THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, School of Library and Information Science

NEWSLETTER, 1998-99, No. 40

The School of Library and Information Science Newsletter is published annually by the School of Library and Information Science, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1420. Ethel Bloesch, editor. Telephone: 319/335-5707. E-mail: ethel-bloesch@uiowa.edu

An Evening to Remember:

Carl Orgren Feted on His Retirement

From the Director

Faculty Notes

Students Present Forum

Celebrating the First Decade of the Web

A Cause for Celebration

Academic Promotion for faculty member Jean Donham

Alumna Perspective:

Notes on the 25-Year Journey of a SLIS Graduate by Lorraine (Guenther) Kiewiet

Alumni Notes

Appointments of 1998 graduates

Congratulations

31st Annual Festival of Books

A hundred colleagues, students and friends gathered at the Iowa Memorial Union April 12 to pay tribute to Carl Orgren for his 29 years of distinguished service to the School of Library and Information Science. He joined the school shortly after its founding in 1967, and was influential in the early development of the program, as well as its later expansion. Both as teacher and director (from 1980-1996), he has given notable service to students, to the school, and to the profession.

 [Photo of four faculty]

Three former SLIS faculty members returned to join in the festivities: Bill Asp, from the Twin Cities; Kathleen Tessmer, from Madison, WI; and Esther Bierbaum, from St. Petersburg, FL. All three decades of Carl's service were represented: Bill was a colleague in the 70s, Kathy and Esther in the 80s, and Esther in the 90s.

 [Photo of Carl holding baby]

Two special guests were Carl's daughter Kristen Rummelhart and her 4-month-old daughter Esme, held here by grandpa Carl.

 [Photo of four students]

SLIS students welcomed guests as they arrived. Shown here (standing): Kristin Karr, Paula Whannell; (seated) Brenda Molife and Corey Williams.

 [Photo of three persons pointing]

The after-dinner entertainment featured a panel show "To Tell the Truth." When asked who was telling the truth, the three Carl imposters (Ed Holtum, Daniel Goldstein, Sue Sykes Berry) rose in unison and pointed to the real Carl Orgren.

A Message from Carl --

At retirement, I realize that replacing the "people" part of my career will be the hardest challenge. Fortunately, I don't have to give up the actual people. Both at retirement and over the years many students, graduates, past faculty and colleagues have taken the time to keep in touch. For this I am tremendously grateful. Perhaps I'll have a little more time to hold up my end of such connections.

I hope it's obvious to all of you as it is to me that I would not have stayed at Iowa for twenty-nine years, or in the profession for forty years, had my soul not been fed in the process. It has been wonderful.

Orgren can be reached at

5 Melrose Place, Iowa City, IA 52246

319-338-0358 or carl-orgren@uiowa.edu

Dear Friends,

This has been another busy year at the school. We have completed the first full year of our new curriculum, and have completed the second year of offering distance education over the Iowa Communications Network (ICN). By the end of fall 1999 we will have offered all 13 semester hours of core courses and an additional 20 semester hours of electives over the ICN. Another achievement this year has been the implementation of our electronic classroom. And I am very pleased to announce that Dr. Jean Donham was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Congratulations, Jean!

Many of you know that SLIS is currently being reviewed by the College of Liberal Arts and the Graduate College. This review is being conducted as the regular seven-year review mandated by the State Board of Regents. The schedule calls for a self-study to be submitted by June 30, and for a review committee to visit the school in late September. The school will then have an opportunity to respond to the review recommendations before the College of Liberal Arts and the Graduate College formulate their concluding response to the review.

This spring marked the end of an era for the school, with the retirement of our beloved colleague Carl Orgren. Carl's wise and humane leadership and teaching over nearly three decades provided both stability and a forward-looking vision for the school. We will miss him, professionally and personally.

This summer we also bid farewell to two other valued staff members -- Dr. Shaojun Lu and Patricia Kondora.

Dr. Lu has been a Visiting Assistant Professor this past year. Although he was with us only one year, he made a significant contribution to the school with his dedicated and informed teaching. We wish him well as he begins a tenure-track position in information science at SUNY/Oswego in the fall.

Pat Kondora, our longest-serving staff member, will retire from her secretarial position in July after thirty years of devoted service to the school. All of the newsletters that you received over these three decades came to you because of Pat's efforts to maintain our mailing lists and affix labels to the issues. She did many other things of course, and we will greatly miss her.

It is also a time of welcome for two visiting faculty members who will join the school this fall. One is Dr. Feili Tu, who comes back to Iowa after serving on the faculty at SUNY/Buffalo for one year. Dr. Tu holds a Ph.D. from Texas Woman's University. The other is Dr. Cavan McCarthy, who comes to us from Kuwait University, where he was Associate Professor of Library and Information Science. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Loughborough, England.

