Fall 2025 Awards and Recognitions

Join us in celebrating accomplishments and honors attained by University of Tennessee Libraries’ staff, faculty, and student assistants.
 

Awards & Recognitions
 

Michelle Brannen (Immersive Spaces and Technologies) and Paris Whalon (Immersive Spaces and Technologies) were selected co-chairs of the local planning committee for the ACTAL [Association of Creative Technologies in Academic Libraries] Conference. The conference was held November 5-7 at the John C. Hodges Library and hosted approximately 100 library professionals.

Melanie Dixson (Health, Wellness, and Professional Programs) was appointed by the Medical Library Association to serve as a juror for MLA scholarship awards for the 2025–2026 term. Dixson was also awarded the Academy of Health Information Professionals Senior Level Certification for 2025–2030.

Jeanine Fletcher (Health, Wellness, and Professional Programs) was awarded the Academy of Health Information Professionals Certification at the Distinguished Level.

Brian Fuson, a student intern with the University of Tennessee Press, won an award at the Association of University Presses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show for his cover design for Ballplayers on Stage.

Meredith Hale (Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives) was part of a team that was awarded a $349,999 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project. The team is creating a digital database of the author’s history-revealing correspondence. Collaborators include Hilary Havens of the UT Department of English, as well as faculty from four other universities.

Hale was also one of five librarians selected nationwide to participate in a Digital Librarian Cohort Program. Participants complete a project using CollectionBuilder and contribute back to the open-source project.

Leigh Mosley, UT Libraries’ accessibility coordinator (Acquisitions and Continuing Resources), in partnership with Student Disabilities Services, received a $3,000 Lyrasis grant to underwrite accessibility testing of online content and share results with other campus stakeholders. The Lyrasis grant will allow UT Libraries to pay selected students and faculty with a variety of disabilities to participate in digital accessibility testing of the Libraries’ e-resources and online instructional materials.

Stacy Palado has been promoted to Senior Director of Advancement, UT Libraries & the Press.

Publications and Presentations
 

David Achodo, student library assistant at Pendergrass Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine Library, had three poems published in the monograph Sonder: Through Our Eyes (July 2025, Duluth Publishing Project).

Maggie Albro (Health, Wellness, and Professional Programs) co-authored a guest blog post for Hiring Librarians on the topic of “Bullying and Burnout in Academic Libraries.”

Jennifer Beals, Alesha Shumar, Kris Bronstad, Dennis Koch, and Courtney Holmes (faculty and staff from the Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives) presented a panel discussion on "Removed to Oversized: Dealing with Legacy Finding Aids” at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society of Tennessee Archivists.

Alex Boris (Health, Wellness, and Professional Programs), Kat Brooks (Assessment Programs and Collection Strategy), Sarah McCarter (Health, Wellness, and Professional Programs), and Erin Elizabeth Whitaker (Teaching and Learning Programs) published an article, "The Writing Blitz: Engaging Students Through a High-Impact Hybrid Event" in the Journal of Creative Library Practice.

Olivia Chin (Research Impact and Open Access), Mikayla Wood (Data and Digital Scholarship), Sidney Gavel (Data and Digital Scholarship), Alexander Harriman (Research Impact and Open Access), and Luke McDonald(Acquisitions and Continuing Resources) gave a poster presentation at the 2025 Charleston Conference. The poster, entitled "Man vs. Machine: Evaluating Open Access LIS Journals," details their research on whether ChatGPT can quickly and accurately evaluate the quality of a chosen set of open access library and information science academic journals.

Thura Mack (Community Learning and Engagement) was an invited presenter at the SPARKS: Power of Partnership — Engaged Scholarship for Society event.

Additionally, Mack and Angelica Nepomuceno (Community Learning and Engagement), along with Kimberly Brown, Jada Russell, and Laura Barry from the College of Nursing, gave a presentation at the 8th Annual Engagement and Outreach Conference. Their session, titled “Great Expectations in Healthcare Conference: Introducing Middle Schoolers to the Nursing Profession,” reported on a conference that introduced middle school students to the nursing profession.

Mack and Nepomuceno also gave a presentation at the Tenn-Share Showcase 2025. “Literacy and Tradition in Current Spaces" presented a model that any type of library might use when working with K–12 literacy programs.

Anchalee (Joy) Panigabutra-Roberts (Cataloging) published “Representing Researchers in the Library Linked Data Environment: A Case Study of ORCID Users at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville,” in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Additionally, Panigabutra-Roberts presented a Lightning Talk, “A Case Study of ORCID Users at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville,” at the NISO Plus Global/Online Conference.

Panigabutra-Roberts also presented “Representing Researchers in the Library Linked Data Environment: A Case Study of ORCID Users at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville” to the Coalition for Networked Information.

Mike Rogers (Discovery and Technology Solutions) spoke about “Better Discovery Through Change: Looking Back on Fifteen+ Years of Primo Development to Help Prepare for the Future” at ELUNA Learns 2025 (Ex Libris Users of North America).

Gail Williams (Assessment Programs and Collection Strategy) gave a poster presentation at the 2025 Charleston Conference titled “Faculty Selections, Library Reflections: Analyzing a Faculty Bookplate Event.” The poster reported on a project done in collaboration with Lizzie Cope (Assessment Programs and Collection Strategy) and School of Information Sciences faculty members Wade Bishop, Brian Dobreski, and Rosa Wardlow.