Simmons GSLIS is pleased to welcome Dr. John M. Unsworth as the Allen Smith Visiting Scholar for 2012 - 2013. Unsworth will be bringing his award-winning digital humanities expertise to the GSLIS community.

Unsworth currently serves as Vice-Provost for Library and Technology Services and Chief Information Officer at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He is the 2005 recipient of The Richard W. Lyman award, as well as the 2005 Vodafone fellowship at Kings College at the University College in London. His upcoming initiatives include hosting a THATCamp Libraries to be held February 23, 2013 and a Digital Humanities Symposium to be held March 15th – March 16th, 2013, in honor of late faculty member Allen Smith. Both events are being co-sponsored by Simmons GSLIS, Brandeis University, and other local institutions concerned with bringing greater visibility to digital humanities scholarship. These events will be held at the Simmons College Boston campus; for more information, please contact Bethany Fair at [log in to unmask].

Before arriving at Brandeis, Unsworth served as Dean and Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and Director of the Illinois Informatics Institute. His research interests include: humanities text mining, digital libraries, electronic textual editing, and scholarly communication. For more information about Unsworth, please visit: http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/index.html

The Allen Smith Visiting Scholars Program, which honors the memory of distinguished teacher and scholar Allen Smith, was established in 2009 by his family. Allen Smith Visiting Scholars are expected to be distinguished practitioners, educators, or researchers renowned for their work in reference, oral history, or the study of librarianship and information service in the humanities.

The nationally Top Ten 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 is a nationally recognized university located in the heart of Boston that includes an undergraduate college for women, the nation's first MBA program designed specifically for women, and graduate programs for women and men in health sciences, social work, library and information science, education, liberal arts, and communications management. For more information, please see: http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/