SLIS welcomes new faculty

TWU SLIS welcomes new faculty members Rachel Simons and Meti Tmava.

Rachel Simons completed her Ph.D. in Information Studies this summer at The University of Texas at Austin. She previously received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Georgia, both in Comparative Literature. Rachel's research centers on diversity and ethics issues in both the use of information and communication technology (ICT) and in ICT development, including a growing focus in community informatics. Her dissertation research analyzes the effects of organizational structure and cooperative computer work tool selection on diversity within everyday video game design work and makes concrete suggestions for better supporting individuals from marginalized and underrepresented groups within this field. Rachel has also examined the impact of gender-based harassment on social media and the use of crowdsourcing to improve machine-learning approaches to generating image captions for people who are visually impaired. She has previously been involved with projects related to improving university-level ethics education for information and computation professionals and supporting curricula for teaching future social media professionals within MLS programs.

Ahmet (Meti) Tmava was born and grew up in Kosovo (part of former Yugoslavia). He graduated with a B.S. in Psychology in 2007, from Texas Woman's University. He completed his master’s degree in Information Science, Medical Informatics track, in 2010. During his MLIS coursework, he became fascinated by the inclusive nature of Information Science, and in 2010, he enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Information Science Ph.D. program at the University of North Texas. He completed his Ph.D. in 2017, and his dissertation was featured as one of eight "Notable Dissertations for 2018" by American Libraries Magazine. The focus of his dissertation was on the challenges that proponents of Open Access (OA) repositories face in communicating the value of OA publishing to faculty and researchers. His passion for OA scholarly research and publishing led him to develop an online course regarding Open Access and its impact on Scholarly Communication. Meti taught several courses during 2017-2018 as an Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Information Science at UNT, including Information and Knowledge Professions, Research Methods and Emerging Technologies. In May 2018, he started working at the TWU Libraries as a research data management librarian, providing specialized research data support to faculty, students, and staff. His primary goal was to assist faculty and students with finding and accessing data, data organization, documentation and sharing, and drafting data management plans.

Meti has presented at national and international conferences in the LIS field, such as the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries, the Association for Information Science and Technology, the International Conference on Knowledge Management, and the Association for Library and Information Science Education. His primary research interests include: scholarly communication, Open Access publishing and archives (repositories), information organization in an online environment (metadata), and the impact of emerging technologies on libraries. 

 

Page last updated 4:42 PM, July 12, 2022