Thomas Nisonger Retires
"Tom, regrettably if understandably, has decided to hang up his boots at the
end of the spring semester... Tom will have completed twenty years of dedicated service at IU when he departs in summer. He will not be replaced easily and he will be missed by everyone at SLIS." [SLIS Dean Blaise Cronin]
SLIS faculty member and MLS Program Director, Thomas Nisonger, retires on June 1, 2008.
Note: An excerpt of this piece, written by SLIS faculty member Debora Shaw for the University Retirement Ceremony Bio, was printed in the Spring 2008 issue of SLIS Network, our semiannual alumni magazine.
In the spring of 1988 Dr. Thomas E. Nisonger came from Texas to interview for a position as assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science. A TV reporter outside the Union saw Nisonger as an expert and solicited his comments on the basketball coach because he was wearing "a Bobby Knight jacket." The story has become legend for generations of SLIS students, who have come to respect Tom Nisonger's expertise in collection development and library evaluation (if not basketball).
Tom Nisonger was born in Ohio and attended the College of Wooster, where he earned a B.A. in Political Science and History. He completed his Master of Library Science degree at the University of Pittsburgh and continued heading east, to graduate from Columbia University with a Ph.D. in Comparative Politics. He worked as a librarian at the University of Manitoba and the University of Texas at Dallas before joining the IU faculty.
Tom Nisonger's three books connect his research with the practice of librarianship: Collection Evaluation in Academic Libraries (1992), Management of Serials in Libraries (1998), and Evaluation of Library Collections, Access, and Electronic Resources (2003) have been favorably reviewed and well received. He is the author of scores of articles, book chapters, conference papers, reviews, and bibliographies; in 2001 he received the K. G. Saur Award for the most outstanding article in College & Research Libraries. The arc of his publications traces developments in the field, beginning with the challenges of evaluating library collections, dealing with vendors and approval plans, observing the impact of electronic journals in the early 1990s, and outsourcing in the late '90s. Tom's longstanding interest in use of bibliometric data for evaluation is a continuing theme; his careful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of citation data was displayed in his 2004 "citation autobiography," which demonstrated the increasing importance of the World Wide Web in identifying citations to (and impact of) one's publications.
From his earliest days at SLIS, his colleagues have relied on Tom Nisonger to make things work. He has readily and repeatedly taught foundational courses and both served on and chaired committees that have shaped the school's programs and faculty. He has been Director of the Master of Library Science program, faculty advisor of the award-winning Student Chapter of the American Library Association, and liaison to the Beta Phi Mu honorary society.
At the national level, Tom has served on several committees within the American Library Association, including the Library Research Round Table (which he chaired in 2001-02), the Research and Statistics Assembly, the Association of College and Research Libraries Publications Committee, and the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Education for Collection Development Committee. He has served on the editorial boards of Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory (for which he also served as book review section editor), Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services, Collection Building, Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian.
Professor Emerita Judy Serebnick describes Tom as "the perfect faculty colleague. Whether we were planning for courses, discussing research, or serving on committees, or speaking with students, or sharing good or bad news, he was always fully engaged, discerning, and supportive. Tom's warmth, optimism, compassion, and humor are what I remember."
One of Tom's doctoral students, Jennifer Paustenbaugh, recalled, "I will always feel eternal gratitude to Tom for his enormous personal generosity. His quiet encouragement, his ability to balance strong personalities, and his always helpful feedback really humanized the process of my completing my dissertation by long distance. When I finally participated in commencement exercises in 1999 and was privileged to be hooded by him, I could not think of anyone that I more wanted to receive that honor from than Tom."
Students and alumni often mention Professor Nisonger as one of the best at SLIS; their accolades earned him the school's 2000 Teaching Excellence Recognition Award and 2004 Trustees' Teaching Award. Typical students comments include:
- "Professor Nisonger knows the topic inside and out and expresses it wonderfully." "It was one of the least painful lecture classes I've ever had."
- "Dr. Nisonger and his sense of humor are what made this class so enjoyable. I learned a lot about the subject and enjoyed the course."
- "Professor Nisonger is amazing – very engaging, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, personable ... He packed every class full of information... I appreciated all the jokes, even the bad ones!"
