MS/LIS student Michael Pritz discusses his internship with NASA.

iSchool master's students Laura Rocco and Elise Feltman are the recipients of the first Robert Howerton Graduate Student Research Award from the University Library. The award financially supports students who hold a pre-professional graduate assistantship position at the library and who are engaged in research regarding reference and technical services with plans to publish their work.

As a new master's student in library and information science, funds were tight, and Curt McKay (MS '88) hoped for an assistantship to ease his financial burden. Leigh Estabrook, dean of the School, noticed that McKay had been a teacher and offered him an assistantship in the learning resources lab. "At Illinois, not only did I start learning a new career, but I got carried away by this wonderful atmosphere," McKay recalled. Instead of completing his degree in one year as he had planned, he decided to extend it to two years, then in April of his first year, a job opened up in the School, and McKay was encouraged to apply.

Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner will serve as a keynote speaker at the 1st workshop on reframing research at the European Symposium Series on Societal Challenges in Computational Social Science, which will be held December 5-7 in Cologne, Germany. The theme of the 2018 symposium is “Bias and Discrimination.”

Current student Warren Lambert began his journey to the iSchool six years ago, when he first visited the Urbana campus in November 2012 to find out more about the MS in library and information science (MS/LIS) program. At the time, he was finishing up his bachelor's degree in art history at the University of Missouri St. Louis (UMSL).

Anna Oates (MS '18) won the National Records of Scotland Award for the Most Outstanding Student Work in Digital Preservation for her master's thesis work on the PDF/A standard. She received the award on November 29 at a ceremony at the Amsterdam Museum, as part of an international conference hosted by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network and the Amsterdam Museum on World Digital Preservation Day. According to the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), who sponsored the awards, this year marked the greatest number of nominations the organization has received to date, and those selected as finalists faced tough competition from entries across the world.

MS/LIS student Aileen Nolan discusses her summer internship with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Transportation Library.

A team composed of two iSchool PhD students, Ly Dinh and Jessica Cheng, and a PhD student from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Li-Min (Cassandra) Huang, won the ASIS&T 2018 Student Design Competition. The competition was held on November 13 during the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Adjunct Lecturer Ruth Shasteen (CAS '13) has received the 2018 Polestar Award from the Association of Illinois School Library Educators (AISLE) for her contributions to school librarianship. Shasteen served as district librarian at Neoga CUSD and high school librarian at Central A&M High School in Moweaqua, both in the state of Illinois. In addition to being a school librarian, she also taught for many years in Illinois classrooms at Sullivan Jr. High School, Sullivan High School, and Bethany Jr-Sr. High School. 

Doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra won the Best Student Paper Award at the Workshop on Informetric and Scientometric Research (SIG/MET), which was held on November 10 in conjunction with the ASIS&T 2018 Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada. Sponsored by Elsevier, the award recognizes achievement in student presentation in the following criteria: design of the study, originality, relevance to the workshop, and adherence to research ethics.