California Literacy Program has to be the most significant for me. Watch-ing public libraries and librarians across California step up and incorporate adult learning into public library services and reaching people who otherwise could not read has been a sustained pleasure. Literally thousands of people’s lives, both learners and tutors, have been changed. It was natural for me to support the adult learning centers within the Queens Library and to support the UCLA Library’s program of Infor-mation Literacy and Learning when I came here.

SI: What do you look for when considering a new ALA-accredited graduate for a position?

GES: First and foremost they need to be darned good librarians. Most important is that the candidates know the job being posted and relate their own skills, knowledge, and abilities to match the job. As we have transformed some of our traditional jobs to focus on eLearning and new technologies, candidates some-times don’t quite believe that we are serious. Underly-ing these newly defined jobs, however, is the commit-ment to customer-centered service and user-centric approaches to organizing what we do and how we deliver it.

At Queens, we provided an excellent base of experi-ence in a large urban setting. Within a few years, we saw our Michigan graduates becoming highly competitive, able to take on directorships in small and medium sized libraries back in the Midwest or pro-moted to positions of leadership with us. It was a joy to find someone committed to bringing library service to children or young adults in a challenging urban environment. These are the kids who will achieve given the right support and direction. I look for the same here at UCLA.

If we can capture the imagination of extremely talented undergraduates and challenge their use of informational and library resources as well as just “Googling,” then we have really set them on the right track.

“Watching public libraries and librarians across California step up and incorporate adult learning into public library services and reaching people who otherwise could not read has been a sustained pleasure.”


c o n v e r s at i o n s : o n c o M M o n g r o U n d 15U n i v e r s i t y o f M i c h i g a n


Richard Kong (MSI ’06) Adult Programming and Technology Coordinator Skokie (Illinois) Public Library

SI: What do you see as the core values of the MSI pro-gram? Have these values proven to be important in your working life?

Richard Kong: I remember sitting in a large auditorium very early on during my time at SI and hearing various faculty members speak about what to expect during our two years in the MSI program. When I think of the overriding values that were most important at SI, I think of George Furnas’ explanation of the Borromean Rings representing “people,” “technology,” and “information.”

The idea that we could have the most impact when we strive to keep those three elements together definitely struck a chord with me and it continues to influence my approach to my current work. That same morning in the auditorium, we also listened to John King sharing how many SI graduate come back to tell him how they are often the ones in their organizations who are looking to explore new ideas.

I think there is an openness to new perspectives at SI and I feel like I’ve brought this to my professional work thus far. I feel that I’m willing to both question the way things have traditionally been done in libraries and come up with innovative solutions.

SI: Can you comment on the balance between the focus on technology and service in the SI curriculum when you were here?

RK: There was an obvious interest in and focus on technology at SI. Often it was interwoven into what was being taught in classes, but this emphasis on technol-ogy also manifested itself in conversations with other students and observations of what was happening at the University while I was there. I remember the announce-ment of the University’s partnership with Google was made during my first semester at SI. Immediately there were discussions not only about the technology but also the impact something like Google Books would have on the way people access information. I suppose it all goes back to the Borromean Rings again! How do technol-ogy, people, and information affect each other? For me, this question continues to help me think about how I can make an impact on my local community.

SI: What are some of the community-focused programs you work with now of which you’re particularly proud?

RK: Part of my job at the Skokie Public Library involves coordinating technology classes for the public and

making sure the Library’s community has access to hardware, software, and the Web. The role of public libraries in providing people access to technology has been well- documented and I truly believe that we are in the business of transforming people’s lives through technology. One of the exciting projects I’ve had the privilege of working on lately is the creation of a state-of-the-art digital media lab for our community.

This lab will empower our community members to create digital videos, music, photography, graphic design, and more. We’ll even have cameras and other equipment that people can borrow from the Library. In this day and age when the average citizen can participate in a presidential election by creating and posting a short video on YouTube, it’s important for libraries to be a leader in technology and provide a means for people to learn how to work with digital media projects. I’m very excited about this project precisely because I think it can make a tremendous impact on my local community.

If you could go back to SI and redo your degree pro-gram today, what would you do differently?

RK: If I were to redo my program today, I would defi-nitely take advantage of the coursework associated with new specializations like community informatics and social computing. I would also try to learn more about web design, which is something I ended up teaching myself after graduating. Really though, I’m satisfied with how SI prepared me for my work so far and I’m especially thankful for the practical work experiences I had during my two years in Ann Arbor. I was fortunate enough to work at both the Ann Arbor District Library and the UM Graduate Library where I learned just as much from my colleagues as I did in my classes at SI.

“I feel that I’m willing to both question the way things have tradition-ally been done in libraries and come up with innovative solutions.”


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In the recent economic turbulence, no state has been more buffeted than Michigan. At the School of Informa-tion, serving the larger community is central to our mission. We’re doing that on the economic front by nurturing and encouraging entrepreneurial activities among our students and by educating the information professionals who are needed in the knowledge-based economy that will power Michigan’s future.

IT Start-Ups in Ann Arbor

Rebuilding an economy from the ground up requires entrepreneurs and energy. Several startups recently founded or co-founded by SI students are good indica-tors of the level of entrepreneurial energy emerging from the School and the University as a whole.

Ann Arbor, in fact, is a key to Michigan’s transformation from a manufacturing-based economy to a knowledge economy. Home to numerous start-ups in technology and other knowledge fields, Ann Arbor is also home to 10 of the state’s 17 venture capital firms.

