Lynne McKechnie, acting associate dean and associate professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), has accepted the position of Cleary Visiting Professor, the Information School’s first endowed professorship. McKechnie will be introduced to the Northwest library community at an April 11 lecture in celebration of Beverly Cleary's 90th birthday, part of a week of outreach to children served by local public libraries. She will begin teaching at the iSchool in January 2007.

The Beverly Cleary Endowed Professorship in Children and Youth Services was established to honor Cleary’s writing career and commitment to librarianship for children and young adults. Author of more than 30 books for children and young adults, Cleary (then Beverly Bunn) earned a degree in librarianship from the UW in 1939, and her first job was as a librarian in Yakima. Her books, in which fictional children face the challenges that every child faces growing up, have won numerous honors, including the 1984 Newbery Award (for Dear Mr. Henshaw), the 1975 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award and the 2000 Library of Congress Living Legends award in the Writers and Artists category.

McKechnie, who spent 20 years as a children’s librarian before earning her Ph.D. in Information Science in 1996, now educates future children and youth services librarians and advocates for childhood literacy and increased access and support for public libraries. At UWO in London, Ontario, she teaches children’s literature, library services for children, everyday life information practices, research methods and reference. “I am fortunate to be able to teach in an area that draws both on my professional experience and my research interests,” McKechnie says. “I particularly enjoy helping to develop new youth services librarians and mentoring new scholars.”

McKechnie’s core research area focuses on the public library's role in developing children as readers. She is conducting additional ongoing work around the use of theory in library and information science research, with particular emphasis on information seeking behavior. Her current research project, “Doing Early Learning: An Observation Study of Early Learning Programs,” is supported by a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Co-author of Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals About Reading, Libraries, and Community and co-editor of Theories of Information Behavior and also edits the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, McKechnie is also coordinating chair of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) Research Committee and chair of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Special Interest Group (ASIST SIG) Use Award Adjudication Committee.

She is proud to be linked to Beverly Cleary through this professorship and sees the position as an opportunity to honor her work.  “Each morning I wake up, look at the pile of Ramona stories on my bedside table, and smile,” she wrote in a letter after accepting the professorship. “Mrs. Cleary's work has quietly enriched the lives of generations of children throughout the world. My work as the Cleary Professor will be to celebrate this and ensure that it continues by enabling the work of children's librarians, public libraries, and scholars so that there will always be someone to put a copy of Ribsy into the hands of the 9-year-old for whom it is the right book at the right time.”

Dr. McKechnie’s first lecture as the Cleary Professor will be delivered on April 11 in honor of Beverly Cleary’s 90th birthday.  For more information see the UWAA Cleary event page.