iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the 2024 Illinois Library Association (ILA) Annual Conference, which will be held on October 8-10 in Peoria. The theme of this year's conference is "Libraries are Lit: Sparking Innovation and Imagination."
On October 9, Kyungwon Koh, associate professor and director of the Champaign-Urbana (CU) Community Fab Lab, will present "Hands-On Coding and Electronics Library Programs: Empowering Blind and Visually Impaired Learners and Beyond" with Marni Balint, experiential learning supervisor at Skokie Public Library, and CU Fab Lab staff members Sara Ballenger and Wayne Hardy. The presenters will demonstrate hands-on coding and electronics programs for use in libraries and discuss their experiences with them. By employing physical and tangible tools such as Snap Circuits, Code Jumper, and Snapino, these programs can be used to address the needs of blind and visually impaired (BVI) youth.
MSLIS students Yanling Liu and Nikki Gross will present their poster, "From Compliance to Conformance: LibGuide Accessibility Evaluation of Funk ACES Library," on October 10. They will discuss their evaluation of the 75 LibGuides of Funk ACES Library following the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).