- Wear the Bobby Knight jacket more often :)
- "Dr. Nisonger is incredibly well organized. From the first day of class his students know exactly what will be covered and what is expected of them. The projects are practical and interesting – designed to help students (and future librarians) think analytically and critically.
Mary Popp, who has co-advised the ALA student chapter with Tom, commented on his dedication to the students. "Every year, for the last several years, the ALA Student Chapter has had a fancy dress party. This has been held in the lovely University Club in the Indiana Memorial Union. It features nice wines, hors d'oeuvres, and music. We are able to use the room only because Tom is a member of the University Club. He reserves the room, signs all the paperwork, and takes full responsibility. That means he arrives at the first moment the room is reserved and stays until the last person leaves and all the cleanup is done, usually 4-5 hours later. In the interim, he mingles with the students and their friends and makes everyone feel at home. No one is left out. It is no wonder that the students think he is wonderful!"
Tom and his wife Claire, an Instructor in the Biology Department, have put down roots in Bloomington. Not surprisingly, however, they intend to do some traveling so Tom can conduct research in libraries and archives after his retirement. Maybe the storied Bobby Knight jacket will provide a starting point for another quarter century of jokes and friendships.
Mary Popp Receives Machine-Assisted Reference Award
Mary Popp, public services librarian and a SLIS ALA Student Chapter advisor at IU Bloomington, is the 2008 recipient of the ALA Machine-Assisted Reference Section Recognition Certificate, also known as the "My Favorite Martian Award."
The Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS), a section of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), administers the award. It is given to an individual to recognize excellence in service to MARS. Mary will receive the award this summer at the ALA Annual Conference held in Anaheim, California.
According to the ALA news release, "the certificate will be presented at the MARS Chair's Program, 'Is Face-to-Face Reference Dying?' 10:30 a.m. to noon, on June 29, 2008. The release also included:
"Mary, for your dedication and service over the years, we are pleased to award you with the 'My Favorite Martian' award," stated Mary Mintz, MARS Section chair. "The MARS membership cannot thank you enough for your contributions and leadership."
Internship in Ghana
One of SLIS' first dual MLS/MA African Studies students, Summer Tritt, has been awarded an International Enhancement Grant by the Indiana University Vice President for International Affairs and the University Graduate School. The grant will help pay for Tritt's summer 2008 internship in Ghana, where she will work at the Balme Library at the University of Ghana Legon.
"As an intern, I will be carrying out a variety of tasks that support the daily operations of the library," Tritt says in her grant proposal. "These tasks include: providing reference services to faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, instructing users on how to use library services, such as electronic and online databases, requesting and processing interlibrary loans, and assisting librarians with collection development and management. I also plan to participate in and contribute to several on-going technology-based projects, such as the library automation project, which is underway to create an online public access catalog (OPAC), and the digitization of rare manuscripts." One project is an existing effort to digitize all back issues of a popular Ghanaian newspaper.
Tritt is proficient in Twi, a language of Ghana, and received a FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) fellowship to study fourth year Twi at the University of Ghana this summer.
She has worked as a student assistant in the African Studies Collection at the IU Wells Library since August 2007 and hopes to become an African Studies Librarian when she finishes her dual degree program.
Photo Credit:mixedeyes
Some rights reserved.
Individuality and the MIS Degree
The Master of Information Science (MIS) Degree program has flexibility for students from all majors, and who are pursuing a variety of career paths. Ross Durrer is a current MIS student who has pursued graduate education and other creative outlets at the same time. Faculty members Howard Rosenbaum and Noriko Hara proudly sent SLIS News the recent IU News Story about Ross Durrer and his newly released book A Cold Reception (by AuthorHouse).
Microsoft Research Presentation on Text Chat with Online Games
Chatting online is a common way to communicate. The options of where and how one chats in the virtual world are rapidly expanding. SLIS graduates will become creative leaders in information sharing, in part because of the research efforts of SLIS faculty members Susan Herring and John Paolillo.
Herring and Paolillo will present "Text Chat in a Multiplayer Online Game" at Microsoft Research (Redmond, Washington) on May 23, 2008. The talk will provide information about their ongoing study of computer-mediated communication in online games.
