Alumni Accomplishments
Innovative Librarian Introduces Modern Technology, Receives Award from Louisiana Library Association
If you’re thinking of a dowdy librarian with hair in bun and cat-eye glasses perched on the end of her nose hissing shhhhh, you’ve got it wrong.
Debra Cox Rollins ’73, Pineville, La., a librarian at Louisiana State University in Alexandria, defeats the comical librarian stereotype. She’s up-to-date on the latest technologies that help people access information more efficiently.
For her efforts, Rollins won the 2006 Anthony H. Benoit Mid-Career Award, given by the Louisiana Library Association. This award recognizes Rollins’ implementation of a wireless computer network and a supply of laptop computers for student use at LSUA’s Bolton Library. Having proposed the technological update back in 2003, Rollins received
a Student Technology Fee Grant of $19,000 to cover the costs.
Her expertise in library work extends beyond her employment at LSUA. Rollins served for 16 years as a school library media specialist with the Rapides Parish School System. She has also participated in many professional organizations, including the American Library Association, the American Association of University Professors, the Louisiana Library Association and the American Association of School Librarians. Colleagues say that Rollins “unfailingly seeks to provide the best library service possible” and is “an extraordinary asset.”
Rollins does nothing to perpetuate the image of a mousy bookmiser of a librarian, but she still might ask you to lower your voice if you visit her library.
2004 Communication Alumna Selected to Intern in Kosovo
The Advocacy Project (AP) selected Barbra Bearden ’04, who studied communication at Centenary, to be one of 18 graduate students from North American universities to intern this summer with AP partner organizations around the world. These interns were selected from over 140 applicants. Barbra is currently pursuing her master’s in international communication at American University in Washington, D.C. Her research specialty is the role of culture, information technology and the educational system in democracy building and community empowerment for developing countries.
Her internship entails working with the Kosova Women’s Network, an organization that seeks to support, protect and promote the rights and interests of women and girls throughout Kosovo.
1954 Alumnus Honored for Contributions to Arts, Music and Culture
Noel Tipton ’54, Eastham, Mass., was recently honored by Eventide Arts for his contributions to the art, music and cultural life of Cape Cod.
After graduating from Centenary, where he studied piano and organ under Ralph Squires and William Teague, Tipton studied at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, earning a master’s degree in piano performance. He then went to Columbia Teachers College and worked as a consultant to Dr. Robert Pace.
From 1958–88, he lived in Westfield, N.J., where he and his wife, Betty, also a Juilliard graduate, owned and operated a teaching studio. During the same period, Tipton also served as associate organist and choirmaster at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
The Tiptons moved to Cape Cod in 1988. Both taught at the Cape Cod Conservatory of Music and Art, and Noel became director of music at Dennis Union Congregational Church. Betty continued to teach, but in 1993, Noel received a grant from the Ella Lyman Cabot Trust that allowed him a year’s sabbatical so he could research Stephen Foster. This set him on a creative path that precluded his teaching in the future, but he retained his position as organist and choirmaster at Dennis Union Church.
In 1993, he started Eventide Arts, a cultural organization dedicated to the promotion of understanding social diversity through plays, concerts and mixed media events. Under Tipton’s leadership, the organization received many grants, the most outstanding of which was from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities to produce a musical play about Stephen Foster and host a symposium called “Unraveling Racism, Minstrelsy Revisited.” This symposium featured three national authorities on Stephen Foster: African American scholar Horace Clarence Boyer, biographer Ken Emerson and musicologist Deane Root.
Subsequently, he has written musical plays about Emily Dickinson and Anna Howard Shaw, the first female Methodist minister in the world, who was minister at Dennis Union Church from 1877–84.
Recently he was named Artistic Director Emeritus at a celebration including Eventide’s honorary chairperson, Julie Harris. Harris received one of five 2005 Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Awards.
With the hefty organizational work behind him, Tipton is now free to continue his creative efforts. At the present time he is doing a major rewrite of Amherst Sabbath, a play with music based on the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson. With input from William Luce, author of the Tony Award-winning play Belle of Amherst and Julie Harris, who created the role, this creative effort advances the theory that the old congregational hymn tunes inspired some of Dickinson’s most memorable and psychologically complex poems.