Wisconsin Library Association Annual ConferenceFeatured Speakers
Here's a great opportunity to learn first-hand about some of our speakers at this year's conference.
Brad Baker is Dean of Libraries and Learning Resources at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, where he has worked for the past 26 years. In his current position, Baker is responsible for NEIU libraries, distance learning and oversees the campus Center for Technology and Learning. Baker has been active in ALA, ACRL and the Illinois Library Association as well as a number of library cooperative activities at the local, state and national level. Baker’s educational background includes an MA in Library Science from the University of Chicago, an MA in American Studies from Northeastern Illinois University, and a BA in History from Trinity College.
Mary Brintnall-Peterson is a professor with the University of Wisconsin-Extension and presents programs in the areas of family caregiving and grandparents raising grandchildren. She has developed two national satellite programs and presented at numerous national meetings on the issues and concerns of relative caregivers. Mary was selected as a member of Generations United National Network of Expert Trainers and recently received the AARP Grandparent Award. She has also published and developed web sites and educational resources for relative caregivers and professionals who work with this emerging family structure.
Carole McGinley Edland is an artist, musician, registered nurse, and Doctor of Ministry, and also the founder and facilitator for the Butterfly Ministry in La Crosse. A Wisconsin native, she has lived in La Crosse since 1970. She has been a member of the Friends of the La Crosse Public Library for 25 years, and the Friends of Wisconsin Libraries for six years. Carole is on a number of literacy task forces, and is a founding member of the La Crosse Community Literacy Coalition. She has written one book, Devyn Has Cancer: A Tale of Two Angels, and is working on another.
Mary Relindes Ellis was born and raised in northern Wisconsin. Her stories have appeared in The Milwaukee Journal, the anthology Uncommon Waters: Women Write About Fishing, and Glimmer Train magazine. The Turtle Warrior is her first novel and winner of the 2005 Banta Award, sponsored by the Wisconsin Library Association Foundation and Banta Corporation.
Diane Fay is the current Chairperson of the ALA-APA [Allied Professional Association] Standing Committee on the Salaries and Status of Library Workers. She retired as a supervisor in the Cataloging Department at the Boston Public Library after 34 years of employment. While working at the BPL, she taught supervisory skills at the City of Boston’s Training Center. She is a Past President of ALA/LSSIRT [Library Support Staff Interests Round Table] and a Past President of the Massachusetts Coalition on New Office Technology/Office Education Project (CNOT/OTEP). She is also a member of the Board of the Friends of the Cotuit Library in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Ruth Irene Garrett, author and lecturer, left the Amish faith and her family in 1996, and was ultimately excommunicated from the Amish church. Since that time she has fully immersed herself in modern life. She married Ottie Garrett, joined the Lutheran church, learned how to drive, and has earned her high school degree. She looks forward to attending college. One of her great passions is photography; something the Amish frown upon since they do not want to be photographed. Both Irene and Ottie Garrett, who live in Glasgow, Kentucky, devote their time to helping Amish families who have left their communities. Her books include Born Amish, Crossing Over: One Woman’s Escape from Amish Life and My Amish Heritage.
Peter Hamon has been a librarian in Wisconsin and a member of WLA for well over 30 years. His career began at the Oshkosh Public Library, followed by several years as the Director of the State Reference and Loan Library, and he is soon to retire after 24 years as the Director of the South Central Library System. He has been WLA legislative advocate on several occasions, and served as the WLA President in 1991. He currently spends as much time as possible as a level 35 Druid in the online world of Mal'ganis, and also juggles.
James L. Hansen, F.A.S.G, has been, since 1974, the reference librarian and genealogical specialist at the Library of the Wisconsin Historical Society, where he assists several thousand researchers a year in their genealogical and historical research. He has taught beginning and advanced genealogical research courses over Wisconsin's Educational Telephone Network. Among his publications are articles on a variety of genealogical topics, a bibliography of territorial Wisconsin newspapers, and a guide to the library in which he works. He was the 1994-1995 president of the Association of Professional Genealogists, and, in 1995, was named a fellow of the American Society of Genealogists. In 2002, he was awarded the Filby Prize for Genealogical Librarianship at the NGS conference in Milwaukee.
Fred Heath is Vice Provost of the University of Texas Libraries at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. He currently serves on the Boards of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) and is a member of the Steering Committee of the Digital Library Federation (DLF). He makes frequent presentations at national and international library and information conferences on digital libraries, LibQUAL+ and service issues, and has published extensively on library service and management issues.
