Claudia Gollop and Paul Jones retire

The UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) has stopped requiring graduate program applicants to submit Graduate Record Exam (GRE) scores. SILS implemented the change over the summer, so students matriculating in January will be the first cohort admitted under the revised standards.

“We were very pleased when the UNC Graduate School gave us the option to remove this requirement,” said Brian Sturm, Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at SILS. “The majority of SILS faculty did not believe the test scores were a good predictor of student success, and we were concerned that the test was an unnecessary barrier, especially for applicants from underrepresented backgrounds, first-generation college students, and people returning to school after a long break.”

The UNC Graduate School is allowing professional schools and academic departments at Carolina to suspend the GRE requirement through at least 2024, during which time they will collect data on the change’s impact.

Over the summer, three SILS faculty members transitioned to new academic leadership roles within the school.

Professor Brian Sturm became Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, taking over for Clinical Associate Professor Ron Bergquist, who had held the position since 2016. Among other duties, Sturm is responsible for developing the course schedule each semester, working with faculty to review and revise the curricula, and administering financial aid.

Sturm had previously served as coordinator of the Master of Science in Library Science (MSLS) program. Teaching Assistant Professor Casey Rawson, who earned both her MSLS and PhD from SILS, assumed that role.

Associate Professor Brad Hemminger became coordinator for the Master of Science in Information Science (MSIS) program, which had previously been led by Clinical Professor Paul Jones, who retired this summer.

Claudia Gollop in the SILS Library in 2017. Photo by Katherine Perales, UNC SILS.

Claudia Gollop, PhD, joined the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) in 1994 as an assistant professor. She became an associate professor with tenure in 2000 and served as associate dean from 2004-2007.

In addition to teaching courses in reference services, health information resources and services, and information issues related to diverse user groups, she served as advisor for numerous master’s papers and dissertations.

Her research centered on issues of consumer health information acquisition and dissemination, particularly among older adults. Her groundbreaking article “Health Information-Seeking Behavior and Older African American Women,” published by the Medical Library Association in 1997, has been cited more than 100 times.

After undergoing angioplasty and cardiac rehabilitation in 2007, Gollop launched a new line of inquiry into cardiac rehabilitation information referrals practices with the goal of improving the heart health of women and minorities.

Gollop received the Edward G. Holley for the Good of the Order Award from SILS in 2012, held the Frances Carroll McColl Term Professorship at SILS, and received the Round Table for Ethnic and Minority Concerns (REMCo) Roadbuilders’ Award in Library Education from the North Carolina Library Association.

Most recently, she was named the 2018 winner of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) Award for Professional Contribution. The award is presented to ALISE members for regular and sustained service that promotes and strengthens the broad areas of library and information science education through the holding of appropriate offices and positions within the profession.

A native of New York City, Gollop received her BA from City College-City University of New York (CUNY) and MLS degree from Columbia University. She worked as a library/information professional in public, special, and academic libraries for nearly 15 years prior to returning to school to earn her doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh.

Paul Jones spent 42 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, holding various roles in information technology services and then academic appointments in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and the UNC School of Information and Library Science.

He retired this summer as a Clinical Professor at SILS, Coordinator of the Master of Science in Information Science (MSIS) degree program, and Director of ibiblio.org.

One of the largest “collections of collections” on the internet, ibiblio.org was formed as a collaboration between UNC–Chapel Hill’s MetaLab, formerly known as SunSITE, and the Center for the Public Domain in September of 2000. The online public library now offers freely available software and information on topics such as music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies, and regularly registers between 12 million to 16 million worldwide transactions per day.

Jones was involved with many firsts during his time at Carolina, including UNC’s first website, email service, and internet radio at station WXYC-FM. Though he’d been one of its earliest adopters, Jones quit using email in 2011 and shifted his electronic communications almost exclusively to social media. Jones had grown tired of the tedious and time-consuming work of managing his email inbox, and decided to try a more interactive approach with other platforms.

In 2013, he made headlines by “rediscovering” the first web page ever created, Tim Berners-Lee’s Demonstration Page for Hypertext 91. Berners-Lee had copied the page to Jones’ NeXT cube during a visit to Carolina in 1991, and the page still remains accessible through ibiblio.org.

Most recently, Jones was an advisor on the Arch Mission Foundation Lunar Library project. The spacecraft carrying the 30-million page library crash-landed on the moon in 2019, but the Foundation believes the 25-layer nickel disc containing Wikipedia, the Guttenberg Project, and more remains intact.

In addition to a bachelor’s degree in computer science from North Carolina State University, Jones holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. His first chapbook, “What the Welsh and Chinese Have in Common,” was a North Carolina Writers’ Network publication winner. His reviews have been collected in Contemporary Literary Criticism (Gale) and some of his poems are collected in Best American Erotic Poetry: 1800 – Present (Scribner’s), and in 27 Views of Chapel Hill (Eno Publishers). He is also a contributing editor to the Heath Anthology of American Literature.

Paul Jones in his Manning Hall office in 2017. Photo by Johnny Andrews, UNC-Chapel Hill.