Doctoral student Paige Cunningham will speak at the annual meeting of the History of Education Society, an international organization that encourages teaching of and research in the history of education. The group’s 2015 meeting will be held November 5-8 in St. Louis. Cunningham will present her paper titled, “Learning from PLATO: Lessons in Online Community Building” on November 6. Abstract…

For aspiring school librarians who pursue K-12 LIS Licensure, scholarships like those provided by The Louise C. Meckstroth Scholarship Fund can ease the challenge of balancing school, work, and family. Julie Derden (MS ’06), a teaching materials librarian at Illinois State University, established the Meckstroth Fund at GSLIS in 2011 as a way to recognize individuals who supported her throughout…

Several members of the GSLIS community will participate in this week's 2015 Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum, held on October 26-28 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Hosted by the Digital Library Federation, the DLF Forum is an annual meeting of professionals, students, and scholars working in areas related to digital librarianship. GSLIS postdoctoral research associate Sayan Bhattacharyya…

GSLIS Associate Professor Catherine Blake is a co-principal investigator on a newly announced, five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, “A Big Data-Theoretic Approach to Quantify Organizational Failure Mechanisms in Probabilistic Risk Assessment.” Led by Zahra Mohaghegh, assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at Illinois, the $899,000 project is funded by two NSF programs: Science of Organizations (SoO) and Big Data Science and Engineering (BIGDATA)

Associate Professor Carol Tilley, an expert in comics readership and history, is featured in The New York Times’s Retro Report documentary, Sex, Drugs and Gore. The documentary explores two societal battles in the history of pop culture, “one over gory comic books in the 1950s, the other over sex- and violence-laden rock songs in the 1980s.” Tilley’s comments in the documentary focus on the…

The GSLIS faculty have voted in favor of submitting a formal proposal to change the name of our School to the School of Information Sciences. This vote followed several years of discussion among faculty and a month-long period of stakeholder consultation during which formal feedback was solicited from alumni, students, staff, and friends. “This name encompasses the breadth of our teaching,…

Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn will serve as a guest columnist for the "Scholarly Communication" column in College & Research Libraries News twice in the coming months. Bonn’s first column was published in the magazine’s October 2015 issue. In “Maximizing the benefits of open access: Strategies for enhancing the discovery of open access content,” she discusses current models of open access and…

Despite the ubiquity of search in many people’s daily lives, a lack of search literacy can make it difficult to find solutions to technical problems, such as completing software-based tasks like troubleshooting program installations. GSLIS Professor Michael Twidale and Assistant Professor Max Wilson of the University of Nottingham have received funding from Google for a project that aims to…

GSLIS faculty and staff will participate in the 2015 All for One Conference: A Library State of Mind, the first joint conference of the Illinois Library Association (ILA) and the Illinois School Library Media Association, held in collaboration with the Illinois Association of College and Research Libraries and the Special Libraries Association Illinois Chapter. The conference will be held on…

Open Access Week 2015 will be recognized around the world October 19-25. GSLIS Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will deliver the keynote address for Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University’s OA Week celebration. Her talk, "Scholarly communication in the era of big data and big computation," is sponsored by the Virginia Tech’s University Libraries, Division of Computational…