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.

Doctoral candidate Steve Witt successfully defended his dissertation, "Making Internationalism Conscious: Libraries and the Transnational Struggle for Global Order (1911-1951)," on May 30. 

Cheryl Ziegler very nearly wasn't the librarian at the Union League Club. She had applied for several jobs, but on the day of her interview at ULC, she got a call saying that she had been selected for an independent contractor position on a project with Chicago Public Schools. "Well, I can't have two jobs," she thought to herself, and canceled the interview. 

Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke will be a keynote speaker at two upcoming conferences: the New Jersey Library Association (NJLA) Annual Conference, which will be held May 30-June 1 in Atlantic City, and Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA) 2018, which will be held June 13-15 at the University of Zadar in Croatia.

According to Roy Saldaña (MS '08), the best part of his job is the opportunity to work with college students from underrepresented groups: first-generation and lower-income students as well as those with documented disabilities. He has found his niche as the director of a program aimed at helping these individuals succeed in college and beyond.

iSchool affiliated faculty member Clara M. Chu, Mortenson Distinguished Professor and director of the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs at the University Library, has been selected as the 2018 recipient of the American Library Association's Beta Phi Mu Award. This award is given in recognition of the achievement of a library school faculty member or another individual for distinguished service to education for librarianship.