Kevin Henkes grew up in Racine and now lives in Madison with his wife and their two children. In addition to winning the 2005 Caldecott Award for Kitten’s First Full Moon, he has created many beloved books for children, including Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse, Olive’s Ocean (for which he was awarded a 2004 Newbery Honor), Sun & Spoon, Wemberly Worried and Oh!, which was illustrated by his wife, Laura Dronzek. All of Mr. Henkes’ books have been published by Greenwillow.
Janet Swan Hill graduated magna cum laude from Vassar College in 1967, and received her MA in librarianship from the University of Denver in 1970. She began her professional career as an intern at the Library of Congress. In 1978, she went to Northwestern University Library as Head of Cataloging, and, in 1989, moved to the University of Colorado Libraries in Boulder, where she is Associate Director for Technical Services. Hill has published and spoken on topics ranging from cataloging, education for cataloging, technical services, and faculty status and tenure for academic librarians. She is also a judge of figure skating singles, pairs, and ice dancing for the United States Figure Skating Association, and member and founder of a Masters synchronized figure skating team, which recently placed eighth at the US National Championships.
Fran Kaufmann is Acting Assistant Director, MacKay Library, Union County College in Cranford, New Jersey. Prior to accepting this position, she was Client Services Librarian at Seton Hall University. Ms. Kaufmann has held library positions at Montclair State University, the College of Saint Elizabeth, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. She has a BA from Penn State University, an MLS from Drexel University, and was awarded an MA in History from Rutgers University in May 2005. She is immediate Past President of the New Jersey Library Association, College & University Section/ACRL, New Jersey Chapter. She has presented at regional and state library conferences, as well as having poster sessions and roundtable discussions accepted for ACRL and ALA.
Tomas Lipinski, JD, LLM, PhD, has worked in a variety of legal settings, including the private, public and non-profit sectors. He has taught at the American Institute for Paralegal Studies and at Syracuse University College of Law. In summers, he is a visiting associate professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Lipinski currently teaches, researches and speaks frequently on various topics within the areas of information law and policy, especially copyright, privacy and free speech issues in schools and libraries, and serves as Co-Director of the Center for Information Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Jacqueline Briggs Martin grew up on a dairy farm in Maine with three brothers and two sisters, received a BA degree from Wellesley College and an MA in Child Development from the University of Minnesota. Martin has published 14 books for children, beginning with the three-book Bizzy Bones series and the ALA Notable Book Grandmother Byrant’s Pocket (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). Her picture book biography of a self taught scientist, Snowflake Bentley, illustrated by Mary Azarian (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), was awarded the 1999 Caldecott Medal by the American Library Association. The Lamp, The Ice and The Boat Called FISH, illustrated by Beth Krommes (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), was named an ALA Notable Book. Her most recent books are The Water Gift and the Pig of the Pig, illustrated by Linda Wingerter (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), and On Sand Island, illustrated by David Johnson (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). Jacqueline Briggs Martin began writing books for children because of her own family’s experiences with books. “We read stories every day when my children were young,” she has said. “And I decided I would like to write books that children and parents could enjoy together.” She and her husband Richard live in Mount Vernon, Iowa.
Dayce McAndrews is currently in her fifth year as a teacher at HolmenMiddle School where she works with both the Talented and Gifted and English as a Second Language programs. Dayce and the eighth grade social studies teachers are entering their fifth year of participation in the National History Day program.. Strong research, critical thinking, and presentation skills are among the main points of focus in the Holmen NHD program. It has become a vital part of the curriculum due in part to the academic benefits, but also because it helps students develop a more personal interest in history, a stronger level of confidence, and a growing relationship with members of the community.
Hope A. Olson is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information. She combines an MLS from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with fifteen years of professional experience cataloguing and teaching organization of information, cataloguing, classification, indexing, and issues relating to gender, diversity, and globalization. Dr. Olson’s research addresses problems of bias in subject access to information and in classification in general. She has published in both scholarly and professional journals and has produced three books: The Power to Name: Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries (Kluwer Academic, 2002); Information Resources in Women’s Studies and Feminism as editor (K.G. Saur, 2002); and Subject Analysis in Online Catalogs 2nd ed. with John J. Boll (Libraries Unlimited, 2001). She was editor-in-chief of the journal Knowledge Organization from 2000 to 2004. For more information, see http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/SOIS/directory/faculty/olson.htm.
