Michèle Valerie Cloonan (MS '84, PhD '88), iSchool research associate professor and professor of the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, has authored a book addressing the social, cultural, and political issues in cultural heritage preservation. Her book, The Monumental Challenge of Preservation: The Past in a Volatile World, was recently published by The MIT Press.

On September 24, the iSchool will dedicate a memorial plaque to Yingbo Zhou, an MS/LIS student whose life was tragically cut short in 2009 when she died from injuries sustained in a hit-and-run car accident. The plaque, inscribed in both English and Chinese, will be located next to a tree that was planted in her honor following the accident.

Doctoral candidate Kinyetta Nance discusses her summer internship at Facebook in California.

When Nintendo introduced the Wii home video game console in 2006, the company needed to show the general public how the Wii was unlike other game consoles currently on the market. To do so, Nintendo created an experience trailer to help potential users understand how it would feel to use the Wii. Professor and MS/IM Program Director Michael Twidale and Stefan Rennick-Egglestone, a senior research fellow in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham, discuss this area of research in their article, "Experience Trailers."

Doctoral student Jessica Cheng will present her research at the 18th European Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop, which will take place on September 13 in Porto, Portugal. The workshop, held in conjunction with the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2018) and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI 2018), will explore the potential of knowledge organization systems (KOS) such as classification systems, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, and lexical databases in the context of current developments and possibilities.

Doctoral candidate Jacob Jett presented his research in digital cultural heritage collections at the Japanese Association for the Digital Humanities annual conference (JADH 2018), which was held September 9-11, in Tokyo, Japan. The theme of this year's conference was "Leveraging Open Data."

Professor Emeritus Gerald McWorter (Abdul Alkalimat) and Associate Professor Kate Williams have coauthored a book on New Philadelphia, the first known town planned and legally registered in the U.S. by an African American, Gerald's great-great-grandfather, Free Frank McWorter.

Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner will serve as a keynote speaker for the fifth annual Historical Network Research Conference (HNR 2018), which will be held from September 11-13 in Brno, the Czech Republic. The conference brings together historians, social scientists, and computer scientists to foster awareness of the possibilities of network research and create opportunities for sharing cross- and multidisciplinary approaches to the networked past.

Associate Professor Kate McDowell (MS '99, PhD '07) has been named interim associate dean for academic affairs, effective immediately. In this new role, she provides leadership and oversight for academic programs, including program development, curriculum coordination, and continuous improvement of educational experiences. 

Nineteen iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Spring 2018. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning.