Library director earns doctorate

Tim Schlak, director of Northwestern College’s Ramaker Library, has earned a doctoral degree from the University of Pittsburgh after successfully defending his dissertation last fall. He will be awarded a Ph.D. in library and information science during commencement ceremonies May 1.

Schlak’s dissertation is entitled “Image Retrieval as Information Seeking Behavior: Self-Categorizations of Users to Retrieve Images.” He studied users’ motivations for retrieving digital images in Web environments.

Schlak, who joined Northwestern’s staff last summer, also earned a master’s degree in library and information science and a master’s in Slavic languages and literatures, both from the University of Pittsburgh. He received a bachelor’s degree in Russian area studies from Wittenberg University and worked in a United Methodist Church initiative to send mission teams to Russia.

A former president for the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Schlak served as a teaching fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and published an article on photographic archives in Archival Science.