This Fall, GSLIS welcomes four new faculty members to our
community — Naresh Agarwal, Mary Wilkins Jordan, Kathy
Wisser, and Fran Zilonis.
Last year, as Naresh Agarwal
approached the end of his
dissertation and worked on a job
search, he took on something
he'd never done before: He
created a marble sculpture for
the School of Computing at the
National University of
Singapore, as part of a
university-wide endeavor. "My
head of department was worried
that our faculty might be the
only one without a sculpture," he
says. "So I promised him I'd get
one done."
The work, called "In Harmony," speaks to Agarwal's artistic side
— his favorite hobby, beyond traveling, acting, and modeling, is
painting — but also to his love of community. After earning his
bachelor's degree, Agarwal worked for six years as a computer
engineer. But he decided that "working with machines was not
really satisfying," he says. So he made the shift to information
science, where in his "person-centric" research he looks at why
and how people search for information the way they do. Agarwal,
a native of India who has spent the last dozen years in Singapore,
says he was drawn to Simmons largely because of the people.
"When I walked in the door I found a very collegial environment,"
he says. "I said, 'I can see myself getting old at Simmons.'"
Mary Wilkins Jordan's first job out of library school was library
director in a low-income North Chicago community, where, she
says, "As long as I didn't burn the building down, I was being
more successful than they had been." And she found that to be
successful, she needed to be resourceful. She soon secured state
and private grants, as well as donations of furniture and
computer equipment from a local company. The library began to
thrive.
Now, in her new role as a researcher and professor at Simmons,
Jordan hopes to do similar kinds of work on a larger scale: She
wants to train future library managers, as well as research ways
to improve the training of public librarians and the services they
provide. "I want to help libraries have something they can put
their hands on and measure to say, 'If we do these things, we'll
be more helpful,'" she says. Jordan, who completed her Ph.D. at
the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, grew up in
Springfield, Illinois, and worked as an attorney before going to
library school.
Katherine Wisser comes to
GSLIS from the University of
Carolina, Chapel Hill, where
she is a Ph.D. candidate and
where she completed her
master's degree in library and
information science in 2000.
Wisser started her academic
career in history — she has a
master's degree in early
American history from the
University of New Hampshire
— and her interest in library science initially grew out of a desire
to learn "the real work of making [historical] materials available
to researchers," she says.
Once she took a cataloging course, everything changed. She now
often publishes and presents about metadata standards in
libraries, archives, and museums. Her Ph.D. dissertation is on
19th-century classification in American social libraries, which
she'll continue researching when she's at Simmons. This fall,
Wisser will teach classes that reflect both of her interests:
Information Organization and Archival Access and Use. "I think
about teaching as learning. Student involvement is essential,"
says Wisser, who grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. "I want people
to look forward to class. I like to have fun, and there's lots of
laughing."
Fran Zilonis comes to
Simmons GSLIS from Bishop
Feehan High School, where she
was vice principal of academic
affairs since 2006. Prior to that,
she spent six years as the
director of information
technology in the Newton
Public Schools, and, from 1994-
2000 was a full professor and
the chair of Secondary
Education and Professional
Programs (consisting of
Counseling, Educational
Leadership, High School and
Middle School Education, Library Media Studies, and
Instructional Technology) at Bridgewater State College. She has
also worked in the Cambridge and Randolph Public Schools. She
received her M.Ed. in School Librarianship from Bridgewater
State College in 1973, and her Ed.D. in Educational Media and
Technology from Boston University in 1979. In 2005, School
Library Journal named her one of the library field's most
innovative and influential thinkers. Beginning in the 2009-2010
academic year, Dr. Zilonis will be teaching in the School Library
Teacher Program.
