Ian McCullough was recently elected as a Liaison Council Member-At-Large to the Executive Committee of Akron AAUP. He will preside as a co-chair during meetings of the Department’s Liaisons Council in addition to serving on the Executive Committee. His term lasts until next fall.
Congratulations on being elected!
Tammy Stitz will be presenting the poster, Providing Thesis and Dissertation Support for Engineering Graduate Students: Preliminary Results, at IDEAL ’19: Advancing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility in Libraries & Archives on August 6 and 7, 2019. In case you are unfamiliar, IDEAL aims to foster awareness and appreciation of workplace diversity issues through the exploration of exemplary practice, contemporary theory, thought leadership, and strategy development for all those in the academic and public library, archives, and museum sectors.
Good for you, Tammy!
Tammy Stitz wrote Chapter 16: Training STEM Students in LaTeX in the following publication:
Renfro, Crystal1, crenfro1@kennesaw.ed., and Elisabeth2, eshield5@kennesaw.ed. Shields. “Transforming Libraries to Serve Graduate Students.” College & Research Libraries News, vol. 78, no. 4, Apr. 2017, pp. 202–205. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.uakron.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eft&AN=122393404&site=eds-live.
Nice work, Tammy!
Ian McCullough had this recent publication:
Chloe Mills and Ian McCullough. 2018. “Academic Librarians and Labor Unions: Attitudes and Experiences” portal: Libraries and the Academy, 18(4), 805-829.
Well done, Ian!
Tammy Stitz presented Making your PDFs Universally Accessible at the 2018 Code4Lib Midwest Meeting on June 7, 2018. This presentation discussed the features of accessible PDFs based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 showing how to correct some issues using Adobe Acrobat DC when using a few different programs to generate the PDFs.
Nice work, Tammy!
Tammy Stitz and Shelly Blundell had the following article published:
Evaluating the accessibility of online library guides at an academic library. Journal of Accessibility and Design for All, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2018).
Find it at: http://dx.doi.org/10.17411/jacces.v8i1.145
Well done, Tammy!
You may have noticed in a recent UA email that announced Achievement Awards winners, that one of our very own is being honored. Tammy A. Stitz is this year’s faculty winner of the 2017-18 Exemplary University Service Award. Tammy was nominated by both Ian McCullough and Marilia Antunez. Here are some excerpts from their award-worthy nomination letters.
Ian McCullough on Tammy Stitz:
Her work ethic is frankly astonishing and absolutely unmatched in my experience – at Akron and all jobs before.
She has created and maintained several high quality and much needed workshops to help STEM graduate students. The first is her long-running and respected LaTeX training series, which several professors send their new graduate students to.
… she created a new series of workshops in the last year or so to improve the ease and quality of graduate work, hosting seven seminars in person and five online in addition to all of her regular library instruction.
An example of her pushing us to be better is her most recent research has been on accessibility – both electronic and physical. She has done what a good faculty librarian will do – she studied the literature, determined best practices, and brought back that knowledge to the library for implementation.
Marilia Antunez on Tammy Stitz:
Tammy has collaborated successfully with other units on campus by initiating and working with technical writing faculty to combine the strengths of the academic program with that of the UA Libraries to best meet the students’ needs.
She applied and received funding from the Academic Library Association of Ohio (ALAO) to develop workshops to help engineering and computer science students in this essential graduation requirement.
At the international level, Tammy offers free and valuable resources to all learners. She created an online guide with thousands of views worldwide . . .
From day to day responsibilities to represent the University at the international level, Tammy is often the first and last person to leave work. Tammy is intelligent, innovative and works very hard to do the best she can for the UA community including our primary users—UA students.
In addition, Tammy’s work on the Accessibility Committee, which is a Faculty Senate Subcommittee may have played a role. She shared her and Shelley Blundell’s research which resulted in the creation of the wiki-space that was created for all web authors about web accessibility. They wrote an article to be published by the Journal of Accessibility for all in the near future. Shelley and Tammy provided a workshop for faculty during disabilities week last November. Jamie Newhall, Patrick Tabatcher, and Tammy will provide a workshop about video accessibility next week as part of the Library Gather Series.
Congratulations, Tammy! Very impressive!
Ian McCullough, Assistant Dean, Research and Instruction Services
In January, Ian McCullough was named an Assistant Editor for refereed articles by the journal Issues in Science and Technology Libraries, where he had been a peer-reviewer for several years.
In addition, he was granted the joint title of Assistant Professor, Chemistry starting January 1st, 2018.
Congratulations, Ian!
Ian McCullough, Physical Sciences Librarian and Interim Head,Science & Technology Library
Ian McCullough presented his research on librarian attitudes towards unions – “Labor Casualties Through Casual Labor: The Last Ten Years of Tenure.” at the Pennsylvania Library Association Annual Conference & Expo on October 16, 2017.
Nice work on the presentation, Ian!
Tammy Stitz, Applied Science Librarian
In the September 2017 ALAO Newsletter, Tammy Stitz had an article published about LaTeX in the column “News from the trenches”. Check out this link for the story: https://newsletter.alaoweb.org/2017/09/15/notes-from-the-trenches-2/
Nice going, Tammy!