On Sunday, July 27, as part of the annual conference of the American Library Association, the I School hosted a reception in Washington, D.C., for alumni and friends of the school to reconnect with each other and with the school.
The reception welcomed alumni from the school's past forty years (from the class of 1967 to the class of 2007), with degrees from the School of Librarianship (up to 1976), the School of Library and Information Studies (1976–1994), the School of Information Management and Systems (1994–2006), and the School of Information (2006–present).
Many of the alumni were excited by the opportunity to reconnect with former colleagues or classmates. Norma Kobzina (MLIS '79) said, “For me, one of the most exciting aspects of this reunion was contacting many of my former students, some of whom I had not seen for many years.”
Kobzina, who also taught at the School of Library and Information Studies and is now a librarian in the UC Berkeley Library, especially enjoys building bridges between alumni from the school's different eras. “Having been a student at the SLIS myself, and then teaching there for 10 years, I have very strong feelings about ... getting alumni to work with the students and alumni of SIMS and the I School.”
