Standard III. Faculty

III.1 The school has a faculty capable of accomplishing program objectives. Full-time faculty members are qualified for appointment to the graduate faculty within the parent institution and are sufficient in number and in diversity of specialties to carry out the major share of the teaching, research, and service activities required for a program, wherever and however delivered. Part-time faculty, when appointed, balance and complement the teaching competencies of the full-time faculty. Particularly in the teaching of specialties that are not represented in the expertise of the full-time faculty, part-time faculty enrich the quality and diversity of a program.

Universities place great emphasis on the significance of faculty in graduate programs, especially their teaching, research, and service activities (see University of Pittsburgh’s Faculty Handbook ). The academic programs are dependent upon the expertise of faculty in terms of program design, course development, and incorporation of research into the classroom (real and virtual). When faculty leave through retirement, for other opportunities in their fields, or because they have sadly passed away, academic programs re-evaluate their strengths and explore ways of enhancing their resources and expanding their objectives.

The iSchool has been reminded of the faculty’s importance over the past several years in light of a number of departures due to deaths, illness, retirements, and relocations.

Since the last COA report a number of new faculty have been hired and several faculty left for personal and/or professional reasons. The table below describes each of the current LIS faculty, as well as those who have left the School for various reasons.

The faculty status table is available on-site.

Other iSchool faculty changes during the same period include 2 hires, 2 retirements, 4 promotions and 2 departures affecting the Information Science & Technology, Telecommunications & Networking, and Undergraduate programs, as detailed below.

Hires
Konstantinos Pelechrinis (Telecommunications & Networking Program)
Rosta Farzan (Information Science & Technology Program)

Retirements
Douglas Metzler (Information Science & Technology Program)
Richard Thompson (Telecommunications & Networking Program)

Promotions
Peter Brusilovsky – Full Professor (Information Science & Technology Program)
Hassan Karimi – Full Professor (Information Science & Technology Program)
Michael Lewis – Full Professor (Information Science & Technology Program)
James Joshi – Associate Professor (Information Science & Technology Program)

Departures
Joseph Kabara – Assistant Professor (Telecommunications & Networking Program)
Glenn Ray – non-tenure-stream Assistant Professor (Undergraduate Program)

The number of faculty changes have made it challenging to meet teaching responsibilities and to continue to conduct research in several key areas: the organization of information, cyberscholarship, information visualization, information architecture, and archives and records management. The permanent faculty were, in the short term, augmented by visiting faculty to provide teaching expertise in archives, organizing and retrieval of information, cataloguing, and architecture.

The School has ambitiously pursued recruiting and hiring new faculty. Sheila Corrall and Brian Beaton joined the iSchool in the Fall 2012 term. Corrall, a senior scholar and administrator from the University of Sheffield in the UK, was brought in as the LIS Program Chair as well as taking on teaching and research responsibilities. Beaton, a freshly-minted PhD in History from the University of Toronto, brings expertise in archives, social and cultural theory, information workplaces, design, history of information and technology, scholarly communications, digital humanities, and public policy. Elizabeth Mahoney, the former director of the SIS library and adjunct faculty member teaching in the areas of reference and children and youth services, joined the faculty as a full-time lecturer starting in the Fall 2012 term. Alison Langmead was hired with a joint faculty appointment between the iSchool and the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences (1/3) in 2009. She serves both as the Director of the Visual Media Workshop in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and a Lecturer in the Library and Information Science Program, focusing her teaching work in the archives and information management area. Stephen Griffin, formerly a senior program officer at the National Science Foundation, has joined the faculty as a Visiting Professor, in a position funded by the A. W. Mellon Foundation, teaching and undertaking an ambitious research agenda in the area of cyberscholarship.

The School and University are committed to hiring faculty possessing the education, professional experience and research orientation necessary to meet the specific goals and objectives of the MLIS program. All eligible full-time LIS faculty members have been appointed as members of the University’s Graduate Faculty, a status recommended by other members of the faculty on the basis of evidence of competence to direct graduate study and research at all levels. This is in accordance with University policy which states that “Membership in the Graduate Faculty shall be of two classes, "Regular" and "Adjunct." Regular membership shall be recommended for full-time faculty members or part-time, tenure stream members of the University faculty who are approved to direct graduate study and research at all levels. Adjunct membership shall be recommended for persons whose primary responsibility is outside the University but who hold a part-time faculty appointment and are approved to direct graduate study and research at all levels. Only Regular members shall be eligible for election to the University Council on Graduate Study, and only Regular members may cast votes in such elections. Thus, our full-time lecturers are not eligible for admission to the Graduate Faculty Roster.

All candidates applying for full-time faculty positions are expected to hold an earned doctorate or the equivalent in academic or professional experience. Every full-time faculty member and those holding joint appointments in the LIS Program meets this requirement.

The School is conducting searches for four new faculty members, including an assistant/associate professor (non-tenure stream) in the LIS Program with expertise in historical and contemporary archival theory and practice, including both analog and digital formats. This non-tenure stream faculty will join a cadre of outstanding non-tenure stream faculty currently teaching in the LIS Program including James “Kip” Currier and Elizabeth Mahoney. The open position had been held by Bernadette Callery. The school has strategically used the non-tenure stream option to recruit faculty who have demonstrated expertise in teaching and as a practitioner, thus taking on an enhanced teaching load. Such positions are not uncommon in other degree programs in the School, most particularly the undergraduate program. New tenure stream appointments in 2013/2014 are intended to focus on web science (including areas such as data-intensive scholarship, information visualization and data mining), and information assurance (including trust, privacy, security and digital forensics). A non-tenure-stream “professor of practice” is being sought to teach systems design and analysis in the undergraduate program.

