The iSchool at Illinois seeks nominations for the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award. 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. The deadline for nominations is October 5, 2018.

Deborah Stevenson, director of The Center for Children's Books at the iSchool, will present the App Authors research project at the Border-Crossing in Children’s Literature: The Second International Symposium for Children's Literature, which will be held on June 14-15 at Princeton University.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will be a keynote speaker at the second annual Building Research Integrity Through Reproducibility conference, which will be held on June 15 at the University of Utah. She will also moderate the panel, "What Universities Do (and Don't Do) to Influence (or not) Research Reproducibility."

Associate Professor Emerita Christine A. Jenkins and Michael Cart have authored a new comprehensive history of young adult literature featuring LGBTQ+ themes. Their book, Representing the Rainbow in Young Adult Literature: LGBTQ+ Content Since 1969, was recently published by Rowman & Littlefield.

iSchool alumnus Alexander Salopek (MS '15), acquisitions/government documents librarian for the Supreme Court of the United States, has been chosen to participate in the highly competitive American Library Association Leadership Institute. 

Last month a contingent from the iSchool at Illinois took part in a special dialogue with librarians in Russia. The second working meeting of the U.S.-Russia Dialogue on the Civic Role of Libraries in the 21st Century was held on May 14-15 in Suzdal, Russia.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will be a keynote speaker at the 2018 IEEE Data Science Workshop, which will be held June 4-6 in Lausanne, Switzerland. The workshop will bring together researchers from the academic disciplines of data science, along with industry experts.

Kurt Munson (MS '92), assistant head of access services at Northwestern University Library, was selected as the 2018 winner of the Sharing and Transforming Resources Section's (STARS) Virginia Boucher Distinguished ILL (Interlibrary Loan) Librarian Award, sponsored by OCLC.

PhD student Yingjun Guan will present his research at the Conference on Statistical Learning and Data Science / Nonparametric Statistics, which will be held June 4-6 at Columbia University. The conference brings together researchers in statistical machine learning and data mining from academia, industry, and government to discuss topics such as big data analytics, classification, learning theory, network analysis, and signal and image processing.

Associate Professor Carol Tilley will participate in a panel discussion at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) this weekend. A celebration of independent comics, CAKE features workshops, exhibitions, and panel discussions as well as comics for sale.