The University of North Carolina at Greensboro School of Education is excited to announce that Dr. Lisa O’Connor will be the new Chair of the Department of Library and Information Studies effective August 2016.
“I am honored and excited to join the exceptional faculty and staff in the Department of Library and Information Studies and to collaborate with other colleagues in the School of Education, the University Libraries, and the University community,” said Dr. O’Connor.
Dr. O’Connor earned an M.L.I.S. from the University of South Carolina. She worked in academic libraries for nearly a decade, both as an information literacy instruction coordinator and a business librarian. Her Ph.D. in Cultural Foundations of Education from Kent State University allowed her to explore the socio-political origins of information literacy. She also applied her expertise in information literacy assessment to develop a standardized instrument called Project SAILS, which has been administered at hundreds of academic institutions.
She joined the faculty in the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky in 2004, where she taught Information Literacy Instruction, Information Retrieval, and Business information/Competitive Intelligence. She has twice received the College Teaching Excellence Award.
Dr. O’Connor’s research interests lie at the intersection of information literacy and information behavior, particularly as it is mediated by social media. She has published more than 30 book chapters, columns, reviews and articles in top tier journals, including the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Library & Information Science Research, Journal of Librarianship & Information Science, College & Research Libraries, Library Trends, and Journal of Education for Library & Information Science. O’Connor is also editor of the Journal of Business and Finance Librarianship. She has recently been awarded the Business Reference and Services Section’s (BRASS) Emerald Research Grant to investigate how information and media literacies interact with financial literacy to affect millennials’ stock market participation.