MS/IM student Pranay Parmar won first place in the Data Visualization Competition sponsored by the University of Illinois Library's Scholarly Commons. The competition provides students with an opportunity to demonstrate their skills in visually communicating information. Winners were announced on October 22 at the 2019 Scholarly Commons Open House.

The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books has released the 2019 Guide Book to Gift Books. This annual publication, available as a free downloadable pdf, highlights over one hundred of the best books for giving and receiving. 

Professor Ted Underwood will give a lecture at Leiden University in the Netherlands as the Visiting Scaliger Professor for 2019. The position is affiliated with both the Scaliger Institute of Leiden University Libraries and the Faculty of Humanities. In his talk on November 21, "The Role of the Humanities in an Information Age," Underwood will discuss how "humanists are joining hands with data science to create a form of public reflection that fuses the scale of machine learning with the historical self-consciousness of humanistic tradition."

Our School is grateful for talented and dedicated staff, who contribute greatly to our teaching and research excellence. This "Get to Know" series highlights our staff, sharing their friendly faces and stories of professional success.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will give distinguished lectures at the University of Chicago on November 19 and Northwestern University on November 20. These lectures will focus on her reproducibility research as well as her work as a member of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Committee on Reproducibility and Replicability.

Assistant Professor Yun Huang presented her research at the 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2019), which was held November 9-13 in Austin, Texas. CSCW is the premier venue for experts from industry and academia to explore the technical, social, material, and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.

MS/LIS student Monica Hoh was invited by the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) to participate in the Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Book Fair). The event, which was held October 16-20 in Frankfurt, Germany, is the world's largest trade fair for books and draws more visitors than any other book fair.

For its defense of the First Amendment rights of incarcerated individuals, the Education Justice Project (EJP) has earned the 2019 Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award. EJP is a social justice and academic community of incarcerated students, educators, formerly incarcerated individuals, family members of the incarcerated, and others. Based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, EJP offers educational programs to eligible individuals incarcerated at Danville Correctional Center (DCC), a men’s medium-security state prison 35 miles from the Urbana campus.

PhD student Shadi Rezapour will present her research with the Diesner lab at the 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2019), which will be held November 9-13 in Austin, Texas. CSCW brings together experts from industry and academia to explore the technical, social, material, and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.

For the first time in the journal’s history, Library Trends has published a bilingual issue. Communities and Technologies: Realities, Challenges, and Opportunities for Librarians in Cuba was edited by Kate Williams, iSchool associate professor; Pedro Urra González, professor of information technologies at the University of Havana’s School of Library and Information Sciences; and Professor Yohannis Martí-Lahera, professor, director of information, and director of the Central Library at the University of Havana.