One of those firms, RPM Ventures, has initiated com-petitions to identify and support promising young en-trepreneurs among the University’s students. SI student startups have taken several prizes in the past two years.

Troubadour Mobile

In spring 2008, three then-MSI students, Hung Truong (MSI ’09), Adan Torres (MSI ’09) and Gaurav Bhatna-gar (MSI ’09) won with Troubadour Mobile (troubadourmobile.com), a mobile software startup.

16t r a n s F e r r i n g k n o w l e d g e

Entrepreneurship, Education, and the Economy




As the name suggests, they focused on software for mobile devices, starting with Apple’s iPhone. They finished their first iPhone application, Let’s Pizza!, at the end of last summer. With this app, an iPhone user can walk down a street, pop open the phone, click on the Let’s Pizza! icon, and get a list of the nearest pizza restaurants, complete with reviews from local patrons.

During this past academic year, the team tapped the ex-pertise of fellow master’s students for help in designing and improving the usability of their next apps — Let’s Meet! and Let’s Vote!

Geographically aware applications for mobile devices are hot properties. An August 2008 report from ABI Research predicted revenues of $3.3 billion for the location-based mobile market by 2013.

Phonagle

This summer four SI master’s students participating in the RPM10 entrepreneur program took the prize with their mobile game company phonagle. Sponsored by RPM Ventures, RPM10 is a10-week summer internship program for University of Michigan students with ideas for technology-based start-up companies.

Sergio Mendez-Baiges (MSI ’08), Eric Garcia, Jeremy Canfield, and Benjamin Malley developed outWord, a word game that can be played on an iPhone or iPod Touch using the real world as a game board. With out-Word, players can interact with friends, acquaintances, and even strangers all over the globe. The partners re-leased outWord on the Apple iTunes site, the first app of their young company. To learn more, visit phonagle.com.

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Entrepreneurship, Education, and the Economy


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Olark

SI Ph.D. candidate Ben Congleton is a member of the group who started hab.la, now known as Olark (olark.com). This application helps build relationships by letting Web site owners chat in real-time with site visitors using a variety of instant messaging software such as iChat, GoogleTalk, AIM, or Jabber.

Web site managers register free with Olark, copy a line of Java Script code, and paste it into a Web page. The Olark chat bar floats in the lower right-hand corner of the browser window. When a visitor clicks on it, a small chat window launches in the browser, and a message appears in the instant messaging client letting the site manager know a visitor wants to chat.

Magical Pork

Magical Pork (magicalpork.com) is a new company begun by Libby Hemphill (Ph.D. ’09) that builds mashup solutions. “Mashup” is a general term for anything digital that’s put together with pieces of other things digital. In this case it’s Web applications that pull data or services from multiple sources.

Magical Pork’s early offerings include SayWhat?, which allows people to monitor what others are saying about any given topic on Twitter. An example of the service is Tweeteorology.com, which pulls Twitter postings (tweets) about the weather in any city or ZIP specified.

They’re also about to launch Many-Flyers.com, an online travel site to

ease planning for group events such as weddings, reunions, or confer-ences. The site will search for flights from many origins that arrive at a single destination at about the same time.

Nurturing the Knowledge Economy

If entrepreneurs sow the seeds of a new economy, trained profession-als are the groundskeepers who keep that economy vibrant. In a knowledge economy, many of these groundskeepers must be informa-tion professionals.

In 1881, with the Industrial Age going at full steam, the University of Pennsylvania launched the first collegiate-level business school, the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. Other universi-ties, including Michigan, eventually followed suit, developing programs to train professionals to manage people and production in an indus-trial society, and the business school was born.

As the Information Age shifted into high gear, the University of Michigan helped give birth to the iSchool movement, launching the first Master of Science in Informa-tion, a degree designed specifically to educate professionals to address the challenges of the Information Revolution.

The need for such professionals, particularly acute in a tight economy, has been articulated even by Presi-dent Barak Obama in appointing the White House’s first-ever chief information officer, or CIO.

This new CIO’s primary charges– ensuring broad access, increasing efficiency, and maintaining the integrity and security of information

— are all part of the charge to MSI degree graduates.

They learn how to make organiza-tions more efficient, how to tap the power of social networking tools, how to analyze data for rapid and complex decision making, and how to turn costly, cumbersome paper-based processes into digital systems that are more efficient and user-friendly.

The role of such information profes-sionals is essential to the growth of the knowledge economy, says Jef-frey MacKie-Mason, associate dean for academic affairs at SI.

“The University has made a strategic and growing commitment to offer the best information school in the world,” he says. “This rests on a firm belief that the future of the economy — in southeast Michigan, as well as nationally and globally

— depends on making information technology work better for and with people.”

“It is the broad-based knowledge economy where most of the good-paying job growth is occurring….”

— MichiganFuture Task Force Report


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I’ve been a part of many great projects during my time at SI, but our project for the CHI 2009 Student Design Competition was by far the most fun and rewarding. My team (composed of myself, Sang Koh, Amy Kuo, Noah Liebman, and Andrea McVittie) came together in As-sistant Professor Mick McQuaid’s “Interface & Interac-tion Design” class last fall with the goal of entering the competition.

Little did we know then all the adventures that would be in store for us the rest of the year! The CHI design competition is always a socially conscious one; this year, the challenge was to design an object, interface, system, or service to support using local resources rather than global resources, in a sustain-able and environmentally efficient manner. Our team started off with little idea of what part of the problem to focus on, but as luck would have it, an SI connection led us to interview some local thrift store volunteers. From that interview, we instantly knew we had a great niche to study. We spent the next several weeks doing contextual inquiry to learn more about the issues thrift stores face, and creating personas and scenarios to learn more about potential thrift store shoppers. The focus in SI 682 on doing iterative design from a very systemic perspective really helped us, as we kept refining and reworking our design solution until we were sure we got it right.

