Awards

Boren Scholarships and Fellowships - 2010

About Timothy Thompson

Timothy Thompson is a dual-degree master's student in library science and Latin American and Caribbean studies at Indiana University. In his application essay, Tim highlighted his keen interest in both digital libraries and Brazilian studies, two areas that have gone hand in hand with his professional development as a librarian: within his MLS degree, he is also pursuing a digital libraries specialization, and his first two years of study at Indiana University were funded by consecutive Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships in Portuguese.

He has worked closely with Luis A. González, Indiana University's Librarian for Latin American, Iberian, Latino, and Chicano-Riqueño Studies, under whose supervision he completed an internship centered on digital collection development. Using open-source reference management software, he helped implement a complete redesign of González's Researching Brazil, an online gateway that provides a searchable index of Brazilian scholarly journals.

In 2010, Tim received a Boren Fellowship to spend the following year in Brazil. During the first half of 2011, he continued his study of advanced Portuguese and took language courses at the University of Brasília, where he also completed a graduate-level course in Information Architecture. Concurrently, he enrolled in an independent readings course supervised by González and wrote a review essay of 12 recent books related to library and information science in Brazil.

In April of 2011, he was selected to receive the 2011 Rovelstad Scholarship in International Librarianship, awarded annually by the Council on Library and Information Resources to sponsor travel to the IFLA World Library and Information Congress, held this year in San Juan, Puerto Rico. During the latter half of the year, he conducted fieldwork for his master's capstone project, which he will conclude during the upcoming semester. His research focuses on the contribution that digital libraries can make as educational resources supporting human development.