I hope that you remain in touch with us, and once again I wish all of you success in you endeavors.

 PADMINI SRINIVASAN

padmini-srinivasan@uiowa.edu

Sharon (Shay) Baker, associate professor, and Karen (Nyholm) Wallace have completed a revision of their book, The Responsive Public Library Collection. The second edition will be available soon from Libraries Unlimited.

Esther Bierbaum, professor emerita, will receive a Golden Anniversary Award for distinguished professionals at the annual meeting of Beta Phi Mu in New Orleans this summer.

Jean Donham was promoted to associate professor with tenure, effective in August. In May she gave three presentations in Sweden: on program evaluation at the Swedish Library School in B"ras; and on information literacy at Uppsala University and at the regional library in Goteborg. She will give a presentation at the ALA conference in June and teach a three-day institute at the University of Hawaii in July. She co-authored(with Barbara Stein) "Assessment," a chapter in Principles and Practices: School Library Media Annual, and (with Violet Harada) "Assessing Information Literacy," in Assessing Student Learning: A Practical Guide. Her article "Collaboration in the Media Center: Building Partnerships for Learning," appeared in the Bulletin of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (March 1999).

David Eichmann, assistant professor, was nominated by the Information Systems Directorate

of the Johnson Space Center for the 1998 NASA Software of the Year Award, in recognition of his work on the MORE and MOREjava repository systems. He received a Group Achievement Award and a Space Act Award from the Johnson Space Center of NASA in 1998. Last November he presented a paper (with Miguel Ruiz and Padmini Srinivasan) "Cluster-Based Filtering for Adaptive and Batch Tasks" at the Seventh Conference on Text Retrieval, NIST, in Washington, D.C.

Shaojun Lu, visiting assistant professor, presented a paper on the impact of the Internet on formal scholarly communication at the annual meeting of ASIS last October.

Carl Orgren, associate professor, chaired an accreditation visiting team for the ALA Committeeon Accreditation (COA) in March.

 Students Present Forum

Celebrating the First Decade of the Web was the theme of a public program presented March 26 by Iowa's student chapter of the American Society for Information Science (ASIS). Four notable speakers shared their perspectives: Erik Selberg of the University of Washington, and creator of MetaCrawler, rated the effectiveness of search engines using quantitative evaluation; Efthimis Efthimiadis, also from the University of Washington, gave a qualitative glimpse at the inner workings of the Boeing engineers' search behavior; David Eichmann, of SLIS, gave an online demonstration of his work with image-based search mechanisms; and Brian Pinkerton, creator of Web Crawler and chief scientist of Excite, delineated some important challenges to web search effectiveness and to an open web environment. Padmini Srinivasan, SLIS director, led the concluding panel discussion. A videotape of the event is available for viewing. Contact the school(padmini-srinivasan@uiowa.edu) for further details.

Faculty member Jean Donham received many floral tributes this spring upon the news of her academic promotion to associate professor with tenure. Students, faculty, and friends shared in celebrating Jean's significant achievement. Keeping up with Jean's daunting schedule is another matter. Her spring and summer plans include working trips to Vancouver, Sweden, New Orleans, and Hawaii.

 My days at Iowa are very special memories for me. In January 1974 when I started in the SLIS program, I thought I wanted to become a children's librarian. If you had told me then what I would be doing today, I would not have believed it!

My current position with CitySearch reminds me of being a new Mom -- every day is different, and the child changes every day! Ticketmaster Online - CitySearch, Inc., headquartered in Pasadena, California, is an Internet business that provides city guides, coupled with the convenience of online purchasing. As CitySearch's Technical Documentation Manager, I use my SLIS training to gather information in a rapidly growing company (700 employees in 4 years) and put together a documentation team that can be responsive to users' information needs nationwide.

Working in documentation with an Internet company means working with the programmers who develop the Web publication technology, including the search engine technology and the tools for creating Web pages. Our servers update our pages every night at midnight local time.

Our city guides are unique because each city's editors provide local content, or "editorials" that give personality to each city's site. Our documentation must also keep up with the changing templates. Templates give the overall look and navigational feel to a collection of pages. Within the templates, individual tags get data from the database to update the content. To stay competitive, our templates and tags, our design and editorial tools, and our search and publication technologies must be state-of-the-art.

CitySearch also maintains partnerships with some of the largest newspapers around the world. Partners use our documentation to use the templates and tags and to maintain their own publication cycle on their own hardware.

Other things I've done along the way: From 1975 to 1979, as a prison librarian and then state library supervisor for correctional library services, I was given the chance to learn about grant-writing, fund-raising, public speaking, and politicking to provide library services.

After our move to Post-Proposition 13 California in 1979, I moved into library automation. As a project manager with AutoGraphics, and then for Geac Computers, I learned about computer-output microfilm, OCLC record structure, mainframe and mini-computers, library automation issues, project management, and the many issues surrounding storage and retrieval of library data.

