January was a month of celebration for graduates of the School of Library and Information Management in Colorado and Utah.
On Jan. 6, 20 graduates of the program in Salt Lake City were honored at the Viridian Event Center in West Jordan, Utah. Donna Jones Morris, the Utah state librarian and SLIM alumna, spoke on behalf of the Utah library community, and Vern Waters, manager of the Salt Lake County Metro Jail Library and SLIM alumnus, gave the commencement address.
Randy Silverman, preservation librarian at the University of Utah and SLIM national faculty, and Susan Spicer, manager of the Salt Lake County West Jordan Library and SLIM alumna, helped hood the graduates.
One of the graduates, Ashley Will, will start work as a librarian at the Salina (Kansas) Public Library, and another graduate, Hyunjin Han, continues in her librarian position at the Mandel Public Library in West Palm Beach, Florida. She started there while still a Utah SLIM student.
The commencement ceremony for SLIM's 15th Colorado master of library science cohort was held the afternoon of Jan. 8, at the American Mountaineering Center and Museum in Golden, Colorado, with 20 graduates participating. The commencement speaker was Jamie LaRue, director of American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and the Freedom to Read Foundation. Additionally, the Colorado state librarian, Gene Hainer, also spoke, offering a nice welcome to the profession on behalf of the Colorado library community. Student speakers were Victoria Blepp and Viviana Casillas.