The iSchool is pleased to announce that Anita Say Chan has joined the faculty. She also holds a joint appointment with the College of Media, where she is an associate professor of communications in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will be the keynote speaker for Digital Scholarship Symposium 2019, which will be held on March 19 at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). The theme of this year's symposium is "(Re-)Mining Text: From Traditional to Digital." Co-organized by the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre and CUHK Library, the event aims to explore techniques and applications of text mining in the era of digital scholarship.

Four iSchool alumni are included in Library Journal’s 2019 class of Movers & Shakers, an annual list that recognizes fifty professionals who are transforming what it means to be a librarian. Jarrett Dapier (MS '15) and Gwen Evans (MS '02) were honored in the Change Agents category; Heather Thompson (MS '13) was honored in the Educators category; and Anton Chuppin (MS '99) was honored in the Digital Developers category.

The iSchool at Illinois is pleased to announce plans to launch a Bachelor of Science degree in information sciences (BS/IS). The first degree of its type on campus—and among public universities in the state of Illinois—it will equip graduates to compete successfully in today’s technology-centered job market.

MS/LIS student Itzel Jihan has been awarded a scholarship to attend the PyCon 2019 conference, which will be held May 1-9 in Cleveland, Ohio. The conference is the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language. It includes tutorials, talks, events such as a poster session and job fair, and sprints, where developers collaborate on open source projects.