In the end, our team’s idea was to create TreasureHu-nter, an online community that supports the finding and sharing of used goods in the local community. It works by connecting two user groups: the busy consumers who would buy used but lack the time or inclination to find items themselves, and the ‘treasure hunters’, who spend

a lot of time at thrift stores and love the thrill of the hunt. TreasureHunter allows busy consumers to make requests online of the items they’d like to buy, and then has a mobile version that treasure hunters can use while at a store to look for those requested items and reply right away. Our prototype also included many features to help provide incentives for treasure hunters; the credit for these ideas is largely due to Paul Resnick, our fac-ulty advisor, who was an invaluable help to us. We also never could have gotten into the CHI competi-tion without the helpful critique from our classmates in SI 682, or the invaluable advice from past CHI finalists including Jackie Cerretani, Sean Munson, and Noor al-Hasan. Most of all, Professor McQuaid poured a lot of effort into helping us succeed, and for that we are immensely grateful. Attending the CHI conference in Boston this April was a lot of fun. With five SI teams in the finals, we had a great Michigan presence this year! While the poster ses-sion judging was nerve-wracking, the great feedback we received made us confident for the finals. We managed to pull together our final presentation in only a few days, and were elated and grateful for being named first place. It was great to see (Professors Emeriti) Gary and Judy Olson at the finals being the first to congratulate us, along with several SI alums. This whole experience is one that I will remember for a long time. Again, congrats to all the other Michigan teams that made it to CHI this year – and I can’t wait to see more SI students representing Michigan at the CHI conference next year!

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MSI students (from left) Debra Lauterbach, Andrea McVittie, Amy Kuo, and Sang Koh competed at the CHI 2009 Student Design Competition, held this year in Boston. Stu-dent teams from all over the world are eligible to compete. Noah Liebman was also on the team.

Debra Lauterbach Tells the Tale

Treasure Hunters Strike Gold at International CHI Competition

2020

21a l U M n i M o v i n g f o r Wa r d



J a M i e h i n e

Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Consumers Rights

“ t h e o n e b e s t t h i n g a b o U t t h i s J o b i s

at t h e e n d o f t h e d ay, t h e r e a r e ta n g i b l e ,

M e a s U r a b l e t h i n g s t h at W e ’ v e d o n e

t o P r o t e c t c o n s U M e r s . ”

Few federal government depart-ments touch citizens’ everyday lives as closely as the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. The agency oversees the regulation of everything from telemarketing calls to fair lending practices to credit cards. And surely few individuals are as well-qualified to protect consumer interests as SI graduate Jamie Hine (MSI ‘03).

An information specialist and attorney/advisor to FTC Commis-sioner Pamela J. Harbour, Hine is one of 350 employees who work on the consumer protection side of the agency. In all, the FTC has approxi-mately 1,100 employees.

With a law degree and a master’s in public policy in addition to his Master of Science in Information degree, he presents a triple threat as he gathers information about pro-ducers of bad products, purveyors of questionable financial deals, and a multitude of other malefactors.

“The one best thing about this job is at the end of the day, there are tangible, measurable things that we’ve done to protect consumers,” he says. “We really help consumers, from start to finish.”

Hine and his colleagues have worked on numerous high-profile cases covering mortgage scams and phony work-at-home offers. Federal stimulus dollars have had the un-intended consequence of bring out more scammers.

“The fun thing is that I’ve worked on so many different cases and proj-ect areas, but the most satisfying is probably the privacy area,” he says.

That’s a broad area, but one that covers everything from medical records and credit card information to how much information someone can gather about people as they surf the Web.

Hine has been influential in draft-ing guidelines about “e-havioral” advertising, for example, which covers such things as online adver-tisers directing advertising toward consumers based on demographic background.

Commissioner Harbour is keenly interested in privacy issues, Hine says, and his expertise in that area helps shape national policy. Essen-tially he’s putting into practice the skills he picked up at Michigan, and learning the ins and outs of working

with representatives of all sides of an issue.

“It’s part of how government works,” he says. “You have to listen to and consider all viewpoints. We at the FTC don’t have all the answers.”

Hine has also been active in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Group, dealing with cross-border privacy and data transfer regula-tions to protect individuals. Oddly enough, although the U.S. advocates for strict privacy laws in other na-tions, the FTC often must rely on state regulations in the absence of federal standards. “But what we do well is enforce those laws,” Hine says.

There’s always work to do because there are always people scheming to cheat and defraud the public. “Un-fortunately, we can’t bring cases on behalf of every individual consumer because of resources, but we do bring cases where we see a pattern or practice. We do an awful lot here.

“That’s what makes it fun.”

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M a r y a n n W i l l i a M s

Preserving Disney’s Empire, One Artifact at a TimeOf all the places a digital archivist could dream of working, the Walt Disney Company must surely be one of the most — well, magical.

As digital archivist for the Animation Research Library at the Walt Disney Co. in the Los Angeles area, Williams is part of a team charged with archiving the historical artifacts of an entertainment empire. The bits and pieces of history stretch back to the 1920s, when Mickey Mouse was known as Steamboat Willie.

Williams and her colleagues catalog everything from an artist’s glass plates used in animations to painted back-grounds and fscripts, to just about anything else that was used by the entertainment giant. Not everything is a physical item; there’s also a plethora of born-digital items to account for.

