GSLIS faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), held at the University of Tennessee on June 21-25. The event brings together international scholars focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, organizational, and social issues. The goal is to provide a forum for shared learning and facilitate the application of knowledge for research, development, construction, and utilization in digital libraries.

GSLIS seeks nominations for the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award. The deadline for nominations is October 1, 2015. Given annually, the award acknowledges individuals or groups who have furthered the cause of intellectual freedom, particularly as it impacts libraries and information centers and the dissemination of ideas. Granted to those who have resisted censorship or efforts to…

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem and doctoral student Melissa Hayes will participate in the annual conference of the Children’s Literature Association coming up June 18-20 in Richmond, Virginia. The theme of the year’s conference is “‘Give me liberty, or give me death!’: The High Stakes and Dark Sides of Children’s Literature.” Hoiem will chair a session titled, “Liberty and Death for the…

GSLIS master’s student Janet Swatscheno has been selected to participate in the highly competitive 2015 Library of Congress (LoC) Junior Fellows Summer Intern Program. She will spend ten weeks working full time on-site in Washington, DC, at the LoC’s John W. Kluge Center, which hosts scholars from the United States and abroad. Swatscheno’s project is to conduct an evaluation of the center’s…

The HathiTrust Research Center is pleased to announce the release of its Extracted Features Dataset, a dataset derived from 4.8 million public domain volumes, totaling over 1.8 billion pages currently available in the HathiTrust Digital Library collection. The dataset includes over 734 billion words, dozens of languages, and spans multiple centuries. The release of this dataset enables…

Assistant Professor Jana Diesner spoke at the ninth International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) on May 27. Hosted annually by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, ICWSM addresses themes in social and computational sciences related to human social behavior on the web. The 2015 conference was held May 26-29 at the University of Oxford.

Three GSLIS alumni have been chosen to participate in the highly competitive American Library Association Leadership Institute: Jenna Mayotte (MS ’07), business resource center coordinator at the Simsbury (CT) Public Library; Michele Paladines (MS ’11), collections coordinator at Oak Park (IL) Public Library; and Janet Vogel (MS ’08), youth services coordinator for Frederick County (MD) Public…

The news is filled with stories about the latest medical innovations—new prescription drugs that promise relief from symptoms, treatments that offer improved quality of life. Although journalists tend to focus on a single study, people with a chronic health condition who are trying to figure out the best treatment for them, and policy makers who are trying to make recommendations that are best…

With a growing international population and a penchant for cross-campus collaboration, the University of Illinois provides a wealth of opportunities for area youth to learn about cultures other than their own. The Center for Children’s Books (CCB) teamed up with the Luso-Brazilian Association and University Housing recently to host one such multicultural learning event at the Orchard Downs Family…

Several GSLIS affiliates presented this week at HASTAC 2015, the annual conference of the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. Held at Michigan State University May 28-29, HASTAC 2015 featured presentations relating to the theme, "Art and Science of Digital Humanities." GSLIS postdoctoral research associate Sayan Bhattacharyya presented an interactive session…