About Our Team
Melissa Gross is a professor in the School of Information at Florida State University and past president of the Association for Library and Information Science Education. She received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998, received the prestigious American Association of University Women Recognition Award for Emerging Scholars in 2001, and the Outstanding Faculty Member Award for 2002-2003. Dr. Gross has published extensively in the areas of information seeking behavior, information literacy, library program and service evaluation, information resources for youth, and teacher/librarian collaboration. Her teaching interests include research methods, the information needs of children and young adults, reference, and the development and evaluation of information programs and services. Her research specialty is information seeking behavior and concentrates on understanding user information seeking behavior as a basis for the design, evaluation, and improvement of information resources, programs, services, and systems.
Don Latham earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and his M.S. in LIS and Specialist degrees from Florida State University. His research interests include young adult literature, information behavior of youth, and information literacy. He has published articles on information literacy among college undergraduates, constructions of literacy and identity in young adult literature, the Peritextual Literacy Framework, and has authored two books: David Almond: Memory and Magic and (with Melissa Gross) Young Adult Resources Today: Connecting Teens with Books, Music, Games, Movies, and More, and he has two edited volumes forthcoming: one on the Peritextual Literacy Framework and the other on implementing the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. He teaches Information Needs of Children, Information Needs of Young Adults, Diverse Resources for Children and Young Adults, Graphic Novels in Libraries, Technical Communication, and Theory and Foundations of Information Sciences. He is a member of ALISE, ALA, ACRL, YALSA, and the Children's Literature Association.
Shelbie Witte is the Kim and Chuck Watson Endowed Chair in Education and Professor of English Education and Adolescent Literacy at Oklahoma State University. She was previously an Associate Professor and Coordinator in English Education in the School of Teacher Education at The Florida State University. Witte studies 21st century literacies and multi-modal approaches to adolescent literacy learning, particularly the intersection of these literacies and literacy pedagogy. She has published in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Science Education, Voices from the Middle, Library and Information Science Research, and other journals centering on 21st century literacies. She is the co-editor of six books focused on this work, including Writing Can Change Everything: Middle-Level Kids Writing Themselves into the World (forthcoming, 2020), Studying Gaming Literacies (2020), Playing with Teaching (2020), Literacy Engagement through Peritextual Analysis (2019), Towards a More Visual Literacy (2019), and Young Adult Literature in the Digital World (2019). She continues to actively serve as a member of various committees and projects of the National Council of Teachers of English, including co-editing (along with Sara Kajder) Voices from the Middle, the premiere middle-level journal for English Language Arts teachers. She is currently vice-president of the Oklahoma Council of Teachers of English and director emeritus of the Oklahoma State University Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project. She earned a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis on English Education and Technology from Kansas State University, a M.S. in English Education from Kansas State University, and a B.S. in Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum with an emphasis in English Education from the University of Oklahoma.