Ruth V Small

Ruth V. Small, Laura J. & L. Douglas Meredith Professor and Director of the iSchool's nationally ranked school media program, received a doctorate in instructional design, development, and evaluation and has been on the faculty of the iSchool since 1989.
She is director of the iSchool's School Media Program and is also founding director of the Center for Digital Literacy, Center for Digital Literacy (CDL), an interdisciplinary, collaborative research and development center

The mission of CDL is to explore the need for and acquisition of multiple literacies, develop tools to foster these literacies in a variety of contexts, and study the consequences of having or not having these literacies on children, youth, and adults. Since its founding in 2003, CDL has brought in close to $6 million in external funding and has fully or partially supported more than 40 graduate students from throughout the University.

Ruth’s research is in the application of motivation theories and models to a variety of information contexts. Ruth has received two national research awards for her scholarly work, the 2001 Carroll Preston Baber Research Award from the American Library Association and the 1997 Highsmith Research Award from the American Association of School Librarians. Her current research focuses on the motivational influences on and information resource needs of young innovators.

Ruth has received three awards for her teaching including the School of Information Studies Professor of the Year in 1996, Teacher of the Year from the Syracuse University Alumni Association and, in 2006 Syracuse University's highest honor, the Meredith Professorship for Teaching Excellence, the first iSchool recipient of this award.

Before coming to the iSchool, "Dr. Ruth" (as her students affectionately call her) worked as a college administrator, high school principal, librarian, teacher, and instructional design and evaluation consultant. Ruth is president of SMALL Packages, a consulting business specializing in motivational design and evaluation.

Research Interests

Ruth's research focuses on the motivational aspects of information use by both children and adults in a variety of contexts and has authored or co-authored more than 100 publications, including seven books, and served on the editorial boards of three professional journals.  For her work, she received the 1997 Highsmith Research Award from the American Association of School Librarians and the 2001 Carroll Preston Baber Research Award from the American Library Association. She has received funding for more than 20 grants to study motivation in a variety of contexts.

Teaching Interests

Ruth has taught at every level and has had students in her classes from every program in the iSchool. Most of the courses Ruth teaches are related to the design and presentation of information. She has created several new courses, including IST 444: Information Reporting and Presentation; IST 611: Collaborative Technology Projects in Educational Organizations, IST 617: Motivational Aspects of Information Use, and IST 663: Motivating 21st Century Learning; and IST 662: Instructional Strategies & Techniques for Information Professionals, . She also has developed an online academic component to the school media internships (which she supervises) and a doctoral seminar entitled "Motivation, Information Systems, and Organizations." 

Ruth founded and directed the iSchool's Summer Institute on Leadership & Change from 1991 to 1996 and from 1993 to 1996 the School's distance learning master's degree program in library and information science, the first web-based, limited residency program in library science in the U.S. She was voted the iSchool's 1996 Professor of the Year by the graduate students of the School and in 2004 Teacher of the Year by the Syracuse University Alumni Association. In 2006 Ruth was named a Syracuse University Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence, its highest teaching honor.  

In 1999, she was named Faculty Technology Associate for Syracuse University's Faculty Academic Computing Support Services, participating in presenting more than 25 workshops to faculty from colleges and universities throughout central New York. She presented her workshop on Motivating Students to the Teaching Assistants Orientation Program for seven years. Ruth has consulted and conducted workshops on motivation and evaluation for dozens of organizations and at professional conferences throughout the country and in South America and Asia.

Professional Interests

Ruth has directed dozens of research and evaluation projects. Her current projects focus on professional training for librarians in delivering quality services to students with disabilities and research on how and why a person becomes and remains innovative, and how the use of social media affects the motivation to learn. She has evaluated a wide range of educational programs, from the Department of Library Science at the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) to the Connecting Schools and Libraries Project of the Dewitt Wallace-Readers Digest Fund and from management training programs at Miller Brewing Company to Pappyland, the award-winning, nationally-broadcast children's educational television program. 

Ruth has been an instructional design consultant to a variety of organizations, including Motorola, Central New York Regional Transportation Association, Tompkins County Community College, Renaissance Learning Systems, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at RIT, and Bausch & Lomb. She was a research consultant to the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Personal Interests

I am an avid collector of antiques to artwork. I love to visit art museums, watch movies (particularly comedies), and play with my grandchildren.  When I have time, I love to knit; have been knitting since I was eight years old.