Pitt's School of Information Sciences Honors Alumni at 2009 Distinguished Alumni and Professional Achievement Awards March 26

PITTSBURGH-In recognition of individual accomplishments in their respective professions and for contributions to the community, the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences will honor three alumni at the 2009 Distinguished Alumni and Professional Achievement Awards at 6 p.m. March 26 in the William Pitt Union Ballroom, 3959 Fifth Ave., Oakland. The event will feature a reception followed by an awards ceremony at 7 p.m.

The Distinguished Alumni and Professional Achievement Awards were established in 1967 to recognize the outstanding achievements made by Pitt's School of Information Sciences graduates. The 2009 honorees are Distinguished Alumni Award winner Christine Borgman, a professor and presidential chair in information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and Professional Achievement Award winners Edward Mandell, a founding member of the Allegheny County Library Association, and Thomas Reinsel, an executive-in-residence at Sewickley Oak Capital.

Brief biographies of the honorees follow.

Borgman is the author of "Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet" (MIT Press, 2007) and "From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World" (MIT Press, 2000), both of which have won the Best Information Science Book Award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology. She has authored more than 180 journal articles, conference papers, and books in the fields of information studies, computer science, and communications. In addition, Borgman is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the U.S. National Academies' Board on Research Data and Information.

Mandell has more than 40 years of experience promoting public libraries as community centers. He has served as branch manager and director in community libraries in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. In 1992, he became director of the Penn Hills Library, where he established the Penn Hills Library Foundation to raise funding for construction of a new facility. His efforts came to fruition with the October 2007 opening of the William A. Anderson Library of Penn Hills. Mandell also is a member of the American Library Association as well as the Pennsylvania Library Association.

Reinsel has been a strategist and visionary in the IT management industry for more than 17 years. He is the founder of Pepperweed Consulting, a technology consulting firm based in Sewickley, Pa. He served Eli Lilly and Company, the 10th largest pharmaceutical company in the world, in various analyst roles and team-leader positions focusing on process alignment and IT infrastructure management decisions. He also was a founding member of the HP worldwide users group in 1993 and has hosted numerous software user conferences.

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