What Williams and her colleagues are doing is creat-ing an in-house database of enormous proportions that encompasses Disney Animation art and artifacts.

Some day, no matter what someone needs, tracking it will take only an instant. If someone needs a sequence of animation drawings or a background painting, it should be right where the database says it is.

In other words, someone with an SI background is invaluable at The Mouse House, as insiders call Disney.

Williams brings to Disney a skill set enhanced by an SI education that combines the talents of a librarian, a human-computer interaction specialist, and an archivist. What makes her invaluable to the folks at Disney isn’t just that she can do the work, but that she can pass on what she knows to others while they create their store-house of everything Disney.

“My mantra is that information in the real world is only at its most valuable state if you can search, retrieve, and reuse it,” she says. “If you can’t accomplish that triad, then your information is not only lost but it becomes orphaned junk. That’s a particularly blunt description, but unfortunately a true reality.”

When she started at Disney, she was a digital archivist for Disney’s online operation. Now she’s part of the Disney Animation Research Library.

Archiving the collections of one of the world’s top enter-tainment companies gives Williams the opportunity to work on software development, information architec-ture, taxonomy structures, and process and data flow.

The team’s goal, she says, is to digitize approximately one million items over the next two years. That leaves a mere 58 million to go.

To get a handle on the work, Williams got busy bringing colleagues together virtually to share best practices. With most colleagues split between Florida and Califor-nia, her ability to streamline processes was an appreci-ated skill.

“At SI, it was all about information sharing,” she says. Through the knowledge sharing Williams pushed at Disney, digital librarians and archivists now speak the same language. “We’ve got the nomenclature down.”

Williams says a bit wistfully that her time in grad school taught her numerous skills, and made her appreciative of the resources that SI had, to make her self-sufficient.

“It’s a bit of power,” she says, “telling people that they need to organize their files!” The SI education gave her another edge. Aside from the ability to categorize and sort information, she has a strong background in human-computer interaction.

When she was on the job market after graduation, Wil-liams had one thought. “I knew there were people out there who had to hire people like me,” she says.

“SI really opened my eyes to how technology is so all-encompassing, and to really embrace it”

And Disney encourages her to do just that.

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s a g e a d v i c e

Service, Service, Service

Give Thomas Alford (AMLS ’64) a minute or two. That’s all he really needs. He wants to make a point. Ready?

“It’s all about service.”

Music to the ears of those who think the band has left town, and for those who think no one is paying atten-tion. Alford wants to remind them that people like him still have influence over who gets hired here and there.

“Service is the only reason why we’re in business,” Alford stresses, talking about not only libraries, but any of the information professions that deliver a product to others. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in K-12, public libraries, university or college libraries, or a private cor-poration. We are indeed in the business of serving users.”

Alford championed user services as a former public librarian in such cities as Benton Harbor, Mt. Clemens, and Flint (Michigan), Los Angeles (California), and Queens (New York).

During his career, Alford saw his share of technological revolutions before retiring. He’s also seen some whose developers apparently forgot that people favor less confusion and more ease of use. Toward that end, he encourages the kinds of students that SI attracts, in all specializations, to remember the needs of end users.

“You’re not building a service or a collection for your-self,” he reminds you. “SI has done a marvelous job bringing into the curriculum a wide variety of fields that are about service to others.”

His advice to students and grads? Listen and commu-nicate, be open to new ways of doing things, and never forget who your “customers” are.

This was especially true when he worked in Queens, New York. The Queens Library system had the highest circulation in the country, serving nearly one million im-migrants and large numbers of other populations.

15seconds with…SAMEER HALAI(Msi ’06)

Program Manager, Microsoft

Why my job is cool

“I work on a social communica-tion client which is actively used by more than 300 million users around the world. My role is to ‘lead without author-ity’ as an end-to-end owner of design and implementation of features for the product.

“I work with researchers and designers to brainstorm and design new interactions using user-centered design pro-cesses. I also specify the nitty-gritty details of how everything should add up as I work with software developers and tes-ters to actually bring the ideas to fruition.

“I also blog, tweet, and engage with the vast community of our users. I draw from everything I learned at SI and my back-ground in computer engineer-ing to accomplish the dynamic requirements of my work. It’s fun, fast-paced, and very re-warding as I get to break down barriers to communication and bring people in the world closer together.”


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Which industries are showing the most stability?

While certain industries are indicating instability — financial, automotive, real estate development — others are showing stability and even growth! These include government, healthcare, information technology (espe-cially green technology), and energy. Think creatively about how your skills and experience could transfer into these growing industries.

Good news for MSI grads! U.S. News & World Report released its picks for the best careers in 2009. Selection was based on such factors as job outlook, average job satisfaction, difficulty of the required training, prestige, and pay. “Library information scientist” and “usability/user experience specialist” were featured.

In this economy, job postings are down. Any advice?

In the job search, it is very easy to get caught up in and spend a lot of time scouring job posting sites. It can be all-consuming. While this should be one of the steps you should take in your job search, your activities should be 20 percent looking at Web sites for job postings and 80 percent networking.

There is a whole hidden job market out there that is dif-ficult to tap into without strong networking efforts.

People pay a lot of lip service to the concepts of net-working and the hidden job market, but now is the time to really pay attention to these buzz words. Networking efforts should be thoughtful and strategic. Take the time to consider how people you know can help you. If you are unsure who is in your network, do some research. Be proactive and use every opportunity to connect to people in your professions of interest (conferences, pro-fessional associations, professional journals, past and current supervisors, co-workers in other departments, etc.) Networking works! Eighty-five percent of recent MSI grads report that networking directly led to their job offers.

