Mary Lynn Rice-Lively, formerly an assistant dean of information technology and associate dean in the School of Information, has pledged $100k to the School of Information.

The funds will create an endowed presidential fellowship in the name of her parents, Joe and Nancy Rice, who, according to Rice-Lively, were extremely supportive and provided every opportunity for their daughters to develop inquisitive minds.

“How could I not honor them in this way?” said Rice-Lively. “They encouraged us to think, to articulate our opinions and to find ways to become lifelong learners.”

Originally from Dallas, Rice-Lively received a bachelor’s degree from The University of Texas at Austin before pursuing her MLIS at the University of North Texas. Soon after, she returned to Austin to earn her PhD in Library and Information Science at the School of Information.

“I came from a family of voracious readers,” said Rice-Lively. “Happily, a common childhood activity was my weekly trip to the downtown Dallas Public Library and later, during the scorching Dallas summers, to the icy air-conditioned bookmobile parked at the Walnut Hill Shopping Center.

So it came as little surprise to anyone when I applied for my first job at the Dallas Public Library. I was immediately hooked on solving information puzzles and thoroughly enjoyed working with the public.”

In the early 1990s, it was the Internet that drew Rice-Lively back to school to complete her PhD. She and several other UT Library staff members facilitated Internet training sessions and she was fascinated to see who and how people chose to adopt and use new information technologies.

“How to best to teach, translate and champion new network- based information technologies was the jumping-off point for my doctoral studies and I wanted to explore these things from the academic side of the university,” said Rice-Lively. “The PhD was a prerequisite for me to make this transition.”

During her years with the iSchool as an academic administrator, Rice-Lively was involved in various challenges faced by the school including the name change from GSLIS to the School of Information, and planning and overseeing the move to the new, renovated facilities. She was also involved in the difficult decision to reshape the school’s preservation and conservation studies program.

During her years as a librarian, information professional and academic, Rice-Lively had many mentors including the late Lillian Bradshaw, former director of the Dallas Public Library; Brooke E. Sheldon, GSLIS dean from 1991-1996; and dean (and professor) Andrew Dillon, who provided her many opportunities to engage in and develop strategies, both professional and personal, to navigate academic and administrative storms.

When asked what words of advice she might have for current or future students, Rice-Lively said, “The ‘bendy’ figures on the iSchool homepage remind iSchool students to stay flexible! Changes to our information worlds show no sign of slowing down and iSchool graduates will have amazing and varied career opportunities in settings and organization as yet unimagined.”

Rice-Lively has been married to her husband, Bob, for almost 44 years and has a daughter, Sarah, who recently gave birth to their first grandchild, Henry.

Schneider Distinguished Lecture

Date/Time

Tuesday, May 1, 2012
3:15 p.m. School of Information
UTA 5.522

Speaker:

Douglas W. Oard,
Professor, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland

Title:

The Rest of the Story: Finding and Using Conversational Content

Abstract:

Modern search technology evolved as a way of shifting the locus of control over information dissemination away from creators and publishers and closer to the ultimate consumers of that content. Today, however, we are increasingly applying the same technology to what we might call “conversational content” – content that was originally created with interaction rather than dissemination as the principal goal. Some obvious examples include recorded meetings, recorded lectures, oral history interviews, and lifelogging. Conversations are, however, not limited to the spoken word; we find them in email, instant messaging, and Twitter as well. This is no small challenge – by any reasonable way of counting almost all of the words produced on the planet are generated through conversation. In this talk, we will begin by looking at some emerging technologies that are helping to render conversational content more easily accessible. We’ll then step back to consider what benefits, and what risks, these new capabilities offer to our society. We’ll end with a few speculations from the podium about the social and policy response to this new landscape, and, somewhat self-referentially, with some time for discussion.

About the Speaker:

Doug Oard is a Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, with joint appointments in the College of Information Studies and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, where he is the director of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab. Dr. Oard earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. His research interests center around the use of emerging technologies to support information seeking by end users, with recent work focused on interactive techniques for cross-language information retrieval, searching conversational media such as speech and email, evaluation design for e-discovery in the TREC Legal Track, and support for sense-making in large digital archival collections. Additional information is available at http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~oard/]]> 2012-04-21 http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/about/news/view_news_item.php?ID=374

Nancy L. Eaton, an information technology expert and an administrator of university libraries with a long and distinguished career, has pledged $100k to benefit the School of Information.

Surely the wackiest of UT events, the Edible Book Festival brought in avid readers and amateur chefs to bake—and later on, to consume—sweet homages to their favorite books.

The 10th annual event was sponsored by the UT School of Information and held at the Perry-Castañeda Library plaza on Sunday. The guidelines for the entries are that they must be book-related and consumable. Seventeen creations were entered and judged by attendees.

Most entries are humorous takes on favorite books, characters, or authors. One entry, the “Tart of Darkness,” was studded with edible bones to represent the many characters who die in Joseph Conrad’s famous novel.

“It’s really interesting how people will take the themes of books and make edible art out of that,” says Virginia Luehrsen, a doctoral student in the School of Information. “It gives you a window into how they interpret books. Somebody may interpret something with a more serious tone and someone takes a more funny stance.”

Full article: http://alcalde.texasexes.org/2012/04/edible-book-festival-room-for-readers-eaters-and-wit/