“Play can be hard work and serious business,” say the organizers of Extending Play, a conference series that addresses play as more than a leisure activity, considering the factors that shape and influence our notions of both play and playability.

Ninety-five Leep students traveled to campus from over twenty-five states for the iSchool's inaugural Welcome Weekend on September 23-25. During the course of the weekend, Leep students interacted with faculty and fellow classmates, learned about student organizations, and attended workshops on a variety of topics.

Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke is a founding member of the advisory board for Our Voices, a new ALA initiative that seeks to increase diversity in the production and distribution of children’s books. Sponsored by ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom and Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services, Our Voices offers interested libraries a template to promote the growth of diverse, quality content in library collections.

Community services librarian Ziba Perez Zehdar (MS ’12) is going mobile with the Long Beach Public Library (LBPL), and we’re not talking about a digital app. She leads several community engagement projects at multiple branch libraries and outside the library.

Nine iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Summer 2016. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning

The University of Illinois is home to two extraordinary collections of modern reproductions of medieval Irish art, including jewelry, reliquaries, and manuscripts dating back to before the twelfth century. Many of these copies were acquired by the University around 1916, the year of the Irish “Easter Rising” against British rule.

Music, politics, art, prison justice, comics . . . the topics of zines are as diverse as the individuals creating them. Unlike a traditional magazine, a zine is self-published, small in scale, and more personal. On September 16, iSchool Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre answered questions about zines and her role as caretaker of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center (UCIMC) Zine Library on the Harukana Show, a broadcast of UCIMC's radio station WRFU, which is also webcast internationally.

Created in 1941, Wonder Woman has been a popular comics hero for decades. Associate Professor Carol Tilley will join fellow comics fans and scholars to celebrate the character’s seventy-fifth anniversary at the Wonder Woman Symposium on September 22-24 in Cleveland, Ohio.

Michele Plante joined the School on September 12 as the employer relations coordinator. In this new role, she will develop, maintain, and evolve partnerships with employers for student preprofessional and professional opportunities as well as increase corporate engagement.

Cass Mabbott, PhD student, will participate in Information Seeking in Context (ISIC): The Information Behaviour Conference to be held September 20-23 in Zadar, Croatia. This biannual conference is devoted to information-seeking behavior and information use, focusing this year on analytical investigations of the connection between information research and information behavior and practices.