Plan networking goals — for example, a certain number of connections each week — then track and measure weekly progress. In the long run, it will be time well spent.

Use unconventional resources to gain an “in” or get a contact to an organization — and make a great impres-sion. For instance, if you see someone from an organiza-tion in which you are interested quoted in a publication, send an E-mail or LinkedIn message to that person and ask for an informational interview. This can lead to insider information about potential positions and the application process, and maybe an interview or a job.

Tell me, does social networking really count?

Yes! But be mindful of your professional presence online. Many social networking sites for personal intentions (such as Facebook or MySpace) are NOT where you should be conducting professional networking. LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. Recruit-ers often tap into LinkedIn to identify qualified talent. Create a strong, professional profile and ask others to make professional recommendations on your page.

Additionally, consider contractual positions, as this is becoming a more common recruiting trend for employ-ers (as it is more economical for them). Many com-panies partner with reputable, professional staffing/recruitment firms to help identify qualified talent for their organizations. Let everyone know you are looking for a job, and be sure to say what you are looking for. Create your 60-second marketing pitch about what you have done and what you want to do. Refer to this Web site for tips on how to develop an effective pitch: www.jobsearchinformation.com/jsinf/tip37.asp.

Give it to me straight. Are my skills critical?

Diversified skills and strong transferable skills lead to more resiliency in a tough job market. Emphasize transferable skills, regardless of specialization of indus-try: communication skills, strong work ethic, team-work, initiative, analytical skills, computer/technical skills, flexibility/adaptability, interpersonal skills, and problem-solving.

Think about and effectively convey to an employer how these skills can transfer into their organization.

Timely Advice from SI Career Specialists

h av e a c a r e e r - r e l at e d q U e s t i o n ?

W r i t e t o J o a n n a k r o l l a n d k e l ly k o Wat c h at s i . c a r e e r s @ U M i c h . e d U

Joanna Kroll

Kelly Kowatch


r e s e a r c h i n a c t i o n

A searchable, online trove of AIDS-related literature gathered by a prominent science writer is now available online, thanks in part to the work of SI students, faculty members, and alumni.

The materials digitized and orga-nized by the School of Informa-tion and the University Library include transcripts of government meetings, obscure documents from across the globe, and inves-tigative reports from government agencies, among other items.

The database (quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cohenaids) is a digital version of the Jon Cohen Aids Research Collection. Cohen, a correspondent for Science since 1990, has written extensively about the epidemic for decades. The items in this online archive came from 36 file drawers of raw materials behind his articles and his 2001 book, Shots in the Dark: The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine.

The full database will have 6,000 documents, or 230,000 pages of records, once everything is in place. Cohen’s personal notes are not included, but the archive does include documents he obtained through the Free-dom of Information Act, speeches and proceedings from major AIDS conferences, case law, abstracts and news articles, and dozens of other categories of data. These materials are full-text searchable.

“Archives are the materials that form the meat of his-tory,” says Elizabeth Yakel, an associate professor in the School of Information who currently leads this project.

While finished products such as books and articles are already on the Web and more are being added every day, archives are the next frontier.

“This is really the wave of the future,” Yakel says. “Right now, very few archival collections are fully digitized. When it is complete, this collection will really provide you with a whole context, rather than just little pieces.”

Cohen sees the new Web site as a resource for anyone interested in HIV/AIDS, such as those infected with HIV, as well as journalists, policymakers, lawyers, academics, and non-governmental organiza-tions.

“The files have proven to be a ter-rific, unique resource for me, and I think many people could benefit from them,” Cohen says. “There also are loads of historical docu-ments that may interest people in the future. Many of these docu-ments would be extremely difficult to obtain elsewhere.

“I have extensive documenta-tion of investigations of alleged wrongdoing, old brochures from drug makers, reports from stock analysts that hilariously attempt to predict which vaccine will make it to market first, as well as many

scientific papers and newspaper articles.”

For 70 percent of the records, the University obtained copyright permission to display the actual documents to the general public. In the other 30 percent of cases, general public users can see only a citation. Users from within U-M and other universities will have access to a higher percentage of the documents through subscrip-tions held by the institutions.

“The University of Michigan Library is proud to play a role in bringing this important collection online, and in particular, to have done so in collaboration with the School of Information. The library’s commitment to long term access will ensure its availability into the future,” said John Weise (MILS ’95), senior associate librarian who is working on this project.

The archive project, funded by a grant from the John D. Evans Foundation with additional support from the School of Information, began in May 2007. It was initially under the direction of School of Information Professor Emeritus Gary M Olson. Doctoral student Dharma Akmon (MSI ’05) served as project manager responsible for organizing the collection and securing the copyright permissions.

15seconds with…TRACEY HUGHES(Msi ’06)

Why did you come to SI?

“I came to SI specifically be-cause of the breadth of the pro-gram, and its flexibility in terms of skill sets and job prospects. My main goal was to work for an organization in which I was passionate about its mission. I never had any intention of becoming a librarian in a tradi-tional library setting.

“One day I was walking to class and saw an advertisement for a certificate program in geo-graphic information systems through the School of Natural Resources & Environment. This led to my joint program with SI and SNRE.

“Remarkably, I was able to find a position at the University of California-San Diego Librar-ies that perfectly utilizes this unique mix of skills.”

