Faculty Spotlight - Fall 2022/Winter 2023
Hermina Anghelescu
Professor
- Wrote the article “Ukraine’s Libraries under Russian Fire: The First Fifty Days of Aggression.” Libraries: Culture, History, and Society, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2022, pp. 213-237; available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/slisfrp/167/
- Presented “Bridge and Conquer: Promoting Change in LIS Education” with Wayne State School of Information Sciences (SIS) faculty members Associate Professor of Teaching Bin Li, Assistant Professor Timothy Bowman and Interim Dean Tom Walker, at the Michigan Library Association (MLA) 2022 Annual Conference.
- Chaired the American Library Association’s Committee on Accreditation External Review Panel visit to the School of Library & Information Science, Université de Montréal, Quebec, Canada.
Joan Beaudoin
Associate Professor
- Presented “Digital Collection Developments in the Mitten” at the MLA 2022 Annual Conference with SIS students Meg Bruce and Cameron Socha. The session included information about Beaudoin’s work with Socha to develop the Detroit Mural Map, a public digital collection of more than 100 murals in the Eastern Market area of Detroit.
Deborah Charbonneau
Associate Professor/MLIS Program Chair
- Co-authored the article "Librarian contributions to evidence synthesis programs: Addressing the COVID-19 infodemic," published in the journal Library Quarterly, along with Kathryn Vela from the St. Luke’s Health System in Boise, Idaho.
- Their article examines the role of health sciences librarians in emerging evidence synthesis programs during the COVID-19 global health pandemic.
- New evidence services emerging in response to the COVID-19 infodemic included preparing evidence summaries, curating research on COVID-19, providing expert searching services to monitor the evolving research evidence, and helping individuals build critical appraisal skills to assess the increasing amounts of COVID-19 information.
- Citation: Charbonneau, D.H. and Vela, K. (2023). Librarian contributions to evidence synthesis programs: Addressing the COVID-19 infodemic. Library Quarterly, 93(1), 72-85. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/722548
- Organized the panel session "Narratives of Disability and Accessibility" at the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) 2022 Annual Conference held in Pittsburgh, PA (Oct. 2022).
- Presented at the ALISE 2022 Annual Conference with Keren Dali from the University of Denver. Their research paper presentation was entitled: "The Experiences of Disabled and Neurodiverse Ph.D. Students in LIS Programs During the COVID-19 Pandemic." (Oct. 2022).
- Presented a Works in Progress (WIP) poster entitled “Publication Trends of LIS Faculty Teaching Health-Related Courses” at the ALISE 2022 Annual Conference, along with Emily Vardell (Emporia State University), Jeffrey Huber (University of Kentucky) and Robert M. Shapiro (South East Area Health Education Center, North Carolina).
- Serves as the incoming co-convener for the ALISE Health Special Interest Group. Previously served as the co-convener for the ALISE Disabilities in LIS Special Interest Group.
Christine D’Arpa
Assistant Professor
- Association for Rural & Small Libraries (ARSL) 2022 Conference: “Sharing Our Stories to Support Health & Wellness, at Work and in Our Communities” D’Arpa, Noah Lenstra, Susan K. Burke, Ellen Rubenstein. D'Arpa's graduate research assistant for the grant, Andrew Wilhelme, was also able to participate in the session and the conference. Read his first-person report about the experience here. “One of the key aspects of this IMLS funded grant was the opportunity to bring students into a real research project,” said D’Arpa. “We’re incredibly grateful to the institutions and partners who make these opportunities possible by investing in our work.”
- Association for Library and Information Science Education Annual Conference (ALISE 2022): Presented a Works in Progress (WIP) poster, “Public library work during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: Preliminary findings of a national survey” by D’Arpa, Noah Lenstra, Faith Oguz, and Nicole Peritore. Published in the October 2022 issue of 2022: ALISE Proceedings.
Nic DePaula
Assistant Professor
- Wrote the article “Political Ideology and Information Technology in Government Online Communication” published in Government Information Quarterly, an international journal that examines the intersection of policy, information technology, government and the public. The article is open-access and available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0740624X22000831
Kafi Kumasi
Associate Professor
- An invited speaker for Michigan Council of Teachers of English (MCTE) Fall 2022 conference, Kumasi presented “The Power to Include or Exclude: Navigating Book Challenges with K12 Educators” (Oct. 2022).
- Presented the keynote address, “What Can Hip Hop Teach LIS Professionals about Data Literacy?” for the Michigan Academic Library Association (MiALA) and the International Association for Social Science Information Service & Technology (IASSIST)-sponsored Data Literacy Mini-conference (Oct. 2022).
- Participated in the panel presentation, “Critical Race Theory and Social Informatics: An intersectional Engagement,” at the Social Informatics (SI) and Information Ethics and Policy (IEP) SIGs for the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting and Information Science Summit. (Dunbar, A., Kumasi, K. Gray. L., Chancellor, R. & Grady, S., Oct. 2022).
- Participated in the panel presentation, “Critical Race Theory as Innovative Pedagogy in LIS,” at the ALISE 2022 Annual Conference (Kumasi, K. Dunbar, A. Gray. L., Chancellor, R. and Grady, S., Oct. 2022).
- Michigan Association for Media in Education Annual Conference (MAME 49): Hosted the School of Information Sciences alumni reception and presented the breakout session, “Restoring Urban School Libraries through InFLOmation and Hip Hop Pedagogy” with SIS practicum coordinator Kathleen McBroom and adjunct faculty member Gwenn Marchesano (Nov. 2022).
- Participated in the virtual panel presentation, “Banning Books, Banning Readers: Balancing Intellectual Freedom in the Winds,” sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education’s HEARD: The Hub for Equity, Anti-Oppression, Research, and Development (Kumasi, K. Irvin, V., Knox, E. Dec. 2022).
Xiangmin Zhang
Associate Professor
- Served as the external reviewer for a Ph.D. dissertation titled "Graph Attention Networks for Cross Lingual Entity Alignment and its Applications” from the College of Computing and Electrical Engineering at York University in Toronto.
- Co-organized the workshop "International Workshop on Explainable AI for Recommender Systems" in conjunction with this year's 21st IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT 2022) in Niagara Falls, Canada (November 2022). The workshop featured two keynote speakers and seven paper presentations and received the "WLU CS Workshop Award."
- Served as the external reviewer for a Ph.D. dissertation titled "Impact of Internal and External Factors on Quality of Services in University Libraries of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Islamabad” from the Department of Information Management at the University of Sargodha in Pakistan.