These new faculty additions join a program faculty with documented strengths in both research and teaching. In addition to Corrall and Beaton, recently-hired faculty members include Leanne Bowler, Jung Sun Oh, and James “Kip” Currier. Bowler, who is preparing to come up for tenure in the next academic year, serves as the lead faculty member in children’s and youth resources and services. In addition, Bowler has crafted a rigorous research program looking at the metacognitive abilities and development of young persons, information seeking behaviors of children and youth, and multi-modal literacy of young library users. Currier, who holds a non-tenure assistant professor position, teaches in intellectual property, information ethics and the management and leadership of libraries and information services. Jung Sun Oh, in addition to teaching in the retrieval area, has initiated a research program looking into social information tools, social informatics, and metadata. 

These young faculty members join a strong corps of individuals with extensive teaching experience totaling more than twenty years each, including Professor Richard Cox in the archives area, Associate Professor Christinger Tomer specializing in information technologies and digital libraries, Associate Professor Mary Kay Biagini in School Libraries and Adult and Young Adult Resources, and Associate Professor Ellen Detlefsen in Health Information Management and Medical Informatics.

Proportion of courses taught by full-time LIS faculty

Term	Total # of classes taught*	% of courses taught by FT LIS faculty
Fall 2011	32	75.0%
Spring 2012	40	62.5%
Summer 2012	52	32.7%
Fall 2012	30	90.0%

Distribution of teaching across faculty type

Term	Full-time LIS**		Adjunct		Teaching fellow
	Online	On-campus	Online	On-campus	Online	On-campus
Fall 2011	10	14	3	1	3	1
Spring 2012	14	11	5	4	3	3
Summer 2012	8	9	15	10	5	5
Fall 2012	13	14	2	1

The continuing strategic use of adjuncts also brings individuals into the classroom with  additional experience in various LIS fields including archives, school library and media center management, and library instruction. The core courses are mostly taught by permanent faculty, but adjuncts and teaching fellows enable the program to offer a broader range of electives and specialization courses.  For example, Miriam Meislik, a media curator at the University of Pittsburgh’s Photographic Archives, teaches an elective course dealing with Photographic Archives; Lisa Santucci, Assistant Dean for Instructional Services and Emerging Technologies at Miami University Libraries, teaches an elective on the library’s role in teaching and learning;  Joe Prince, librarian at the Marshall Middle School, teaches an elective on Storytelling; and Sally Myers, librarian at the Penn Hills High School, teaches regularly in the School Library Certification program. Doctoral students in the LIS program assist with the core courses, or may design and teach electives. This is a critical component in their education as future faculty members. Adjunct faculty and teaching fellows in specific specializations are selected and supervised by the lead faculty for the specialization. For example, Richard Cox selects the adjuncts and teaching fellows who teach elective courses in the archives specialization. For general courses, the faculty can nominate appropriate adjuncts and teaching fellows who have professional experience or research interests in areas related to the course. The nominations of such instructors are considered by the LIS Program faculty who review the candidate’s CV and pertinent professional experience. Adjunct faculty and teaching fellows undergo the same teaching evaluation processes as full-time faculty including the student evaluations (OMET). See Appendix FAC 4 for a complete list of courses taught with instructors.

The assignment and evaluation of instructors is independent of the mode of course delivery. Full-time faculty members teach the same course online that they do on-campus. Part of this is a function of the former delivery method, which involved recording on-campus classes for online access. But a primary motivation for teaching across platforms is to ensure that online students receive the same quality instruction and learning experiences as on-campus students. Adjuncts and teaching fellows are retained to teach a specific course, regardless of how the course is delivered.

Being part of an Information School, faculty make major commitments to research both in their fields and across disciplinary boundaries. Richard Cox has been a prolific author of books and articles on a wide range of topics in the archives area and in LIS education. He is a three times winner of the Society of American Archivists Waldo G. Leland Award for the best monograph publication of the year. Daqing He has established a strong research record around digital libraries, information retrieval, and Web resources, and Leanne Bowler has developed an impressive record of research in children’s and young adult information behavior and human computer interaction among children and youth. The more recent faculty hires provide a foundation for research that is both deeper and broader. The growth of research programs in science and technology studies, the application of management science concepts and intellectual capital perspectives to library resources and services, and investigation of emerging roles for information professionals in e-research, digital curation and datametrics are anticipated.

The LIS Program is beginning to see, building on the iSchool model, some cross-teaching and cooperative research across the degree programs. Hassan Karimi now teaches a course in Geospatial Information Systems that LIS students can take and Stephen Griffin is teaching a seminar that is cross-listed in all degree programs that explores Digital Scholarship; an introductory version of the latter course is being offered to MLIS students as part of the one-credit modules in Summer 2013. Konstantinos Pelechrinis, a faculty member in the Telecommunications program, offered a PhD seminar in 2012 that looked at network analysis. Daqing He has successfully sought funding for, and implemented, several research projects in partnership with Peter Brusilovsky exploring the creation of adaptive information access tools and technologies. Jung Sun Oh has served as a co-PI on an NSF-funded project to design a personalization and social networking system for short-term communities. Brian Beaton, Sheila Corrall, Richard Cox and Alison Langmead are representing LIS interests as the School shapes a presence in the big data arena. Brian Beaton, Ellen Detlefsen, and Rosta Farzan (a new faculty member in the Information Sciences and Technology Program) have initiated a school-wide working group that is exploring social issues and social problems that have a significant information, media, or technology component; the group is also compiling relevant teaching materials and serving as a platform for cross-program collaboration.