AIDS database now online


r e s e a r c h i n a c t i o n 27U n i v e r s i t y o f M i c h i g a n


s P h e r e s

fa l l 2 0 0 9

f r o M o U r a l U M n i

a l U M n i t r a n s i t i o n s

Keeping in Touch

27

1970 to 1989

Mary Scott (AMLS 1971) is head of adult services at Brighton District Library in Michigan. [email protected]

At the U-M Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Robert Sweet (AMLS 1986) is information re-sources manager. [email protected]

1990 to 1999

Nathie Malayang (MILS ’93) is manager of the CNN Library for Turner Broadcasting in Washington, D.C. [email protected]

Christopher Turner (MILS ’93) is a school library media specialist at Grand Ledge High School in Grand Ledge, MI. [email protected]

The branch manager of the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library in Indiana is Nicole James (MILS ’94). [email protected]

In East Lansing, Eric Ederer (MILS ’95) is a graduate student at Michigan State University. [email protected]

Across the border, John Powell (MILS ’95) is director of Web communications for the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. [email protected]

Frank Richardson (MILS ’95) is a media librarian at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor. [email protected]

As a systems librarian, Jason Leppaluoto (MSI ’96) works at City University of Seattle in Bellevue, WA. [email protected]

Jane Makich (MSI ’97) is a project lead at MetaDesign in San Francisco, CA. [email protected]

Jill Roberts (MILS ’97) coordinates youth services at the West Bloomfield Township Public Library in Michi-gan. [email protected]

Stay Connected!

What’s new with you? A job? A book? A baby? A milestone? A new direction? We’d love to hear what you’re up to these days, as would your fellow alumni. Submit your news, both professional and personal, at si.umich.edu/alumni/update.htm.


a l U M n i t r a n s i t i o n s28Joel Scheuher (MILS ’97) is senior information scientist at General Motors in Detroit. [email protected]

In Ann Arbor, Susan Zauel (MILS ’97) is a content analyst at ProQuest. [email protected]

Alicia Crumpton (MSI ’98) owns 2 Cats Consulting LLC in Tempe, AZ.

“I recently received a Ph.D. in lead-ership studies from Gonzaga Uni-versity,” she says. “I am continuing my consulting practice and looking for adjunct teaching positions.” [email protected]

On the faculty of East Carolina Uni-versity in Greenville, David Durant (MSI ’99) is associate professor.

Stephanie Krueger-Blum (MSI ’99) is associate director for library rela-tions at ARTstor in New York. [email protected]

2000 to 2009

Jane Greenwood (MSI ’01) is a children’s materials evaluator at the OC (Orange County) Public Libraries in California. [email protected]

Juliane Morian (MSI ’01) is associ-ate director of the Clinton-Macomb Public Library in Clinton Township, MI. [email protected]

Jeanne Ragan (MSI ’01) is senior design research lead at IDEO. [email protected]

The University of California in San Diego is where Karen Heskett (MSI

’02) works as an instruction coordi-nator. [email protected]

Abigail Leah Plumb-Larrick (MSI ’02) is a freelance Web product manager/information architect. She and her husband (C. Andrew Plumb-Larrick MSI ‘02) and moved to the Cleveland area in March. He is associate director of the Law

Library at Case Western Reserve University. Also in March, their son Levi turned 2. [email protected]

The district webmaster at Ann Arbor Public Schools is Alexandra Van Doren (MSI ’02)[email protected]

Christopher Borawski (MSI ’03) is a senior librarian (assistant branch manager) at Montgomery County Public Libraries in Silver Spring, MD. He had been a children’s librarian in Montgomery County since graduating from SI. [email protected]

One of the research fellows at the Social Science Research Council in Brooklyn, NY, is Ingrid Erickson (MSI ’03). [email protected]

Jeff Gedeon (MSI ’03) is a patent attorney in Novi, MI. [email protected]

Kristin Hitchcock (MSI ’03) is a Medical Research Librarian at American Association of Orthopae-dic Surgeons in Rosemont, IL. [email protected]

In Raleigh, NC, Nicole Mikesell (MSI ’03) is a reference librarian at Pasco County Libraries. [email protected]

At George Mason University in Arlington, VA, Gretchen Reynolds (MSI ’03) is a social sciences liai-son librarian. [email protected]

N. Sadat Shami (MSI ’03) is a col-laboration software researcher at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA. [email protected]

For Kelley Blue Book in Irvine, CA, Marcia Meyerowitz (MSI ’04) is a lead user experience designer. [email protected]

Julia Gardner (MSI ’04) is a reference/instruction librarian at the University of Chicago Library. [email protected]

At Indiana University, Susan Hooy-enga (MSI ’04) is a project assistant. [email protected]

Jennifer Nardine (MSI ’04) is an instruction and outreach librarian at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. [email protected]

In Michigan, Julie Darling (MSI ’05) is a young adult librarian at Dexter District [email protected]

Mellanye Lackey (MSI ’05) is a public health librarian at the Uni-versity of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. mjlackey@uncedu

Frank Lester (MSI ’05) is a media coordinator at Vanderbilt University Library in Nashville, [email protected]

At North Carolina State University Libraries in Raleigh, Emily Lynema (MSI ’05) is associate head of infor-mation technology. emily_lynema@ncsuedu

Sharon Smith (MSI ’05) is director of programs and administration at Public Knowledge, LLC, in Seattle, WA. [email protected]

User interface designer Jeffrey Tang (MSI ’05) works at Nokia in San Diego, CA. [email protected]

A Little Something in Common …

Three alumni share something special — their employer. All work for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. William Robboy (MILS ’96) is a li-brarian (wlrobboy@umichedu), Daniel Chudnov (MSI ’97) is an information technology specialist ([email protected]), and David Jackson (MSI ’09) is a processing technician ([email protected]).

