2nd Annual Metronet Information Literacy Project Conference:
Information Literacy: The Bridge to College Readiness

Friday, June 20 - UofM Conference Center, St. Paul

Featured speakers

Larry Hardesty
Larry Hardesty is currently the Interim University Librarian at Winona State University. He retired in 2006 after serving more than thirty years as an academic librarian, including as Dean of the Library (2004-2006) at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), College Librarian (1995-2004) at Austin College, Director of Library Services (1983-1994) at Eckerd College, and Head of the Reference Department (1975-1983) at DePauw University. He has served in several positions in the Association of College of Research Libraries (ACRL), including president (1999-2000), member of the board of directors, chair of the college libraries section (1995-1996), member of the College and Research Libraries Editorial Board (1990-1996) and chair of the Charlotte ACRL National conference (2003). His other publications include Faculty and the Library: The Undergraduate Experience (Ablex, 1991) and Books, Bytes and Bridges (ALA, 2000). His articles on library instruction, collection development, computer center and library relationships, and faculty and administrators attitudes towards the academic library have been published in College & Research Libraries, Journal of Academic Librarianship, portal, Library Issues, and numerous other library journals. His article ‘Faculty Culture and Bibliographic Instruction: An Exploratory Analysis,” published in Library Trends (Fall 1995) received the ACRL Instruction Section’s Publication of the Year Award for 1995. He currently serves on the editorial boards of portal and Library Issues. In 2001, Hardesty received the ACRL Academic Research Librarian of the Year. In 2002, he received an outstanding alumnus award from UNK. Previously he had received the distinguished alumnus award from the School of Library and Information studies of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2002), where he received his MALA and the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science (2000), where he received his Ph.D. in library and information science. He continues to serve as the Founding Director of the College Library Directors’ Mentor program and has matched over 200 first-year college library directors with mentors during the 15 year history of the program. He also continues to serve as the liaison between ACRL and the National Resource Center for the First Year Experience and Students in Transition.

Kent Pekel
Kent Pekel is an educator who has worked at the school, district, federal and university levels. He is currently the founding Executive Director of the University of Minnesota’s College Readiness Consortium, a new organization working to provide every Minnesota student with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in higher education and the global economy. From 2000-2005, Kent served on Superintendent Patricia Harvey’s senior staff in the Saint Paul Public Schools, where he led the offices of strategic planning and policy, research and assessment, educational technology, school-wide continuous improvement, fund development, high school reform and government relations for the 41,000-student urban school district. From 1995-2000, Pekel held several senior staff-level positions in the Clinton Administration, including White House Fellow assigned to the Director of Central Intelligence, Special Advisor to the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and Special Assistant to the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education. Prior to his time in Washington, Pekel taught at the high school level in Minnesota and at the college level in China. He holds a B.A in East Asian Studies from Yale University and a Master’s in Education from Harvard. He lives in Saint Paul with his children Adam and Victoria.

Joan Lippincott
Joan K. Lippincott is the Associate Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), a joint project of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE. CNI, based in Washington, DC, is an institutional membership organization that advances the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. She has been with CNI since 1990.

At CNI, Joan has provided leadership for programs such as New Learning Communities, Assessment of the Networked Environment, Working Together, and collaborative facilities and learning spaces. She has written articles and made presentations on such topics as networked information, learning spaces, collaboration among professional groups, assessment, and teaching and learning in the networked environment. Her chapter on “Net Generation Students and Libraries” in an EDUCAUSE book on Educating the Net Gen www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen/ has received wide distribution. She is past chair of the editorial board of College & Research Libraries News and is on the board of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD).

Joan previously held positions at the libraries of Cornell University, George Washington University, Georgetown University, and SUNY at Brockport. In addition, she worked at the Research and Policy Analysis Division of the American Council on Education and the National Center for Postsecondary Governance and Finance at the University of Maryland.

Joan received her Ph.D. in higher education policy, planning, and administration from the University of Maryland, her M.L.S. from SUNY Geneseo, and an A.B. from Vassar College.

Additional information is available at:
http://www.cni.org/staff/joan_index.html