iSchool researchers to present at ILA Annual Conference

Kyungwon Koh
Kyungwon Koh, Associate Professor and Director of the Champaign-Urbana (CU) Community Fab Lab

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).

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Debnath datafies "The Bulletin"

MSIM student Tan Debnath, whose interests span data mining, statistical modeling, text mining, and digital humanities, joined the Center for Children's books as a research assistant. He was tasked with building curation processes that would datafy seventy-five years' worth of archival issues of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, one of the nation's leading children's book review journals.

Tan Debnath stands casually with his hands in his pockets and smiles broadly at the camera. It's a sunny day

iSchool undergraduates selected as 2025 Community-Academic Scholars

The Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI) has selected BSIS student Dhanvi Puttur and BSIS+DS student Lara Terpetschnig as 2025 Community-Academic Scholars. Representing nineteen majors and nine minors in eight colleges and schools at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and two additional universities, the eighteen scholars in this cohort encompass diverse fields of study, from community health to graphic design to statistics. 

BSIS+DS student Lara Terpetschnig and BSIS student Dhanvi Puttur

Guan successfully defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Yingjun Guan successfully defended his dissertation, "Disambiguating Academic Institution Names: A Comprehensive Study of Authority Files, Linguistic Variations, and Computational Evaluation in PubMed Affiliations," on April 28. 

Yingjun Guan

Scholarship provides validation, motivation for Martinez

BSIS+DS student Fabian Martinez chose his major because he wanted to learn how to help people understand and interpret data and information. While his immediate plans include finding a job in data analytics, business analytics, consulting, or product management, his ultimate goal is "to create meaningful relationships and help make a meaningful impact in the world" in whatever way he can.

Fabian Martinez graduation