School of Information Sciences

Join the iSchool at ALISE 2024

Join iSchool faculty, staff, and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place from October 14-17 in Portland, Oregon. The theme of the 2024 conference is "Ethics and Evolution of Truth and Information." At the conference, Associate Professor Emily Knox will receive the 2024 ALISE Excellence in Teaching Award, and Assistant Professor Travis L. Wagner will be recognized for their coauthored paper that won the 2024 ALISE/Bohdan S. Wynar Research Paper Competition. In addition, the iSchool is proud to sponsor Amanda Harrison, 2024 ALISE Leadership Development Intern.

Tuesday, October 15

Rexwhite Enakrire, associate professor at the University of Johannesburg, will present the poster, "You are not Alone: Confusion with Software Applications in African University Libraries," which he coauthored with Professor Michael Twidale and Professor Christopher Lueg during his time as a postdoctoral researcher at the iSchool, at 6:00 p.m.

Doctoral candidate Morgan Lundy will present the poster, "Welcome to #SpoonieTok: Understanding and Supporting Disability Expertise Storytelling Abilities and Collective Information Practices on TikTok and Beyond," at 6:00 p.m.

Assistant Professor Travis L. Wagner will co-present the poster, "‘Life is Too Short Not To Speak the Truth’: Framing Accountable Community Collaboration Within HIV/AIDS Archival Work," at 6:00 p.m. 

Wednesday, October 16

Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh, Associate Professor Emily Knox, PhD student Gowri Balasubramaniam, and doctoral candidate Andrew Zalot will present their paper, "Evaluating The Value and Impact of Makerspaces on Public Libraries," at 8:30 a.m. 

Assistant Professor Rachel M. Magee and Zalot will serve on the panel, "Youth Services: Culture, Community, and Learning," at 10:30 a.m.

Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo and Postdoctoral Research Associate Sang Hoo Oh will present their paper, "University Governance for Responsible AI," at 3:00 p.m.

Interim Executive Associate Dean and Visiting Professor Jiangping Chen will serve on the panel, "Emerging Topics, Challenges, and Strategies for Library and Information Science Education," at 3:00 p.m.

Wagner will co-present "’In Many Ways, You’re This Person Who’s Providing Light’: Theorizing Embodied Responses to Information Absence within LGBTQIA+ Communities," winner of the 2024 ALISE/Bohdan S. Wynar Research Paper Competition, at 3:00 p.m.

Zalot will present his poster, "’Tweet of the Town:’ Synthesizing Local and Social Media Discourse on Book Bans," at 5:00 p.m.
*Won 2nd place in the doctoral student poster competition

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

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

Wang group to present at WSDM26

Professor and Associate Dean for Research Dong Wang and PhD student Ruohan Zong will present their research at the 19th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 26), which will be held from February 22–26 in Boise, Idaho. WSDM is a premier international conference in web search, data mining, and AI, known for its highly selective acceptance rates. This year, the acceptance rate for the main track of the conference was only 16 percent. 

Dong Wang

New NSF award supports innovative role-playing game approach to strengthening research security in academia

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) award will support an innovative effort in the School of Information Sciences to strengthen research security by using structured role-playing games (RPG) to model the threats facing academic research environments. The project, titled "REDTEAM: Research Environment Defense Through Expert Attack Modeling," addresses a growing challenge: balancing the open, collaborative nature of academic research with increasing national security risks and sophisticated adversarial threats. 

Reynolds prepares for a career in global tech

Growing up on the south side of Chicago, BSIS student Devon Reynolds always saw his future in technology. He discovered the information sciences program during his senior year of high school and was drawn to its balance of challenging coursework. Choosing the iSchool at Illinois felt like a natural next step. 

Devon Reynolds

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