The iSchool Alumni Association (ISAA) honored its 2019 award recipients at the ISAA annual meeting and reception, which was held on June 23 during the annual meeting of the American Library Association in Washington, DC.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Yang Wang will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2019, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He is currently an assistant professor and co-director of the Social Computing Systems Lab (SALT) in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.

Affiliate Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, professor and coordinator for information literacy services and instruction in the University Library, in collaboration with Kyle Jones, assistant professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at the Indiana University-Indianapolis (IUPUI), has been awarded a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for Prioritizing Privacy: Training to Improve Practice in Library Analytics Projects.

Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox was recently appointed president of the Board of Trustees of the Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF), a nonprofit legal and educational organization affiliated with the American Library Association, and elected vice president/president-elect of Beta Phi Mu, the international honor society for library and information studies.

Provost Andreas C. Cangellaris has announced the appointment of Dr. Eunice E. Santos as dean of the School of Information Sciences, effective August 16, 2019, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Santos currently serves as the Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair and Professor, and department chair of computer science, at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Associate Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Maria Bonn and colleagues in North Carolina and Kansas have received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (MS LG-36-19-0021-19) to fund their project, Scholarly Communications Notebook (SCN). Co-principal investigators on the project include Will Cross, director of the Copyright & Digital Scholarship Center at North Carolina State University Libraries, and Josh Bolick, scholarly communications librarian at the University of Kansas Libraries.

iSchool Career Services Coordinator Rebecca Hodson (MS '13) has coauthored a chapter in The Future Academic Librarian’s Toolkit: Finding Success on the Job Hunt and in Your First Job, a newly published book edited by Megan Hodge. According to the publisher (ACRL), this handbook will help readers add important skills to their professional toolkit, including advocating for themselves and their ideas, writing for publication, teaching effectively, connecting with faculty and students, and building their professional brand.

Professor Emerita Linda C. Smith was the first person that Richard Pearce-Moses (MS ’01) contacted after discovering that Illinois offered an ALA-accredited library and information science program online. He was interested in pursuing his MS/LIS degree through the School’s Leep program but had missed the application deadline by a few days.

The iSchool at Illinois seeks nominations for the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award. The deadline for nominations is October 5, 2019. Given annually, the award acknowledges individuals or groups who have furthered the cause of intellectual freedom, particularly as it impacts libraries and information centers and the dissemination of ideas. 

Leep student Ben Chiewphasa recently received a 2019 W. David Rozkuszka Scholarship from the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) of the American Library Association. The scholarship provides financial assistance to individuals enrolled in an MS/LIS degree program who are currently working with government documents in a library. Chiewphasa works as an adjunct government information librarian and cataloging specialist at the University of Montana and will transition to a tenure-track faculty government information librarian position at the University when he graduates in August.