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This semester we begin a series of profiles of UT Knoxville librarians. Watch for a new profile each week.

As a Diversity Resident Librarian in the UT Libraries’ two-year post-graduate internship program, Sojourna Cunningham participates in many library initiatives and projects. She provides research assistance at the reference desk and teaches classes in library research skills to the university’s international students. She helps to plan and host the Libraries’ annual exposition for first-year students and our meet-and-greet with graduate students. Sojourna also helps the Libraries extend its services to non-traditional constituencies, teaching information literacy to high school students in the Bridge Program and Project GRAD — two UT-sponsored initiatives that foster college preparedness.

Her desire to improve the user experience within the library led to a persistent interest in assessment. She has worked on studies of our learning commons as an effective bridge to library services and on usability tests of our recent website redesign. Working with the assessment librarian, Sojourna helped to administer and analyze the results of the LibQUAL survey, a multifaceted assessment of library performance.

Sojourna has a bachelor’s in history and English literature from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s in library science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.