Posted Jan. 28, 2010
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Award-Winning Professor to Head Information, Library Science
Gary Marchionini, Cary C. Boshamer Professor at the University, has been appointed dean of the nationally top-ranked School of Information and Library Science.
The Board of Trustees approved the appointment Thursday, effective April 1. U.S. News & World Report has the school's master's degree program tied for first in its annual rankings.
A Carolina faculty member since 1998, Marchionini heads the school's Interaction Design Laboratory and chairs its personnel committee. He serves on the Campus Research Computing Committee and has helped lead numerous campus initiatives since arriving at Carolina. Last spring, he was nominated by his students and selected as the school's Outstanding Teacher of the Year.
He is president of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, an international organization of professionals who focus on improving access to information. Marchionini is chair of the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine's Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee. He has served on more than a dozen editorial boards and is editor of the Morgan-Claypool book series, Information Concepts, Retrieval and Services.
Marchionini has published more than 200 articles, book chapters and technical reports on topics related to digital libraries, information seeking, usability of personal health records, multimedia browsing strategies and personal identity in cyberspace. He has been awarded numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and other foundations, as well as research awards from companies including Microsoft, IBM and Google. He is the author of Information Seeking in Electronic Environments, part of a Cambridge University Press series.
Marchionini earned a doctorate in curriculum development, focusing on mathematics education, and a master's degree in secondary mathematics education from Wayne State University in 1974 and 1981, respectively. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and English from Western Michigan University in 1971. He was a faculty member at the University of Maryland for 15 years. He served on the faculty and as a researcher at Wayne State from 1978 to 1983 and taught mathematics at the East Detroit Public Schools for seven years.
Barbara B. Moran, previous dean of the school from 1990 to 1998, has served as interim dean since May 2009 when José-Marie Griffiths, the previous dean, completed her term.
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