About Us

Project Athena was created to recruit and prepare future LIS faculty to help replenish our nation's insufficient supply. The project was initially funded by a grant from the IMLS, who has reported that nearly two-thirds of the nation's librarians will retire by 2019. The goals of the first grant (Sept. 2002 - Aug. 2005) were to create a self sustaining faculty recruitment model, a doctoral course to prepare future faculty, and a toolkit for evaluating efforts to recruit future faculty.

Project Athena received a second grant from the IMLS (Dec. 2003 - Dec. 2006) to extend the network of relationships used to recruit faculty with the first, and to create a decision making tool called P2hD. As Project Athena is committed to sharing its work products, they can be found on this website.

In this section of the website, you can find links to information that will help you understand Project Athena better - our partner schools are the home schools of the Project Athena fellows, our sponsor schools provide sites for mentoring these fellows and for recruiting potential doctoral students for LIS research programs.

A description of the grants that support Project Athena is provided in Our Grants. We also provide highlights of the progress reports we make to the IMLS and we share research results from our work, which may be of interest to the LIS community.

If you would like to make further inquiries about our project, please feel free to contact Dr. Kathleen Burnett (kburnett@mailer.fsu.edu) Project Athena's Lead Principal Investigator or Dr. Laurie Bonnici (laurie.bonnici@ischool.drexel.edu) Project Athena's Co-Principal Investigator.