In 1983, my library science degree was useful to me as a customer liaison for the newly formed Xerox Artificial Intelligence Systems business. Working on Windows-based applications when Bill Gates was still working in DOS was a privilege! My MLS from Iowa helped me gather and organize information from many users, and disseminate or "translate" information between different groups in the company. As the go-between from Ph.D.'s to Operations personnel, I drew on the service skills one has to have as a librarian.

After eleven years of working with AI and Smalltalk groups as a beta test engineer and then a documentation specialist, I moved fully into authorship and online documentation. From 1995 to 1999, I authored megabytes of Help systems for a Windows application. E-Z Data, a leading vendor of software for insurance agents and financial planners, does not provide a hard copy User's Guide with their software-only online help. A challenge like this fits in with a librarian's training to understand users, their environment, and how they seek information.

Looking back on these past 25 years, I see a common thread in my varied work experiences. While I could not have predicted in 1974 what I would be doing in 1999, all of my work has been based upon a solid foundation of principles that focus both on the user and the user's information needs.

1968

JIM WHITE, a member of SLIS's first graduating class, retired last year after serving as director of the La Crosse (WI) Public Library for 22 years.

1969

LOLLY EGGERS, retired director of the Iowa City Public Library, is author of A Century of Stories: The History of the Iowa City Public Library, 1897-1997.

1970

KAY RUNGE, director of the Davenport Public Library, was recently elected vice- president/president-elect of the Public Library Association, an 8600-member division of the American Library Association. Kay is also president of Humanities Iowa, formerly the Iowa Humanities Board.

1974

PAULA MATTHEWS, music librarian at Bates College, Lewiston, ME, is the current president of the Music Library Association.

HELEN SPALDING, associate director of libraries at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has been appointed for a four-year term to the Budget Analysis and Review Committee of ALA. She continues to serve as ACRL Councilor and on the ACRL Board Executive Committee.

1975

SARAH MORT CRON was named director of Kent Library at Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau, MO.

1976

RUTH PYNE is director of library information services at Anna Maria College, Paxton, MA.

1980

LUCY LOWRY is director of the Southcentral Minnesota Inter-Library Exchange in Mankato, MN.

1981

KRISTIN EVENSON HIRST is owner of Hirst Logics, a web development firm in Iowa City.

1983

JAMES MULDER is coordinator of public services at Missouri Western State College, St. Joseph, MO.

1987

BARB BLACK is coordinator of technical services at the Iowa City Public Library.

DOUG KRANCH is library director for the branch library of Ohio State University and North Central Technical College at Mansfield, OH.

MARIANNE RYAN is head of government documents and maps at the University of Maryland, College Park.

1989

KURT MEYER is a cataloger at Utah State University, Logan.

1990

DONNA ANDREWS is assistant head of adult services at the Bloomingdale (IL) Public Library.

HEIDI LAURITZEN is coordinator of circulation services at the Iowa City Public Library.

SUSAN NISSEN LERDAL is librarian at the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, Iowa State University, Ames.

STEVE OSTREM is instructional developer for the UI Center for Credit Programs.

JAY ROBINSON is systems access librarian at Simpson College, Indianola.

1991

PAULA PRESLEY is director/editor-in-chief of the Thomas Jefferson University Press at Truman State University, Kirksville, MO.

ROBERT SANDERS is osteopathic literature indexer at the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, Kirksville, MO.

1992

KRISTA BOWERS SHARPE is a reference librarian at Western Illinois University, Macomb.

BETH KRUEGER CARPENTER is electronic resources librarian for the Outagamie Waupaca Library System, Appleton, WI.

WALT DUNLAP's library, Fergus Falls (MN) Public Library, was ranked 20th nationally in the 10,000-99,000 population category in Hennen's American Public Library Rating Index.

PHIL HJEMBOE is public services librarian at Rockford College, Rockford, IL.

KARA LOGSDEN was named coordinator of community and audio visual services at the Iowa City Public Library.

STEVE MOON is head librarian for Solomon Cordwell Buenz & Associates, an architecture firm in Chicago, IL.

BOB VANDER HART is reference librarian/government documents specialist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

1993

JEAN SHUMWAY is a librarian at Butler County Community College, Butler, PA.

1994

LINDSAY NICHOL GRETZ is systems engineer for Premium Systems in Indianapolis, IN.

1995

LAURA BAIN is a researcher for Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, WA.

ELYSSA STERN CAHOY is librarian at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, New York, NY.

CHRISTA STARCK, is research education librarian at Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, MI.

1996

ELLEN HAMPE is director of the Washington(IA) Public Library.

JULIA KIPLE is associate librarian in reference and information services, Carleton College, Northfield, MN.

LORA ROSE is technical services librarian for the Rockingham Public Library, Harrisonburg, VA.

