School of Information Sciences

Anselmo highlighted in SLA 'Illuminate Illinois' feature

[image1-right:resize-180w]Linda Anselmo (MS '10) is the focus of a recent Illuminate Illinois feature by the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Illinois Chapter. Anselmo is a research librarian and manager of information services at the Chicago offices of the law firm Michael Best & Friedrich. Before beginning her master’s degree program at GSLIS, she worked as an accountant at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In the interview with SLA, Anselmo discussed her career and why she chose to leave accounting for the information science profession:

Are you in the job today that you thought you would be in 10 years ago? What was something you were doing then that influenced you eventual career path?

It wasn’t on the radar at all. Before becoming a librarian, I was an accountant. Ten years ago, I was working as a Grants and Contacts Manager, dealing with the finances of a department at University of Illinois in Chicago. I think I have always been a curious person, and I did have some personal research projects that made me wonder if doing research was something that I could do as a career. It wasn’t until 2007 that I decided to change careers. It took me four years to go from making the decision to change my career to finding a job, but I am very glad I did.

Anselmo is a recently elected member of the Library School Alumni Association (LSAA) executive board who will begin a three-year term on June 30. Her colleagues on the board will be Jim Obst (MS '04), president; Ethan Henderson (MS '07), vice president; Mary M. Glatthaar (MS '07), secretary; Donna Schaal (MS '00), treasurer; Rachel Bindman (MS '02), past president; David Kates (MS '02), director; Deborah Robertson (MS '00), director; and Stephanie Atkins (MS '99), director.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Chan’s "Predatory Data" named a 2026 PROSE Award finalist

Professor Anita Say Chan's book Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (University of California Press, 2025) has been named a finalist in the Computing and Information Sciences Category of the 2026 PROSE Awards. The annual awards bestowed by the Association of American Publishers recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing and celebrate works that have made significant advancements in their respective fields of study.

Anita Say Chan

He inducted into Sigma Xi

Professor Jingrui He has been inducted into Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. Sigma Xi is the international honor society of science and engineering and one of the oldest and largest scientific organizations in the world, boasting a history of service to science and society spanning over 125 years. It has a multidisciplinary membership of scientists, engineers, and scholars, and Sigma Xi chapters can be found in universities and colleges, government laboratories, and commercial research centers.

Jingrui He

Hassan and Bashir receive distinguished paper award

A paper co-authored by PhD student Muhammad Hassan and Associate Professor Masooda Bashir received the Distinguished Paper Award at the Workshop on Security and Privacy in Standardized IoT, which was held last month in San Diego, California, in conjunction with the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026. 

New multi-institutional project to use AI to represent past historical periods

A new project led by a team of researchers from four universities aims to create and evaluate language models that represent past historical periods. The project, "Artificial Intelligence for Cultural and Historical Reasoning," was recently selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award from Schmidt Sciences. The $800,000 grant will be split among four institutions: Cornell University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The University of British Columbia, and McGill University. Professor Ted Underwood will serve as the principal investigator for the portion of the project at Illinois.

Ted Underwood

Spectrum Scholar Spotlight: Mariana Guerrero

Eight iSchool master's students have been named 2025–2026 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association. This "Spectrum Scholar Spotlight" series highlights the School's scholars. MSLIS student Mariana Guerrero earned a bachelor's degree in Spanish language and literature from Rockford University.

Mariana Guerrero

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top