An interest in organization led Dale Josephs to the field of library and information science and his current job at eBay. Josephs uses the skills he learned at the iSchool—cataloging, metadata, Python programming, and data mining—to develop new analytics tools.

The K-12 LIS licensure program hosted its third annual Summer Getaway: Professional Development for School Librarians from June 12-14 at the School. Over forty Illinois school librarians and iSchool MS students attended this unique professional development opportunity.

Doctoral candidate LaTesha Velez successfully defended her dissertation, "James E. Shepard, The Man and His Message: A Context-Sensitive, Discourse-Historical Analysis of 'God Bless Old North Carolina," on Thursday, June 29.

Two iSchool faculty members, Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke and Assistant Professor Emily Knox, have articles published in the July 2017 edition of The Library Quarterly. The subject of the edition is "Aftermath: Libraries, Democracy, and the 2016 Presidential Election, Part 1."

Lian Ruan (MS '90, PhD '11) is the 2017 recipient of the Illinois Library Association (ILA) Illinois Academic Librarian of the Year Award. The award, presented by the ILA Illinois Association of College and Research Libraries (IACRL) Forum, recognizes an Illinois librarian who is making an outstanding statewide contribution to academic or research librarianship and to library development.

The iSchool Alumni Association (ISAA), formerly the Library School Alumni Association, has announced the 2017 recipients of its annual awards. The recipients were recognized on June 25 at the ISAA Annual Meeting and reception held at the annual meeting of the American Library Association in Chicago.

Doctoral candidates E.E. Lawrence and Andrea Thomer have been awarded Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships by Beta Phi Mu, the International Library and Information Studies Honor Society.

Nicole A. Cooke, assistant professor and MS/LIS program director, has received two grants from the American Library Association (ALA) for her diversity research. The grants, worth $7,500, include the Carnegie Whitney Award and the ALA Diversity Research Grant. 

Associate Professor Terry Weech and doctoral candidate Aiko Takazawa will discuss their research on the economics of information at the International Conference on Business and Information (BAI), which will be held July 4-6 in Hiroshima, Japan.

Last month five iSchool students traveled to Moscow with their instructor, Ellen Knutson (MS '02, PhD '08), to learn about community engagement in Russian libraries and to experience Russian culture. They completed the trip as part of the Community Engagement course (IS 418), which explores the multiple ways that information professionals in libraries and other settings learn about, collaborate with, and provide service and outreach to community members.