15seconds with…SETH TURNER

(Msi ’07)

instructional designer,

saint Joseph’s University

Why my job is cool

“I work as an instructional designer at Saint Joseph’s Uni-versity in Philadelphia, home of the 2008 World Series Cham-pion Phillies and all-round great place to live.

“My job is to help the profes-sors in several of the master’s degree programs here to tailor their teaching strategies to an online learning environment. E-learning is a great field for SI graduates to be in.

“What SI students learn about interface design and user experi-ence is directly applicable to e-learning design, and as more universities embrace e-learning models, librarians are going to become increasingly respon-sible for providing support to distance education students.”


a l U M n i t r a n s i t i o n s 29U n i v e r s i t y o f M i c h i g a n


Amy Anderson (MSI ’06) is a busi-ness information analyst at Procter & Gamble. Aurora322@aolcom

Steven Harrow (MSI ’06) works as a systems analyst at the University of Michigan-Flint. stevenharrow@deltaedu

Working for the National Park Ser-vice In Washington, D.C., is Ricah Marquez (MSI ’06), an archivist as-sistant. [email protected]

In the Waterford School District in Wisconsin, Jim Maynard (MSI ’06) is a media specialist. [email protected]

Nathaniel Powell (MSI ’06) is a media specialist in Ann Arbor Public Schools. [email protected]

At California State University in San Marcos, Saradina Doan (MSI ’07) is a library assistant. sdoan@csusmedu

Kenneth Hozak (MSI ’07) help-ing to protect Michigan’s natural resources as a state environmental quality analyst. [email protected]

Elisabeth Jones (MSI ’07) is a doctoral student/research assistant at the University of Washington in Seattle. [email protected]

Anthony Lin (MSI ’07) is a research librarian for business at the Univer-sity of California in Irvine. [email protected]

Librarian/archivist Erin Passehl (MSI ’07) is at Boise State Univer-sity. [email protected]

Jaime Bourassa (MSI ’08) is an as-sociate archivist at Missouri History Museum in St. Louis. jaimebourassa@hotmailcom

At the Home Shopping Network, Wei Chen (MSI ’08) is a product manager (user experience). [email protected]

William Cron (MSI ’08) is a records manager for NetSmith. [email protected]

Jessica Duverneay (MSI ’08) is an information architect for the National Football League in Los Angeles. [email protected]

Xiaomin Jiang (MSI ’08) is a user experience architect at Redcats USA in New York. [email protected]

The National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, MD. employs Christa Lemelin (MSI ’08) as an archives [email protected]

Brian McGuirk (MSI ’08) is a Web services librarian at Oregon State Library in Salem. [email protected]

At Arizona State University, Catalina Oyler (MSI ’08) is a project [email protected]

Katherine Swart (MSI ’08) is a content acquisitions specialist II at ProQuest in Ann Arbor. [email protected]

Youth services librarian Sarah Townsend (MSI ’08) works at Nor-folk Public Library in [email protected]

Dominique Daniel (MSI ’09) is an instruction and reference librarian at Oakland University in Michigan. [email protected]

At Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, CA, Chris-tian Hanrath (MSI ’09) is an inter-action designer. [email protected]

Brian Hewlett (MSI 09) is a library media specialist at Alexandria City Public Schools in Virginia. [email protected]

▲ ▲ ▲

At the spring expoSItion of student projects, Rayoung Yang shows how an ordinary cell phone could be used with Talking Points, an award-winning project she and other students created to help the visually impaired and sighted find points of interest in a city. Users would contribute details about restaurants, museums, stores, and the like to a central database. Special Bluetooth tags at those sites, or tags based on GPS coordi-nates, let the user know when she or he has arrived at a Talking Point.

▲ ▲ ▲

Spring graduate Tammy Greene with good friends and fellow spring graduates Edmund Lewis (School of Social Work), left, and Philippe Rouchon (Dental School).


a l U M n i t r a n s i t i o n s30Malisa Lewis (MSI ’09) is an archives technician at the National Archives and Records Administra-tion. [email protected]

Angelique Richardson (MSI 09) is a project archivist at Winthrop Group, Inc., in Morton Grove, IL. angelique.richardson@ymailcom

Lance Stuchell (MSI ’09) is a digital preservation projects coordinator at the University of Michigan. [email protected]

Alison Trulock (MSI 09) is busy keeping the U.S. House of Repre-sentatives up to date while serving as a research assistant. [email protected]

Alexis Zirpoli (MSI ’09) is a librar-ian for the Internal Revenue Service Chief Counsel Library in Washing-ton, D.C. [email protected]

IN MEMORIAM

Paul Wasserman (Ph.D. ’61) was founding dean in 1965 of what is now the College of Informa-tion Studies at the University of Maryland. He died at age 85 on May 9, 2009 in College Park, Maryland. He devoted his life to the education of others and was on the faculty of the University of Maryland until his retirement in 1995, although he continued to teach occasion-ally until 2005. In addition to his doctorate, he held a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York and two master’s degrees in library science and economics from Columbia University. He was highly regarded internationally for his commitment to improving librar-ies in developing countries. He contributed to projects in more than two dozen countries and worked with numerous governmental and nongovernmental aid agencies to improve library services worldwide. Dr. Wasserman was considered a visionary by his colleagues for his

view that library studies should be multidisciplinary and also incorpo-rate newly evolving technology. The Maryland master’s program was among the first to require a course in technology for library students. His first faculty hires included an engineer, a physicist, and an indus-trial psychologist. He is survived by his widow, Krystyna, a son and a daughter, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Lucia Skoman (AMLS ’73) died July 22, 2009, at age 87 in Ann Arbor. At age 44 she took her first college class at the newly opened Washt-enaw Community College. She was a librarian at the Washtenaw Intermediate School District until her retirement.

