Librarians need to be able to communicate about social justice issues, and teaching social justice storytelling to library school students will help them develop the skills to do so, two researchers say. Associate Professor Kate McDowell and Nicole Cooke, a former Illinois information sciences professor who now teaches at the University of South Carolina, analyzed how to teach those skills through a storytelling assignment with their students.

MS/LIS student Katie Colson and Cora Godfrey (MS/LIS '22) won first prize for their paper at the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) conference's student forum. The conference, which supports innovation in metadata design and best practices across the metadata ecology, was held virtually on October 3-7.

With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Associate Professor Jodi Schneider is leading a project in collaboration with the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) to prevent the spread of retracted research.

Schneider was recently awarded a $249,998 grant to continue her work to create consistent community practices for publishers, preprint repositories, and discovery services to identify and signal that publications have been retracted or have expressions of concern.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will be held from October 24-26, and the 85th annual meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), which will be held from October 29-November 1. Both conferences will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The iSchool at Illinois announces the appointment of three tenure-track faculty, Jiaqi Ma, Meicen Sun, and Haohan Wang, and four specialized faculty, Brandon Batzloff, David Charles, Renee Hendricks, and Adam Rusch.

Randomized clinical trials are valuable in determining the effectiveness of health treatments. But problems with design, execution or reporting of the trial process can lead to unreliable findings, excessive costs, and, potentially, harm for patients. Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and his colleagues seek to address this problem with the help of a $1,328,502 grant from the National Institutes of Health.

How can current and future generations help to ensure that technologies are created and used ethically? One way is effectively teaching students about cybersecurity and AI ethics. Associate Professor of Information Sciences Yang Wang and colleagues from the University of Illinois and other universities are interested in the topic and have been conducting research into how to improve instruction. Notably, their research team also has two high school students.

Three thousand years ago, Native Americans and pioneers used a trail that stretched across Illinois from Kaskaskia in the south to Peoria in the north. These early travelers used the trail for hunting, trade, and war. Over time, with the development of cities and highways, the trail faded away, but a trace of what it used to be remains. MS/LIS student Anna Sielaff is bringing the history of the trail to life through her project, "Relive the True Mother Road: The Edwards Trace."

The National Science Foundation-funded project aims to reduce online fraud among older adults, who lose billions of dollars each year. The iSchool is co-leading a two-year, $5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator phase 2 project to create digital tools that help older adults better recognize and protect themselves from online deceptions and other forms of disinformation.

It is evident that Hurricane Ian's recent devastation in Florida will impact the state economically for years to come. Tragedies such as this have motivated scientists to gain a better understanding of when such events might occur and how to cope with them once they do.