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GSLIS Welcomes New GSLIS Faculty

As you may have heard, we are pleased to be welcoming two new full-time faculty members to GSLIS in Fall 2011. Or, we should say, welcoming one brand new faculty member while also seeing one of our current visiting faculty members become a full-time, tenure-track assistant professor. At the same time, two of our doctoral students are joining the adjunct ranks here in Boston.
Please join us in welcoming the following new faculty members:

Peishan Bartley, Adjunct Faculty

Peishan Bartley received her B.A. in Business Administration from National Cheng Chi University and her MBA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. After spending two years as a marketing specialist for a software company, Peishan switched paths and got her Master's degree from Simmons
GSLIS. She worked for a year at Rivier College Regina Library in the technology department and is now back at Simmons and working on her Ph.D. in Library and Information Science. Peishan's interests include user tagging behavior, usability evaluation methods, and cross lingual information retrieval. She will be teaching a section of LIS 488 in the fall.


Asher Jackson, Adjunct Faculty

Asher Jackson began his libraries and archives career as a records manager in the late 1990s. His experience dealing with issues related to corporate records management eventually led him to pursue a Master's degree at Simmons GSLIS, where his primary area of study was Archives and Records Management. After graduating in 2005, Asher was selected as the 2006-2008
Pauline A. Young Resident at the University of Delaware, where he worked in the Special Collections and Cataloging departments. His professional experiences during his time in Delaware sparked a further interest in conducting research involving the curation of electronic documents, focusing on the role that archival institutions might play in providing support for user-created, community-based online archival projects. Asher will be co-teaching LIS 444 with Ross Harvey in the fall.


Rebecca Morris, Assistant Professor

Rebecca Morris is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences; her dissertation topic is the response of listener-viewers in digital storytelling in the school library. She has taught courses in school library management, young adult resources and services, and storytelling; she also supervised school library practicum students. Rebecca has a professional background in K-12 teaching and librarianship as an elementary classroom teacher and middle school librarian. She earned her MLIS and School Library Certification from the University of Pittsburgh. Her undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Science in Elementary and Kindergarten Education from The Pennsylvania State University, Schreyer Honors College. Rebecca is a runner and novice triathlete; she completed several half-marathons and triathlons recently and is preparing to run the Pittsburgh Marathon in May. She will be teaching LIS 426 and supervising SLTP practicums in the fall.


Laura Saunders, Assistant Professor

Laura Saunders received her Master's from Simmons GSLIS in 2001, and, after working as a reference and instruction librarian for several years, returned to GSLIS to get her Ph.D., which she completed in 2010. As an adjunct and then visiting faculty member, she taught Reference and Information Services, User Instruction, Evaluation of Information, and Academic Libraries. Her dissertation, "Information Literacy as a Student Learning Outcome," won the Jean Tague-Sutcliffe award at the 2010 ALISE conference. She has published in the Journal of Academic Librarians, College & Research Libraries, and the portal "Libraries and the Academy" on the topics of information literacy, learning outcomes assessment, accreditation, and government documents. Laura will be teaching LIS 403 and LIS 407 in the fall.