Brief Bio

Mary Lynn Rice-Lively is Associate Dean of the UT-Austin School of Information, where she earned her doctorate in 1996.  She been involved in some facet of library and information services or information studies since 1975, and has held management positions at the Dallas Public Library, City of Dallas Mayor’s Office, at UT's Tarlton Law Library and University Libraries.  In 1993 she developed and taught one of the first courses at UT about the Internet.  While the class was face-to-face students used slow modems to access the Internet using Usenet Newsgroups to communicate, PINE for email, and clunky things called WAIS, Gopher, and Telnet to explore the Internet as it was in the early 90’s.  Rice-Lively considers herself a “classic early adopter” of new technology, meaning that she lets the “bleeding edge innovators” polish things up, and then she does the proselitizing.  She has facilitated dozens of Internet and technology workshops and training sessions throughout the United States and abroad.  Rice-Lively's research and publishing interests include the culture of networked communities, learning and information technologies, social sensemaking, and qualitative research in networked or computing environments.  Her dissertation was an ethnographic study of communication and social interaction between two university classes linked by teleconferencing and Internet-based communication.  She has a BA in English and History from UT and a MLIS from University of North Texas.