Being a key-holding member of Makerspace Urbana—one of the few who have twenty-four hour access to the maker lab—comes with more responsibility than just locking up when you leave. Emily Knox, iSchool assistant professor and Makerspace Urbana keyholder, spoke recently with Illinois Public Media’s The 21st Show about the group’s efforts to create a diverse and inclusive space.

Assistant Professor Vetle Torvik has been named the iSchool's Centennial Scholar for 2016-2017. The Centennial Scholar award is endowed by alumni and friends of the School and given in recognition of outstanding accomplishments and/or professional promise in the field of library and information science.

Professor Bertram Ludäscher will present the international tutorial at the thirty-first Brazilian Symposium on Databases (SBBD2016) in Salvador-Bahia on October 4-7. SBBD, an official event of the Brazilian Computer Society, is the largest venue in Latin America for presenting and discussing research results in the database domain.

A new resource for educators—Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook, a two-volume set published in September by the Association of College & Research Libraries—examines the theory and practice of critical pedagogy in the LIS classroom. Volume one includes chapters written by iSchool Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke and affiliated faculty member Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (MS '94).

Provenance information describes the origin and history of artifacts. Because of the vital role played by data and workflow provenance in support of transparency and reproducibility in computational and data science, creating tools for capturing and using provenance information is an important yet challenging task.

Doctoral student Paige Cunningham will participate this week in the conference, Learning with MOOCs III: Being and Learning in a Digital Age, to be held October 6-7 at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kafi D. Kumasi, associate professor in Wayne State University's School of Library and Information Science, has been selected by the iSchool faculty as a research fellow for the 2016-2018 academic years. Research fellows are chosen because their work is relevant to the interests of the School's faculty and students. 

“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.