The Department of Information Science is pleased to announce that Drs. Oksana Zavalina and Maurice Wheeler have been promoted to the rank of full professor.
Born and raised in Ukraine, Oksana L. Zavalina received her undergraduate degree in Library Science in Kyiv and worked for 10 years as a librarian at the National Parliamentary Library and as the library director at the Kyiv School of Economics. Her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Library and Information Science are from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Since joining the Department in 2010, she has served as the Associate Director of the Information Science Ph.D. program and is currently the program coordinator for the general program of study for the M.S with majors in Information Science and Library Science program. She has also worked with doctoral students and candidates at the international level: co-organized Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2018 and 2019 Doctoral Consortium workshops and served on the iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee for iConference 2015.
"This promotion means a lot to me as an information professional and educator, as a recognition of my long-term efforts, and makes an excellent piece of good news that my family and I, just like tens of millions of other Ukrainians, need so much this year," said Zavalina.
Zavalina has been developing and teaching graduate and undergraduate introductory and advanced courses on library cataloging and classification, metadata for digital libraries and archives (particularly language archives), and broader information and knowledge organization. She has led workshops on the future of metadata, and at the invitation of the American Library Association, she developed and has been teaching a popular professional development course on metadata and Linked Data since 2016. Zavalina has authored/co-authored over 100 publications. Her research interests include metadata management, and descriptive and authority metadata evaluation (including quality and change of metadata) in brick-and-mortar and digital libraries and archives, with a focus on subject representation, collection-level description, Linked Data applications, and metadata as a Big Data. She also studies user needs for information organization in language archives and how these needs are currently met. These studies include projects funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services and the National Science Foundation. She has been active as a peer reviewer for a number of journals, conference proceedings, edited monographs, and textbooks. She has co-organized several workshops including the ACM/IEEE 1st International Workshop on Digital Language Archives in 2021.
Maurice Wheeler joined the Department of Information Science as an Associate Professor, after working in administrative positions in academic and public libraries. As a scholar, Professor Wheeler’s research is primarily race-centric and focuses on the convergence of African American culture, information, and historical documentation. He teaches courses that anchor the department’s management curriculum, and serves as the director of the Advanced Management Graduate Academic Certificate and the music librarianship concentration within the Master of Science in Library Science program.
His archival research and curatorial work received high-profile exposure through a Lincoln Center exhibition in 2019, and his publications and extensive scholarly presentations have also resulted in his selection as a research fellow by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Professor Wheeler served on an expert national jury for The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and has numerous times served as a grant reviewer for the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been active in leadership roles in the American Library Association (ALA) and other professional associations, and has served on editorial boards and as a reviewer for top publications in the profession, including Library Quarterly.
Published August 5, 2022.