Working on his application for graduate study at the iSchool at Illinois, Michael DeNotto (MS '12) wanted to make his personal statement stand out. DeNotto worked at an upscale wine shop after receiving his master's in English studies and communication from Valparaiso University. There he discovered a "fascinating wine classification system that determined whether a wine was a vin de pays or premier cru or grand cru." He used the wine classification analogy in his personal statement to demonstrate his interest in librarianship.

Alison C. Rollins (MS '17) has been selected to receive a 2018 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, which is given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers.

The iSchool Alumni Association (ISAA) honored its 2018 award recipients at the ISAA Annual Meeting and reception, which was held on June 24 during the annual meeting of the American Library Association in New Orleans.

Associate Professor Jana Diesner taught a course on network analysis to Chinese students participating in the Information Science and Engineering Summer Program this past July. Sponsored by Global Education and Training (GET) at the University of Illinois, the two-week, hands-on program took place at the Urbana campus.

The fifth annual Summer Getaway, hosted by the iSchool, was held July 12-14 on the Urbana campus. The annual professional development event offers a series of workshops focused on current topics in school librarianship and provides opportunities for participants to gain expertise through collaborative activities.

A class project in the Global Health Informatics course has resulted in a journal publication for Ian Brooks, instructor and research scientist, and students Noah Samuel (PhD) and Janina Sarol (CAS).

Lynne M. Thomas (MS '99), head of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library and an iSchool adjunct professor, has won two Hugo Awards—science fiction's most prestigious award. Thomas, now a seven-time Hugo Award winner, joined the University Library in July 2017.

Jill Gage's degree from the iSchool and specialty in English makes her a perfect match for her work at the prestigious Newberry Library. In her current role, she manages one of the world's leading collections in printing history and serves as bibliographer for British literature and history. Gage credits the innovative coursework at the iSchool as excellent preparation for her career in special collections.

Maria Bonn has been appointed to the position of associate professor at the School of Information Sciences, effective August 16, 2018. She previously served as a senior lecturer at the School, where she teaches courses in academic librarianship and the role of libraries in scholarly communication and publishing.

The identification of proper names of people, organizations, and locations from raw texts, referred to as Named Entity Recognition (NER), can be highly accurate when researchers use NER tools on a large collection of text with proper syntax. However, using existing NER tools for analyzing social media text can lead to poor identification of named entities. TwitterNER, an open-source tool developed by doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra, who is supervised by Assistant Professor Jana Diesner, can help researchers interested in performing NER on social media text.