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Dr. Helen Tibbo honored as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists
September 15, 2005 - Dr. Helen Tibbo, professor at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been inducted as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists. The prestigious award was presented on Friday, Aug. 19, 2005, during a special awards ceremony at SAA's 69th Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA.
The award of Fellow is the highest honor bestowed by SAA to members who demonstrate outstanding contributions to the archival profession.
“Dr. Tibbo has a strong commitment to and passion for archives and technological developments,” said Dr. José-Marie Griffiths, dean of the School of Information and Library Science. “She is a person of vision, collegiality and ethical practice who is committed to mentoring and developing the next generation of archivists. She is very deserving of this professional honor.”
The selection and induction of SAA Fellows began in 1957 and is awarded to a select few members each year. Tibbo is one of only 192 honored as a Fellow over the past 48 years from an organization currently comprised of more than 4,200 members.
Fellows are selected by a committee comprised of the five recent past presidents of SAA and three SAA members (who are also Fellows). They make their determinations on the following criteria:
- Appropriate academic education, and professional and technical training;
- A minimum of seven years of professional experience in any of the fields encompassed in the archival profession;
- Writing of superior quality and usefulness in advancing SAA's objectives; and
- Contributions to the profession through work in and for SAA.
Tibbo is known globally for her work with archives and records management, information services for the humanities, electronic information retrieval and reference service. She has won several awards and recognitions for her achievements—including the School of Information and Library Science's 2000 Frances Carroll McColl Term Professorship.
Her current research projects include “ Developing Standardized Metrics: Towards Understanding the Impact of College and University Archives and Special Collections on Scholarship, Teaching, and Learning,” funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; “Minds of Carolina,” a project that is exploring how to best facilitate self-archiving at colleges and universities; and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) Electronic Records Research Fellowship Program: Building Capacity Across the Profession. For the next two years she will be chairing UNC's Digital Curation/Institutional Repositories Committee that will plan and build a pilot digital repository for the UNC at Chapel Hill campus.
“In her research, Professor Tibbo focuses on the users, and their discovery and use of our holdings, particularly in today's networked environment,” said H. Thomas Hickerson, a former SAA president and member of the committee. “Employing evolving metrics for assessing the success of archival methods, tools, and services, she has been a leading figure in research, analyzing the nature of users and use of primary sources. This research is essential to critical assessment of existing archival practice and even more important in designing practices and services for the 21st century.”