Spotlight on Arlene Taylor

Professor Emerita Arlene Taylor served an appointment as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel this April. She presented two workshops and a colloquium. The first workshop, titled "Practical Applications of Metadata", and the second, titled "Ontologies and Taxonomies: Theory and Practice." were attended by Bar-Ilan master's and doctoral students from the Information Science department. Also in attendance were faculty who teach in the field, practicing professional catalogers, database managers, bibliographers, and library managers from around Israel. Taylor's colloquium was titled "Modern Tools for the Organization of Information."

It was attended by many Bar-Ilan faculty members and students and also by practicing librarians from the area.

For Taylor, it was wonderful to be introduced by Sara Fine (pictured here on the left), Professor Emerita of the University of Pittsburgh, now teaching at Bar-Ilan.
Professor Fine showed the audience pictures of Pittsburgh and Pitt where Taylor and Fine had taught together for about five years during the 1990s.

Of her presentations, Taylor remarked, "Some attendees stated that the presentations helped them to understand how basic principles of information management, which have been used for centuries in classical approaches, are now being reflected in current online initiatives. It was also suggested that some changes might be made in some courses (at Bar-Ilan) due to knowledge gained. It is gratifying to feel that one has been able to help in this way."