SIS Hires Two New Faculty

The University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences is pleased to announce that it has hired two new faculty members. Both incoming assistant professors, Dr. Cindy C. Welch and Dr. Vandana Singh, are recent graduates of the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.

Welch will serve as the Youth Services Specialist and will coordinate the school library media track, which was left open after the retirement of Dr. Jinx Watson.
Her dissertation is titled, “Broadcasting the Profession: The American Library Association and the National Children’s Radio Hour, 1931-1937.”

Most recently, Dr. Welch was the deputy executive director of the Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association, where she served from 2002 to 2004. At ALA, Welch worked with the executive director, association leaders and the board of directors, managed the YALSA journal Young Adult Library Services, and developed continuing education offerings. Prior to working at ALA, Welch was the young adult specialist at Chicago Public Library for nearly seven years. In the next academic year, she will teach the Information Environment and Storytelling in Libraries and Classrooms. Welch was recently elected to the YALSA board of directors for a three-year term.

Singh will teach the school’s technology-intensive courses, Information Technologies and Information Networking Technologies, and she will also coordinate the school’s undergraduate minor in Information Studies and Technology. Dr. Singh’s position replaces Dr. Sandusky’s position left vacant at the end of fall term 2007.

Dr. Vandana Singh is a lecturer at the University of North Texas School of Library and Information Science. She holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago and an M.S. in Knowledge Management Systems from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Her doctoral dissertation is on “Knowledge Creation, Sharing and Re-Use in Technical Support for Open Source Software.” Her research areas and work experience are in software technical support, open source software development, human-computer interaction, online communities of practice, and online customer support.