Dr. Helen Tibbo, a faculty member at UNC at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS) since 1989, has been promoted to full professor.

Dr. Tibbo, who served as associate dean from 1996 to 2000, recently completed a term as Frances Carroll McColl Professor. She teaches in the areas of archival studies, records management, digital preservation and access, online information retrieval, and reference.
Dr. Tibbo has explored the question of how archives and other cultural heritage information repositories, such as manuscript repositories and museums can best provide access to their voluminous holdings. As a foundation for understanding how such access can best be facilitated, she is conducting an international user study of historians, the Primarily History Project, with Dr. Ian Anderson from the University of Glasgow.

She also directed the creation of a preservation metadata template for the North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online (NCECHO) program and is currently leading a three-year National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) funded project to study how faculty, staff and administrators manage their digital desktops at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, and throughout the UNC System. For the past two years, she has overseen and taught in the Digitization for Cultural Heritage Professionals workshops held at SILS, developed by the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute from the University of Glasgow. She is currently embarking on the Minds of Carolina project to assist university faculty with digital self-archiving.

Dr. Tibbo earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Bridgewater State College, a master’s degree in library science from Indiana University, a master’s degree in American studies from the University of Maryland, and a Ph.D. in library and information science from Maryland.