Associate Professor Elin Jacob will receive the 2009 Trustees Teaching Award from the School of Library and Information Science.

This past year, Dr. Jacob has taught courses in the MLS program, co-taught a Doctoral seminar, and sponsored many independent studies. She taught a core class, Representation and Organization, and an advanced elective, Metadata. Core classes can be difficult to teach, however, Dr. Jacob's student evaluations are consistently good and she receives high rankings for being responsive to her students' attitudes and reactions in class and for making herself available for consultation and advising outside of class.

She works hard developing, maintaining and updating her classes in an effort to keep the course content current, making sure that her students are aware of the cutting edge of research in her field; in the spring term she integrated a new version of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative into her Metadata class content after the semester began (no easy feat) and introduced new forms of knowledge representation (folksonomies and ontologies) into the Representation and Organization class.

For many years, Dr. Jacob has been dedicated to her Masters and doctoral students teaching courses on the domain of the representation of knowledge. As indications of the effectiveness of her teaching, her classes tend to have large enrollments and students tend to take additional elective courses from her in subsequent semesters.

Dr. Jacob is a reflective practitioner who assesses her pedagogy regularly and continually makes improvements to her classes. She is also concerned with helping others develop their teaching skills and this year mentored several doctoral students who are teaching sections of the courses for which she is responsible.

Congratulations to Dr. Jacob.

Announcement Submitted by:

Pnina Shachaf, Chair, SLIS Faculty Policy Council
Howard Rosenbaum, SLIS Associate Dean

Posted March 26, 2009