Mellon Foundation funds GSLIS faculty work on preserving intangible cultural heritage

Lori Kendall
Lori Kendall, Associate Professor

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been awarded a grant of more than $25,500 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the efforts of GSLIS Associate Professors Jerome McDonough and Lori Kendall and Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn to cultivate a new research community focused specifically on the preservation of intangible cultural heritage.

The project, “Preserving Intangible Cultural Heritage,” will assemble a meeting of scholars, practitioners, librarians, and conservationists who will formulate a research and action agenda outlining important questions for the scholarly community. The group plans to meet in early 2016, and a white paper detailing their conclusions will be published later in the year.

Discussing the new project, McDonough observed, “Librarians, archivists, and museum curators have long worked to preserve the tangible artifacts of human culture. With the advent of new information and communication technologies, cultural heritage institutions can extend their reach to support local communities in their efforts to sustain intangible forms of heritage, such as language, cuisine, performing arts, and traditional craftsmanship. But successful preservation requires better knowledge of the nature of intangible heritage and the conditions for successfully sustaining it.”

McDonough and Kendall have been on the GSLIS faculty since 2005; Maria Bonn joined the GSLIS faculty in 2013.

Tags:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

New book explores how AI is reshaping cultural heritage

Glen Layne-Worthey, associate director for research support services for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), and J. Stephen Downie, professor and HTRC co-director, have edited a new book, Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations, which was recently released by UCL Press. 

Jung to join the faculty

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Yonghan Jung will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2025, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. 

Yonghan Jung

Aubin Le Quéré to join the faculty

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Marianne Aubin Le Quéré will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2026, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Aubin Le Quéré is a PhD candidate in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University. For the 2025-2026 academic year, she will be a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

Marianne Aubin Le Quere