Category: Faculty

Professor Rich Gazan presented Thanking the Algorithm: Discovering Prosocial Communities Through YouTube Music Recommendation Pathways at the 2026 Hawaiʻi International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), held January 5-9 in Lāhainā, Maui. In its 59th year, the HICSS conference is a gathering of researchers from diverse disciplines who study the social and technological aspects of information systems.

The paper was part of the Communication, Digital Conversation, and Media Technologies minitrack within the Digital and Social Media track, and attracted participants from a range of disciplines represented within Library & Information Science and the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Communication and Information Sciences, which Rich now chairs.

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Library and Information Science Program is delighted to welcome its newest faculty member, Dr. Alexandria “Alli” Rayburn. Dr. Rayburn joins the program following the completion of her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan School of Information, where her dissertation, Women in Museum Computing: Implementing Transformative Data Practices in Collection Work, explored the intersections of technology, gender, and cultural heritage.

Her teaching will center on archival studies, with additional interests in knowledge organization. This fall, she will lead LIS 655: Digital Archives, followed in Spring 2026 by LIS 654: Records, Archives, and Memory and LIS 657: Records Management.

Dr. Rayburn’s academic work is deeply informed by her personal passions, including textile arts and women’s crafts. She is especially interested in how these often underrepresented art forms can be integrated into archival systems and digital preservation practices.

When asked what excites her most about joining the UHM LIS  ʻohana, she shared two reflections. First, she is thrilled to return to the close-knit learning environment she experienced as an undergraduate in a small residential college at Michigan State University, where she found inspiration in the liberal arts model within a large university setting. “Working with small groups of students who are truly engaged with their studies is something I deeply value,” she noted. Second, she looks forward to building relationships with professionals in Hawaiʻi’s museums and archival communities. “It’s exciting to immerse myself in a new cultural context and collaborate with those stewarding collections I have so much to learn about.”

Outside of her scholarship, Dr. Rayburn is an avid quilter and textile artist. She also enjoys hiking, camping, kayaking, paddleboarding, and recently earned her scuba certification. While she’s experienced many of these activities in the Midwest, she’s enthusiastic about exploring them in the unique landscapes of Hawaiʻi and connecting with the ʻāina.

Sophia Ziegler of Louisiana State University recently interviewed LIS Assistant Professor Tonia Sutherland for the Journal of Critical Digital Librarianship:

In this interview, recorded September 14, 2021, Sophia Ziegler talks to Tonia Sutherland about her work in critical digital librarianship, focusing specifically on her presentation during the LDL as Data Speaker Series in late 2019, as well as the new project, “Premised on Care: Redescription as Restorative Justice in American Archives.” Ziegler and Sutherland also discuss the role of LIS education in creating a profession that is more prepared for the to describe content in a way that honors everyone’s heritage.

Read the full interview here.

Life continues to be full of changes and adjustments for us all during the COVID-19 pandemic. The LIS Program Chair, Dr. Rich Gazan, took to the Hawai’i Library Association’s newsletter, Kolekole, to discuss the Program’s newly added program goal: Take care of each other, and take care of ourselves.

You can read more about how this this goal has changed Program-wide communications, curriculum, and strategic plans in the Winter/Spring 2021 issue of Kolekole.

You may also be interested in the LIS Program’s Working Together at a Distance statement, too!

Our very own Dr. Noriko Asato and Dr. Andrew Wertheimer made the front page of Hawaiʻi’s Civil Beat today to talk about their research on the history of Japanese bookstores in response to the Hawaiʻi State Public Library System’s exclusion of Japanese language books.

 

 

 

 

The library excluded Japanese readers at a time when Japanese people in Hawaii exceeded 40% of the population, according to research by Andrew Wertheimer and Noriko Asato, professors in the Library & Information Science Program at the University of Hawaii.

While local Japanese were allowed to become library members, the researchers found that the library rejected requests to serve them.

“Now we say intellectual freedom is part of the professional ethics of librarianship, but at that time in Hawaii, it certainly wasn’t,” Wertheimer said.

To read more: https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/10/new-research-shows-how-honolulus-japanese-spurned-by-the-library-made-their-own-bookstore-culture/

Stop the presses – our own Program Chair, Dr. Rich Gazan, was recently interviewed by the Maui News for library-related insight on the revitalization of print media and the importance of brick-and-mortar bookstores:

Rich Gazan, professor and chair of University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Library and Information Science program, said people need to take breaks from the internet, and that’s helping the resurgence of print media.

“I think people who realize they need ‘digital detox’ time are a big part of the reason print book sales have risen recently while e-Book sales have fallen,” he said via email Saturday.

“Print is peaceful and tangible. You don’t need to log in. It has no pop-ups, notifications or crashes. You feel and hear the crispness of a turning page. Of course there’s room for content to be delivered on all kinds of devices, but the intimacy of print will always be with us, as it has for thousands of years.”

Well said, Dr. Gazan!

For the full article, please visit Maui News.

Dr. Noriko Asato joined the editorial advisory board of De Gruyter’s Open book series, Library & Information Science, Media Studies. De Gruyter has a history of over 260 years of publishing scholarship. De Gruyter Open offers unrestricted access to high quality, innovative and peer-reviewed research to general readers and scholars through open access publications. Registered users can access such e-Books as Indigenous Notions of Ownership and Libraries, Archives and Museums (2016) ed. by Camille Callison, Loriene Roy, and Gretchen Alice LeCheminant, free of charge.

This May, Dr. Asato also received the Sarah K. Vann Award from the UHM Chapter of the American Library Association for her work to promote intellectual freedom and international librarianship.