It is with great sadness that we share the news that Dr. Julie Hallmark, professor emerita, passed away on February 8, 2020.
Dr. Hallmark will be remembered by former students, alumni, and colleagues for her keen intellect, bountiful enthusiasm, and a charming generosity of spirit that attracted many to the library profession.
Dr. Hallmark was a faculty member at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UT Austin for thirty-five years, where she researched information resources and communication in science and technology (particularly in the geosciences and meteorology) and LIS education in Latin America. Dr. Hallmark lectured and consulted in Latin America and Asia—including Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, Guatemala, Romania, Australia, China, Thailand, and the Philippines—and published a number of articles in the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science, and Issues in Science and Technology Libraries among others. She received the Texas Excellence Teaching Award in 1986.
Dr. Hallmark was also very active in professional associations. She joined the Special Libraries Association (SLA) in 1964, and two years later joined the Geoscience Information Society (GIS), where she served a term as president of GIS and was a member of the Board of Directors of the American Geological Institute. Her work over the years in the geosciences focused on the bibliographic control of geologic guidebooks and the establishment of the international conferences in geoscience information. In 2010, she was honored with the GIS Mary B. Ansari Distinguished Service Award in recognition of her significant contributions to the geoscience information profession. She was the first chairperson of the Texas chapter of the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) and in 1975 was instrumental in founding the first UT Austin ASIS student chapter, serving as faculty sponsor of the group for its first two years. She served on the Board of Directors of the Special Libraries Association (SLA), as chair of the Texas chapter, and chair of the Science-Technology Division. She was a life member of the Texas Library Association.
Prior to joining the iSchool, Hallmark was a chemist at Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Michigan, where she specialized in carbohydrate and enzyme chemistry; a library intern at the NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas; and a reference librarian for the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, specializing in science reference and sci-tech literature searching. She held a B.S. in chemistry, and an M.L.S. and Ph.D. in Library and Information Science, all from the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Hallmark will be remembered by former students, alumni, and colleagues for her keen intellect, bountiful enthusiasm, and a charming generosity of spirit that attracted many to the library profession. She was a thoughtful, inspiring, and influential leader and teacher who enriched the lives of many people, and she will be dearly missed.
Gifts to the Julie Hallmark Graduate Fellowship fund at the School of Information are warmly welcomed. To contribute, please visit the iSchool giving page or contact Shannon Hickson, Director of Development and Alumni Relations, at (512) 232-0738.