August 1, 2010 (Boston) – The Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) is pleased to announce that Visiting Professor Fran Zilonis has been appointed director of the School Library Teacher Program, and that Andrew Whitmore and Laura Saunders have joined the faculty ranks as visiting professors.

Zilonis, who was previously an adjunct professor at GSLIS, joined the faculty as a Visiting Professor in Fall 2009. She has more than 30 years of library experience in Massachusetts schools, having been a school library media specialist, high school administrator, educational consultant, college professor, and college administrator, information technology administrator, and author. She is a recognized authority on school librarianship and in 2002 was awarded the Mass CUE Pathfinder Award for her leadership in integrating technology in schools. Simmons GSLIS has been ranked among the top ten programs in the area of Services for Children and Youth. Zilonis became the SLTP Director on July 1, 2010, following the retirement of Professor James Baughman, who directed the highly regarded program for over twenty years.

Whitmore comes to GSLIS from the State University of New York at Albany where he was a lecturer in Informatics. His research interests include open source software, information security and privacy, and the economics of information. His Ph.D. dissertation was entitled, “Toward a Policy Framework for the Design of Information Packages.” Before he started his doctorate, Whitmore worked as an IT auditor for Ernst & Young and as an economist for the Consumer Price Index at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. He is teaching XML and a statistical methods group independent study course this fall. 

In May, Saunders became the first Ph.D. student to graduate from GSLIS. She wrote her dissertation on information literacy as a learning outcome in academic programs and won the Jean Tague-Sutcliffe Award at the 2010 Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) conference for a poster based on her work. Before starting the doctoral program in 2004, Saunders worked at the Simmons’ Career Resource and Beatley libraries. Over the last six years, she has been an adjunct professor at GSLIS. This fall she will be teaching in the areas of reference, evaluation and user instruction.

 The nationally ranked Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science is one of the oldest and largest library and information science programs in the nation. Founded in 1899, Simmons College (www.simmons.edu) is a nationally recognized university located in the heart of Boston that includes an undergraduate college for women, and graduate programs for women and men in management, social work, health sciences, and library and information science.

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