Abstract
While multiplayer online games (MOGs) such as World of Warcraft have attracted much scholarly attention in recent years, and while such games often allow for text chat during play, the uses and characteristics of MOG chat remain largely unexplored. How actively do users chat, with whom, about what, and how coherently, when they are shooting enemies and dodging blows in a fast-paced virtual gaming environment? In this talk, we report on a study in progress of public chat conversations in BZFlag, an open source capture-the-flag type game in which user avatars are tanks. We discuss how we arrived at decisions about data capture, sampling, and methods of analysis, and present results regarding BZFlag as a conversational environment and the coherence of conversations that occur there. MOG chat is a type of convergent media CMC, that is, computer-mediated communication bundled into a media product in which user-to-user communication is a secondary goal. As such, the findings from this study contribute to a larger ongoing project aimed at exploring trends toward media convergence and their effects on online communication.
Biographical Notes from the Talk Announcement:
- Susan C. Herring is Professor of Information Science and Linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington. Trained in linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, she was one of the first scholars to apply linguistic methods of analysis to computer-mediated communication. Her recent interests include multilingual and multimodal (especially, convergent media) communication. She is a past editor of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and current editor of Language@Internet.
- John C. Paolillo is Associate Professor of Information Science and Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington. He has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University. His research focuses on the social contexts of online behavior, emphasizing quantitative methods and social network analysis. His recent research has addressed Internet-based CMC, tagging, folksonomies, social media sites, and amateur multimedia.
Photo Credit:Robert Scoble
Some rights reserved.
The Power of Maps - Exhibit at the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing
- "This exhibit is really magic. Everybody who touches it benefits." [Katy Börner]
- "Maps of abstract spaces, like ideas, aim to serve today's explorers who are navigating the world of science." [exhibit Learning Objective]
- "Maps have enabled the discovery of new worlds..." [exhibit Learning Objective]
In collaboration with Chinese researchers at the Research Center for Grid and Service Computing (VEGA Center) at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing, and with support from a grant by the National Science Foundation - the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit will have an opening event on May 17, 2008 from 9:00 - 11:30 a.m. Weixia (Bonnie) Huang, senior system architect from the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at SLIS, will travel to the opening and will work with colleagues to introduce the maps. Katy Börner, SLIS faculty member and director of the Center, is proud of this accomplishment. She noted that this is the first major showing of the exhibit outside of the U.S., and that the maps have been translated into Chinese to aid in the sharing of information.
This will be the debut for the 4th iteration of this 10-year exhibit entitled "Science Maps for Economic Decision Makers".
Starting July 2008, the exhibit will travel to other branch libraries of the Chinese Academy of Sciences including Lanzhou, Wuhan, and Chendu.
Excerpts from the Exhibit Website:
Are you interested in seeing science from above? Curious to see what impact one single person or invention can have? Keen to find pockets of innovation? Desperate for better tools to manage the information flood? Or are you simply fascinated by maps?
Then visit the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit at on display at the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, May 17-June 30, 2008.
The exhibit aims to demonstrate the power of maps to navigate and make sense of physical places and abstract topic spaces. The display at The National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences features the first four of ten iterations of the Places & Spaces exhibit entitled 'The Power of Maps', 'The Power of Reference Systems', and 'The Power of Forecasts'. This will be the debut of the fourth iteration. Also shown are Illuminated Diagram displays by W. Bradford Paley, Kevin Boyack, John Burgoon, Peter Kennard, and Richard Klavans and Worldprocessor globes by Ingo GŠnther, and hands-on science maps for kids with paintings by Fileve Palmer.
Scientists will be stimulated, students and teachers encouraged, and the general public fascinated by this multi-layered accessible approach to the worlds of modern scientific thought.
Acknowledgements
The exhibit display in China is sponsored by National Science Foundation awards IIS-0238261, CHE-0524661, IIS-0737783 and IIS-0715303; Thomson Scientific; the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, University Information Technology Services, and the School of Library and Information Science, all three at Indiana
University. Much of the data used to generate the science maps is from Thomson Scientific. We thank the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for all their support.
Other Venues
NSF, Washington D.C. There is a permanent display of the first two iterations on the 10th floor of the National Science Foundation, 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA.
NRC, Ottawa, Canada. The first three iterations can be seen at National Research Council - Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, April 3 - June 27, 2008.
See also: http://scimaps.org/schedule.php
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