Faculty Spotlight: Adjunct Lecturer, Nancy Roderer
An "iSchool hanger-on," Nancy began a long association with the school as a student and has returned sporadically over the years to teach, advise, and work on projects.
Nancy describes herself as an iSchool hanger-on; having begun a long association with the school as a student and returning sporadically over the years to teach, advise, and work on projects. She has taught at the college since 2004, and has most recently assisted in the preparations for the accreditation of the MLIS program by the ALA. She has not yet found a good cocktail party description of what she does professionally, finding that “understanding and facilitating information use” is not very effective, and best kept to discussions with colleagues at the school. Nancy worked in the areas of medical informatics and librarianship at Columbia, Yale, and Johns Hopkins Universities for over 25 years. As an administrator, Nancy’s favorite questions are “How will that proposal make a difference?” and then “How did that change make a difference?” Given these interests and experience, Nancy has mainly taught Information Use, Library Evaluation, and Health Informatics. Having begun her teaching elsewhere with Post-Doc students and MDs, she found the switch to graduate students at the iSchool challenging at first, and only ventured to teach an undergraduate course very recently. Regardless of the student’s level, however, what she finds most rewarding about teaching is the creativity of students, whether it be in embracing and expanding on ideas new to them or in avoiding work. Nancy enjoys the world of crafts, and likes to take classes to get a better understanding of the challenges involved in creating these art forms. A recent foray was into neon sculpture, and she is very much enjoying one of her instructor’s sculptures in her time at home during the pandemic.