Overcoming Barriers to Information Access (B2A)

Educating the Next Generation of Library and Information Science Leaders

Overview

SOIS has received a grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program to educate six doctoral students with research interests with research interests that address barriers to information access as they relate to one of the three areas of specialization within the doctoral program:

Information organization - e.g., cultural bias in knowledge organization systems
Information policy - e.g., information poverty and accessibility, digital divide issues
Information retrieval - e.g., human-computer interaction barriers, system design to accommodate different information seeking styl

Meet the B2A Fellows

Jennifer Thiele
Adriana McCleer
Renee Kapusniak
Jeannette Robinson
Tina Jayroe
Liza Barry-Kessler

B2A Fellow Activities

The SOIS B2A Fellows are active in their research and scholarship. Learn more about recent and upcoming conferences, lectures and events they are involved in.
Learn More >>

Other Activities

Beyond Books Conference

The B2A grant received an additional funding pool to support student attendance and conference multimedia products at the Beyond Books: News, Literacy and Democracy for America’s Libraries meeting held at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology Media Lab April 6-7th, 2011 (http://journalismthatmatters.org/biblionews/). The meeting, organized by Bill Densmore, director/editor of the Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, brought together 130 journalists, librarians and interested citizens to examine the intersection of journalism and librarianship and to encourage community engagement in areas important to both professions. The grant supplement helped to defray the attendance costs of 30 individuals (primarily graduate students with expressed interests in the themes of the meeting) from around the country. Two of the attendees were SOIS doctoral students, including the first B2A fellow, Liza Barry-Kessler.