Dr. Welsh is a native Mississippian who graduated summa cum laude from the University of Southern Mississippi with a B.A. degree in anthropology, a Certificate in Humanities, and minors in social studies and classical studies. While at Southern Miss, she participated in British Studies for study-abroad credit and was a member of the Honors College as well as Phi Kappa Phi, Phi Theta Kappa, Lambda Alpha, Gamma Beta Phi, and Golden Key Honor Societies. She earned an M.L.I.S. and later a Ph.D. in information sciences from the University of Tennessee. At UT, she was a member of Kappa Tau Alpha Honor Society and awarded the Hilton A. Smith Graduate Fellowship as well as Best Technical Project Award and Best Doctoral Paper Award from the School of Information Sciences.

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She began teaching at Southern Miss in summer 2003; she was awarded the 2007 Excellence in Teaching Award from the College of Education and Psychology, was one of 12 faculty chosen for the 2007-08 Learning Enhancement Center Podcasting Pilot Project, a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) Fellow, served as a member and president of the Friends of Cook Library Board, and co-managing editor of SLIS Connecting e-journal.  She has served on the UT School of Information Sciences Advisory Board, as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS), and on the International Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries (QQML) Advisory Committee and International Scientific Committee. In addition to being published in scholarly journals and conference proceedings, she has authored several book chapters, co-authored a book on information literacy and another book on the research process.

 

Teaching and research interests include information literacy, historical research, bibliometric research, spatial analysis, information retrieval, museum studies, and archival studies. From July 2015 to August 2021, she served as Director of the School of Library and Information Science and from 2007- 2019 taught a summer course, British Libraries, Archives, & Special Collections, based in London and Edinburgh.

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