Betty J. Turock

For 22 years, Betty J. Turock was a faculty member at SC&I, spending eight years as director of the master’s program and chair of the Department of Library and Information Science. During her tenure, the program was named among the top ten in North America by U.S. News and World Report.

Turock is a former president of the 68,000-member American Library Association (ALA), the oldest and largest library association in the world. She testified on more than a dozen occasions before Congress and the Federal Commission on Communications (FCC). Among the accomplishments she is most proud is the creation of the Spectrum Scholarship Program, which has educated over 700 diverse students as librarians. She has also held management posts across the U.S. in school, public, and academic libraries in N.J, N.C, and A.Z. She was also a senior advisor in the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Library Programs.

Turock received the ALA Jesse Shera Award for Outstanding Research in 1989, the Distinguished Alumna Award from Rutgers in 1994, the NJ Library Leadership Award in 1995, the Rutgers Presidential Award for Distinguished Public Service in 1997, the ALA Equality Award in 1998, and the Lippincott Award in 2006. In 2000, she was honored by ALA as one of the Extraordinary Library Advocates of the Twentieth Century and in 2012, ALA conferred on Turock Honorary Membership, the highest honor the association bestows.

Ph.D., Rutgers University
Masters degree, Rutgers University
Bachelor's degree (magna cum laude, Charles Weston Scholar), Syracuse University)