Anne Pellowski, a former librarian at the New York Public Library and renowned storyteller, teacher, and author, has published such titles as The Story Vine, World of Children’s Stories, The Family Storytelling Handbook, and, most recently, Drawing Stories from Around the World. She has performed and conducted storytelling workshops in over 100 countries. Since 1996, she has been a volunteer with IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People, giving workshops in developing countries on the creation of books for children in minority languages, where such books are virtually non-existent. She is also a founder and director of the Information Center on Children’s Cultures, part of the United States Committee for UNICEF [United Nations Children’s Fund.] Anne Pellowski has been called a “world resource,” and received the National Storytelling Network Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
Vonna J. Pitel served as District Media Coordinator/high school IMC Director and elementary director for over 35 years for the Cedarburg School District. She graduated from UW-Milwaukee School of Information Science (1972) and Cardinal Stritch University with a degree in Administrative Leadership (1994). Pitel served as WSLMA President in 1983, and in various leadership positions in WEMA, including four years on the Board of Directors, and was the recipient of a Herb Kohl Fellowship in 1990. She has served on the Cedarburg Public Library Board of Trustees since 1993.
Jeff Rand has been a reference librarian at the La Crosse Public Library for more than twenty years. During the program Laughing Librarians: Breaking the Humor-Impaired Stereotype, he will share some of his favorite reference questions and he makes this solemn guarantee: no serious library issues will be discussed, analyzed, or even considered.
Louise S. Robbins is Professor and Director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Library and Information Studies. Robbins's historical research, which focuses on libraries and intellectual freedom during the McCarthy period, has won awards from the Association for Library and Information Science Education, the Southwest Historical Association, the American Library Association, and the Library History Round Table. Her most recent book, The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), is winner of the Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award from the American Library Association’s Library History Round Table and the Willa Award from Women Writing the West. She is also author of a number of articles. Robbins has lectured widely in the United States and overseas, most recently in China, Korea, Japan, and Kyrgyzstan. She teaches in the areas of management and intellectual freedom, as well as in government information sources and services. She has recently completed a two-year term as president of the Association for Library and Information Science Education.
Valentine J. Schute, Jr., AIA, originally from Philadelphia, graduated Cum Laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1975, with a Bachelor of Architecture Degree. In 1975, he and his wife, Deb, moved to La Crosse. They have two children. Schute’s architectural career began with an internship at a La Crosse architectural firm, and he became a registered architect in 1978, and a partner in 1979. He started his own architectural firm in January 1981, and now employs a staff of 13. The firm focuses on civic, commercial, campus, church, residential, and historic preservation projects in the tri-state region. River Architects’ mantra is joint authorship leads to joint ownership. Schute is a member of the American Institute of Architects, the Wisconsin Society of Architects, the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, the American Library Association, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Kurt Squire is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Educational Communications and Technology division of Curriculum and Instruction. Dr. Squire received his PhD from Indiana University in Instructional Systems Technology. His dissertation examined learning through playing Civilization III in three learning environments. Dr. Squire is also a research scientist at UW-Madison’s Academic ADL Co-Lab, a visiting Research Fellow at MIT and co-director of The Education Arcade, a research and service project investigating the educational potential of digital gaming. He is also a former elementary and Montessori teacher.
Constance Steinkuehler joins the faculty of Educational Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor in the Fall. She earned her MS degree in Educational Psychology at UW-Madison in 2000, and, before that, three simultaneous BAs in 1993, at the University of Missouri-Columbia in Mathematics, English, and Religious Studies. She was an associate lecturer in Educational Psychology, a Spencer fellow, and writes online for Joystick101.org and Terra Nova. Current interests include the ways in which online play spaces align (or fail to align) with practices valued outside the game, rethinking notions of what it means to be 'literate' in a globally networked online world, youth culture, and issues of gender and identity.
Gregory Wegner received his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction in 1988, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 1993, Wegner has served as the National History Day (NHD) coordinator for western Wisconsin at UW-La Crosse. He regularly visits schools to work with students and teachers on integrating NHD into the curriculum. Although the program has traditionally centered on middle and high school students, the La Crosse and Eau Claire regions opened up NHD for the first time to 4th and 5th graders in 2005.
Note: WLA members who are conference presenters are not included in this listing unless they are featured at luncheon events.