School of Information Sciences

Amelia Acker receives ProQuest Doctoral Dissertation award at ASIS&T 2014

11/13/2014

The University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences is excited to announce that Amelia Acker received the ProQuest Doctoral Dissertation award at the ASIS&T 2014 Annual Meeting. Acker, an assistant professor in the Library and Information Science program, received the award for her dissertation entitled Born Networked Records: A History of the Short Message Service Format.

The dissertation investigates “archival implications of born networked records created with mobile ICTs, including the creation and collection mobile telephony metadata, the automatic deletion of text message traces by mobile devices, and the possibilities for text messages as records in personal digital archives.” She completed the dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of her advisor, Anne Gilliland.

Following this prestigious recognition for her work, Acker is “really excited to teach Introduction to Mobile ICTs in the summer, which will build off of work that I did in my dissertation about text messages and mobile communication infrastructure.” The iSchool is equally excited to have her bring her award-winning research into the classroom.

The national award was established in 1974 “to recognize outstanding recent doctoral candidates whose research contributes significantly to an understanding of some aspect of information science” and is administered by the Information Science Education Committee. Submissions are rated according to the importance of the topic, the soundness of the methodology, the organization and clarity of presentation and the quality of data. Significantly, this is the first time since the award’s creation that it has been given to an archival studies dissertation.

Learn more about Dr. Acker on her bio page or homepage.