Here's what Joel Southern recently wrote about Dr. Bill

Associate Professor Bill Robinson will retire at the end of spring term 2008. Dr. Robinson was recruited to the University of Tennessee in 1972 by founding director of the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences Gary Purcell. He has served as assistant director since 2005 and has also served as acting director of the School of Information Sciences.

Over his 35 year tenure at SIS, Dr. Robinson has taught hundreds of students and some 10 courses, including required courses in Research Methods and the Development and Management of Collections. He has authored some 45 articles with an emphasis on Tennessee librarianship, book publishing, and government publications.

His subject specialties lie in social sciences and reference services, although, over the years, Dr. Robinson has become a “gap filler,” teaching a broad variety of courses. Dr. Purcell asked him to be the school’s “book person,” and so to this end, he developed and taught classes in the history of the book, book publishing, collection development—and later, academic libraries, government information, and reader’s guidance.

Dr. Robinson was awarded the Tennessee Library Association’s Frances Neel Cheney Award for “contributions to the world of librarianship and books through the encouragement of the love of books and reading” in 1999. He received UT Libraries’ Outstanding Service Award in 2001, and the College of Communication and Information Outstanding Teaching Award in 2005–2006.

Dr. Robinson graduated Magna Cum Laude from Claremont Men’s College in 1961, and then attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, jointly administered by Tufts and Harvard Universities, where he received a master’s degree in international relations in 1962. He received his M.S.L.S. at the University of Southern California in 1965.

Dr. Robinson was awarded a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois in 1973. His dissertation was on “Subject Dispersion in Political Science: An analysis of references appearing in the journal literature, 1910-1960” for which he was awarded the Berner-Nash Award for the outstanding doctoral thesis of the year. Dr. Robinson originally planned to become a Foreign Service Officer.

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Joel Southern