Stacey Donahue (MILS ’95), age 57, died Sept. 2, 2009 in Ann Arbor of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease). She received her bach-elor’s degree from Queens College of the City University of New York, and a master’s in science educa-tion from New York University. Before coming to Michigan in 1988, she taught in New York City and

Maine. She worked as a computer systems analyst at U-M for 16 years. She returned to her passion for teaching in 2004. She is survived by her husband Kevin, a daughter, and her sister. The family suggests that memorials be made to www.al-sofmichigan.org in Mrs. Donahue’s memory.

Mark A. Bard (MSI ’06), 26, died Sept. 11, 2009 as a result of injuries suffered when he was struck by a drunken driver in Alexandria, VA, on Oct.1, 2007. At the time of the accident, he was working as an in-formation technology policy analyst for the American Library Asso-ciation in Washington. He passed away in a hospital near his home in Fennville, MI.

▲ ▲ ▲

Pratibha Bhaskaran received her master’s degree this past spring with a specialization in human-computer interaction. On hand at the ceremony in Mendelssohn Theatre were her mother Premila and her father Prem.

15seconds with…AYçA AKSU

(Msi ’07)

developer/interaction designer,

ignighter

Why my job is cool

“I work for Ignighter (www.ignighter.com) as a developer/interaction designer. Ignighter is a small startup that aims to change online dating. It is a group dating Web site!

“Ignighter connects you and your friends with someone else and their friends. What makes my job really cool is that I get to wear many hats. I am involved in a lot of aspects of the site.

“I do programming, prototyping, design, and testing at different stages of projects. So, it is really never boring. Also, being able to create and modify something that a lot of people use is a great feeling.”


a l U M n i t r a n s i t i o n s s tay c o n n e c t e d



s tay i n v o lv e d i n y o u r s c h o o l !

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sPheresSPHeRES is published periodically by the University of Michigan School of Information for alumni, faculty, students, and friends. Correspondence may be sent to:

SPHeRESSchool of Information University of Michigan 304 West Hall 1085 S. University Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107

(734) 763-0074 [email protected]

Dean

Martha E. Pollack

Assistant Director of Development and Alumni Relations

Kelly Roan

Marketing and Communications Officer

Glenda Bullock

Editor/Photographer

Jay Jackson

Copyright 2009, The Regents of the University of Michigan

External Photo/Illustrations

Inside Front Cover: Einhorn Yaffee Prescott and Robert A.M. Stern

Page 14: Scott Quintard, UCLA Photography

Page 20: T.J. Peeler, Federal Trade Commission

Page 22: Jill Breznican, The Walt Disney Co.

Regents of the University of Michigan

Julia Donovan Darlow, Ann Arbor Laurence B. Deitch, Bingham Farms Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Olivia P. Maynard, Goodrich Andrea Fischer Newman, Ann Arbor Andrew C. Richner, Grosse Pointe Park S. Martin Taylor, Grosse Pointe Farms Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor Mary Sue Coleman, ex officio

Non-Discrimination Statement

The University of Michigan, as an equal opportu-nity/affirmative action employer, complies with all applicable federal and state laws regard-ing nondiscrimination and affirmative action, including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The University of Michigan is commit-ted to a policy of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity for all persons regardless of race, sex, color, religion, creed, national origin or ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, or Vietnam-era veteran status in employment, educational programs and activities, and admis-sions. Inquiries or complaints may be addressed to the Senior Director for Institutional Equity and Title IX/Section 504 Coordinator, Office of Institutional Equity, 2072 Administrative Ser-vices Building, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1432, (734) 763-0235, TTY (734) 647-1388. For other University of Michigan information, call (734) 764-1817.

304 West Hall 1085 S. University Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107

NoNproFIt orgaNIzatIoN

U.S. poStage PAID

aNN arbor, MI perMIt No. 144

All Hail the Class of 2011

Entering students get a quick introduc-tion to working in groups at fall orienta-tion. This year, 157 students composed the entering class of the Master of Sci-ence in Information program and par-ticipated in two days of sessions geared toward learning what SI is like from the inside. Second-year master’s students led the newbies in various exercises that exposed them to what group work would be like in their Foundations courses. In short, they got a lesson in getting down the “grad school thoughtful look” that comes when they make sense of numer-ous readings. Of course, the exercises also gave the students the opportunity to meet each other and share stories about themselves.

Above left: Kristen Kogachi , Morgan Keys, and Lauren Chen

Left: Ryan Burton

It’s Time to Nominate!

The SI Alumni Society seeks nominations to honor three alumni who have distinguished themselves in and made noteworthy contri-butions to the information professions.

You may nominate someone for the Distin-guished Alumni Award (at least 25 years of service); the Alumni Achievement Award (at least 15 years of service), and the Alumni Early Achievement Award (up to 15 years of service).

Alumni, faculty, and professional colleagues may nominate. Include a short statement with your reasons for the nomination. Recipi-ents will receive a certificate and recognition on a plaque in the School. Awards will be made during the 2010-11 academic year; nominations are due Jan. 29, 2010.

Send nominations to: Kelly Roan 304 West Hall 1085 S. University Ave. Ann Arbor, 48109-1107

Questions? Contact her at [email protected] or (734) 763-2281.

Documents

Spheres Magazine