People in the News

David Free

Charlene K. Mandimutsira has been awarded the Texas Exes iSchool Alumni Scholarship for BIPOC Students at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. The scholarship fund was established and funded by iSchool alumni in 2022 in response to a need to support BIPOC students at the UT iSchool. An independent panel of reviewers selected Mandimutsira as the third awardee for the scholarship. Mandimutsira anticipates completing her studies at the iSchool in spring 2027.

Sai Deng, metadata librarian and associate librarian at the University of Central Florida (UCF), has been selected as a recipient of the 2025 UCF Research Incentive Award. This university-level award honors faculty members who have demonstrated an impactful record of research, creative activity, or scholarship that advances the mission of UCF. With a research career that has been centered on improving access to knowledge, Deng’s contributions to metadata innovation, data integration, and digital scholarship have had a lasting impact across UCF. She has collaborated extensively with Digital Initiatives, Special Collections, and university faculty, helping elevate the visibility and accessibility of institutional collections.

Lauren Reiter has been named head of the William and Joan Schreyer Business Library and appointed the Louis and Virginia Benzak Business Librarian at the Penn State University Libraries. She had served as interim head since March 2024.

A business liaison librarian at Penn State from 2012 through 2024, Reiter supported the academic and scholarship success of Penn State’s departments of economics, finance, risk management, accounting, and management. Her responsibilities in this role included course instruction sessions, outreach programming, and curation of subject-specific library resources, as well as faculty research activity and service to the scholarly field of librarianship.

Eileen Dewitya has been named the Frank Borden Hanes Curator of the Rare Book Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries.

Daniel Fandino is the new digital exploration center librarian at the University of Central Florida Libraries.

Lisa Gregory has been appointed curator of the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries.