The iSchool recognized faculty and staff for their contributions to teaching and outstanding service to the School at a ceremony on May 6. Interim Dean Emily Knox presented plaques to the inaugural recipients of the Faculty Teaching Award, Adjunct Teaching Award, and Staff Excellence Award.

The iDEA-iSAIL Joint Laboratory at the University of Illinois received an Outstanding Paper Award at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026 Logical Reasoning of Large Language Models Workshop for their paper, "RAG Over Tables: Hierarchical Memory Index, Multi-State Retrieval, and Benchmarking." Paper authors include lab members Jingrui He, professor and MSIM program director; Sirui Chen, Xinrui He, and Zihao Li, computer science PhD students; Jiaru Zou, computer science MS student; Dongqi Fu, alum; as well as Jiawei Han, professor of computer science, and Yada Zhu, IBM collaborator. Chen gave an oral presentation of the research at the workshop, which was held last month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This award was selected out of 206 accepted papers at the workshop.

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has formally joined the special interest group (SIG) that leads the development of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), an ISO standard (21127:2023) for the exchange and integration of wide-ranging scientific and scholarly documentation about the past. 

PhD student Gladys Kemboi has been named a recipient of the Standing Conference of Eastern, Central and Southern African Library and Information Associations (SCECSAL) Excellence Awards 2026 in the category of Young LIS Professional. This is an international award recognizing excellence in library and information science in Africa. 

This week, Professor and Executive Associate Dean J. Stephen Downie was a guest speaker at the Herder Institute in Marburg and the University of Göttingen. Downie, who serves as co-director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), lectured on the HTRC's "Tools for Open Research and Computation with HathiTrust: Leveraging Intelligent Text Extraction" (TORCHLITE) project.

PhD student Adebola Obayemi discusses her internship with the San Francisco Public Library, where she worked on Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People Initiative. She has been invited to present her proposal on digital literacy for incarcerated populations at the Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People Convening, which will be held in June in Chicago. 

Professor Emeritus Chip Bruce has authored a new book exploring the relationship between education and democracy. Democratic Education: Finding Hope in Challenging Times was recently published by Peter Lang. 

The iSchool is well represented in the 19th annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, which will be held on April 30 from 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. in the Illini Union. The iSchool is a Gold Sponsor of the symposium, which spotlights undergraduate research through oral and poster presentations, creative performances, and art exhibits.

The Association for Preservation Technology (APT) International has named Informatics PhD student Sepehr Vaez Afshar as a 2026 Student Scholar. Established in 1985, the APT Student Scholarship annually recognizes ten students worldwide whose work advances preservation technology through innovative and impactful approaches.

Adjunct Lecturer Zachary Stier has been selected for a 2026 I Love My Librarian Award. Honorees were recognized for their outstanding public service accomplishments.