With a passion for making books accessible to anyone at any age, Justin Williams made it his mission to seek a career in a library that would allow him to connect with others and make an impact in their lives through the use of stories and information. Williams is set to graduate this May and has a job lined up at as a teen librarian for the White Oak Library District in Lockport, Illinois.

Master's student Ritse Adefolalu has received the Marilyn Kay Maynard Scholarship awarded by the Illinois School Library Media Association (ISLMA). The scholarship is designed to encourage students who wish to gain licensure to work in Illinois as a school librarian, with three scholarships awarded each year.

The iSchool and University Library are partners on a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The grant supports work to hold a national forum and develop a white paper aimed at simplifying scholars' access to in-copyright and access-restricted texts for computational analysis and data mining research.

Doctoral candidate Jinseok Kim successfully defended his dissertation, "The impact of author name disambiguation on knowledge discovery from large-scale scholarly data," on April 24. 

Master's student Kortney Rupp has been selected by the Special Libraries Association (SLA) as recipient of the 2017 Marion E. Sparks Award. This award provides funding to attend the 2017 SLA Annual Conference, which will be held June 16-20 in Phoenix, Arizona. 

Doctoral candidate Claudia Serbanuta successfully defended her dissertation, "Voices from the Other Side of the Wall: The Case of Romanian Libraries of the 1970s and the 1980s," on April 24.

Master's student Saajan Dehury was part of the winning team at Campus 1871, a startup pitch competition held on March 31-April 2 at 1871, Chicago's Center for Technology and Entrepreneurship. 

Comics as an educational tool, the role of women in comics storytelling, supervillains, and libraries' acceptance of comics are some of the topics Associate Professor Carol Tilley is discussing with audiences this month.

David Kalat (MS '11) could be considered a Sherlock Holmes of the digital world. However, unlike Holmes hitting the streets of London for clues, Kalat's brand of sleuthing involves using computer forensics, electronic discovery, and data analytics to find the sometimes deeply concealed facts in a case.

Professor Alistair Black and doctoral candidate Henry Gabb have been honored by the American Library Association's Library Research Round Table (LRRT) with the 2017 Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research.