1997

JEFF DAWSON is branch librarian at a community college in Winslow, AZ.

STEVE LUDWIG is librarian for competitive intelligence at Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Des

Moines.

CASSIE MOON is customer support analyst for Endeavor Information Systems, Chicago, IL.

KRISTIN RASSBACH POLSTON is librarian in the Library and Research Center at the National Watch and Clock Museum, Columbia, PA.

BRIAN THOMPSON is cataloging librarian for the Kansas City (KS) Public Library.

JULIE WESTBY is children's librarian for the Hedburg Public Library, Janesville, WI.

IN MEMORIAM

ROBERT GROTH ('80), of Garner, IA. died August 11, 1998.

JOHN HENNEMAN ('82), of Princeton, NJ, died July 7, 1998.

ROBERT JORDAN ('73), of Iowa City, died April 20, 1998.

JAMES KELLOGG ('77), of Memphis, MO.

DAVID ALEXANDER: reference librarian, University of Nebraska at Kearney.

GAYLE BUCKNER: collections manager, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics Medical Museum.

MATT CELICHOWSKI: information architect, Yamamoto Moss, Minneapolis, MN.

BRETT CLOYD: librarian, Burling Library, Grinnell College, Grinnell.

CATHERINE CRANSTON: reference and instructional services librarian, Central College, Pella.

JANICE FARIS: project cataloger, University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

TWILA FIRMATURE: information specialist, Reddy Corporation, Albuquerque, NM.

LANCE GILLETTE: library assistant, University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

RON HARDY: public services librarian, Cornell College, Mt. Vernon.

THERESA HEPKER: reference/cataloging librarian, North Dakota State Library, Bismarck.

KATE HESS: reference librarian, Cornell College, Mt. Vernon.

JILL HOFMOCKEL: school library media specialist, Prairie High School, College Community School District, Cedar Rapids.

KATE HOLVOET: local and regional documents librarian, Florida International University, Miami.

LAURA HORST: teacher, Sabula.

MARCIA JENSEN: pre-K-5 library media specialist, Davenport Community Schools.

JULIE JONES: visiting faculty in multimedia and video art, University of Iowa.

KARA KINNEER: library assistant, Physics Library, UI Libraries.

SARAH BRINK LATCHAM: elementary library media specialist, Southeast Polk School District, Altoona.

AMY LUEDTKE: ILL/legislative history librarian, Legislative Reference Library, St. Paul, MN.

REBECCA LUTKENHAUS: acquisitions/reference librarian, Drake University Law Library, Des Moines.

JOHN MCGLOTHLEN: reference librarian, Iowa Wesleyan College, Mt. Pleasant.

LISA MARTINCIK: interim mathematical sciences librarian, UI Libraries.

TYLER MASCHINO: school librarian, Benton Community School, Van Horne.

PATRICIA MILEHAM: instruction/reference librarian, Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN.

DARREN NELSON: adult services librarian, Argentine Branch, Kansas City (KS) Public Library.

JULIE PETERSEN: library technician IV, Rockwell Collins Information Center, Cedar Rapids.

AMBER PROKSA: building supervisor, Cornell College Library, Mt. Vernon.

BARB ROBB: reference librarian, Peru State College, Peru, NE.

KEVIN ROSS: librarian, Hamilton Technical College, Davenport.

JENNIFER SATTERFIELD, assistant librarian, Meadville/Lombard Theological School, Chicago, IL.

AMY FULS SMITH: library assistant, Interlibrary Loan, UI Libraries.

ZHIQUN SONG: librarian, Virtual Hospital, University of Iowa.

SUE SYKES BERRY: instructional/reference librarian, University of Missouri at Kansas City.

KELLY THORMODSON: training librarian, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA.

EMILY TURNER: adult/young adult services librarian, Moline (IL) Public Library.

SARAH UTHOFF: young adult librarian, Cedar Rapids Public Library.

ARRON WINGS: reference librarian, Kirkwood Community College, Iowa City.

KATE JONES YOUNG: substitute librarian, Public Library of Des Moines.

XIANGYUAN (SHARON) ZHANG: acquisitions and exchange librarian, Spencer Art Reference Library of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO.

Tyler Maschino, 1998 grad, who received the first Iowa Educational Media Association/Winnebago Progressive School Media Award for leadership in integration of information technology into the library media program.

Michelle Simmons, SLIS student, who is the 1999 recipient of the ALA Marshall Cavendish Scholarship.

 31st Annual Festival of Books for Young People

Saturday, October 30, 1999

Theme: Reading for the Fun of It

Speakers: Tim Egan, Todd Strasser, Carol Lynch Williams

Exhibit of new books, Concurrent booktalk sessions

For more information, call Ethel Bloesch toll-free at 1-800-553-IOWA, Ext. 5707, or e-mail request to ethel-bloesch@uiowa.edu.

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