Our Team
Emily Knox
Emily is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include information access and intellectual freedom and censorship.
Her most recent book, Foundations of Intellectual Freedom was published by ALA Neal-Schuman in 2022. Her previous book, Book Banning in 21st Century America (Rowman & Littlefield) is the first monograph in the Beta Phi Mu Scholars’ Series. Emily’s articles have been published in the Library Quarterly, Library and Information Science Research, and the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy.
Emily serves on the board of the National Coalition Against Censorship. She is also editor of the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy.
Emily received her PhD from the doctoral program at the Rutgers University School of Communication & Information.
Shannon Oltmann
Shannon M. Oltmann is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky. She obtained her Ph.D. from Indiana University. Her research interests include information ethics, censorship, intellectual freedom, public libraries, privacy, and qualitative research methods. Oltmann is the past editor of the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy and Associate Editor of Library Quarterly. She wrote the book Practicing Intellectual Freedom in Libraries and edited The Fight Against Book Bans: Perspectives from the Field. Oltmann’s work has been funded by the American Library Association and the Institute of Museum & Library Services. She has presented her research at numerous academic and professional conferences and published widely.
Andrew Zalot
Andrew Zalot is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s School of Information Sciences. His research focuses on the intersection of local and online discourse in relation to book banning.
Mapping Information Access is a collaborative, cross-institutional, interdisciplinary research enterprise. On this page, we’ve listed some of the key individuals (in alphabetical order) and partners participating in the project. To get in touch with the team, please email: team [at] mappinginfoaccess [dot] org.
Previous Team Members and Partners
Chris Peterson
Chris is a researcher at MIT’s Center for Civic Media and a member of the Board of Directors at the National Coalition Against Censorship. He’s been mapping information access since 2009, when he mapped banned books using data from the Kid’s Right to Read Project. In 2012 he partnered with MuckRock and the Boston Globe to launch a FOIA campaign requesting book challenges from every public school and library in Massachusetts, a pilot which served as a direct precursor to the current project.
Peterson earned his S.M. in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and his B.A. in Critical Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a Fellow at the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution and a former Research Assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
MuckRock
MuckRock is an open government tool powered by state and federal open record laws. Since many of these laws are outdated and their enforcement more a function of persistence than oversight, MuckRock acts as a request proxy to make the process more streamlined and automated: they file the request (whether by email, fax or even snail mail) it to the appropriate agency, followup to make sure it arrived in the right hands, receive all responsive documents back, scan and upload them in full, as well as provide an easy online interface for users to track the whole process. As the only public records request service of its kind in the United States, MuckRock serves journalists, researchers, activists and historians across the country (and even a few outside the States!), having submitted more than 5,500 requests through their groundbreaking system.