February 27, 2006
As the newest member of the St. John’s University Libraries,
Prof. Kathryn Shaughnessy joined the faculty in 2005, but she is by
no means a novice in the profession. The daughter of a high
school librarian, she began working in her mother’s school in
Maryland as a youngster, and continued her library training through
her employment at the Trinity School library, the Loyola/Notre Dame
Library (which serves Loyola College in Maryland and the College of
Notre Dame of Maryland) and the Fordham University
Library.
Prof. Shaughnessy’s educational background includes a bachelor’s
degree in philosophy with a minor in business and fine arts from
Loyola College in Baltimore, MD, and an MA/ABD in philosophy and
religion from Fordham University. The focus of her graduate
studies was medieval metaphysics, which includes moral theology,
negative theology, realist epistemology, ethics and
esthetics. Prof. Shaughnessy considers herself a Thomistic
philosopher at heart, concentrating her doctoral research on the
role of non-contradiction in theological and philosophical
approaches to knowing God in Nicolas of Cusa and Thomas Aquinas, a
topic on which she has given talks for the Jacques Maritain
Society. She is also a May candidate for a master’s degree in
library and information science from St. John’s University.
Prof. Shaughnessy began working for the University in 2004 in
the Office of Online Learning & Services, where she served as
the content manager for St. John’s Central before accepting her
current position as an Instructional Services Librarian for the
University Libraries. In addition to traditional instruction
sessions, she offers workshops
on setting up a research strategy, finding books and articles,
citing sources and avoiding plagiarism. In
collaboration with her colleagues, she is creating upper level
information fluency tutorials and expanding the department’s
Robodemo instructions for on-campus and distance learning patrons,
which will compliment the information literacy and database
tutorials already available to library patrons through WebCT and
the libraries’ website. She is currently
developing audio tours for the University Libraries as well
as enhancing the library’s audio instruction, and has begun
investigating the podcast as a new method of information
delivery and as an emerging form of scholarly
communication. Additionally, Prof Shaughnessy is
working with fellow faculty to incorporate information literacy
into individual classes and is working on an Information Resources
component in WebCT which may be incorporated into upper level
theology and social justice-related programs. She regularly
offers workshops through the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL)
on how to integrate new technologies into teaching, research, and
lifelong learning, and is also involved in the Title III project to
further develop writing, critical thinking and information literacy
within the Scientific Inquiry core curriculum.
Prof. Shaughnessy’s research interests include information
ethics, chiefly information literacy and information fluency,
and increased access to information through technology,
particularly open access and scholarly communication initiatives.
In her scholastic career she has worked for two academic journals,
Thought: Review of Culture and Idea (Fordham UP,
1990-1993) and Vera Lex: Journal of the International Natural
Law Society (Pace UP, 1999-2001), where she served on the
editorial board and as book review editor. She has also
worked as a book reviewer for the Journal of International
Natural Law Society and the International Philosophical
Quarterly. In addition to her professional and research
responsibilities at St. John’s, Prof. Shaughnessy has taught for
St. Joseph’s Seminary for 6 years and recently began teaching for
the New York EPS (Education + Parish + Service) program, sponsored
by Trinity College in Washington D.C.
In her free time, Prof. Shaughnessy enjoys studio arts, movies
and live music, interests which may easily be cultivated in the
fertile cultural landscape of New York City. She has also
used her business and fine arts minors in college to start a modest
calligraphy business. As a college student, she worked for
the Special Events Office of the National Gallery of Art in
Washington D.C., where she served as the “emergency
calligrapher on-call”, among her other jobs. Upon relocating
to New York for graduate school, she began advertising her skills
through wedding agencies and her business began to flourish,
including work for the Columbia University Law School’s Development
Office. She continues to serve as an “emergency calligrapher”
for events, though primarily for her own clients, and enjoys the
fringe benefit of attending the events for which she creates her
art, including dinner at the former Waldorf=Astoria. As a
studio artist, she has done some commissioned work and has had
several of her pieces sold at auction for charity.