Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke and affiliated faculty member Clara Chu have been appointed to serve on a new American Library Association (ALA) task force on LIS accreditation. The Task Force on the Context of Future Accreditation is charged with drafting a white paper describing the fields and context for which ALA will be making accreditation decisions in the future. Based on their…

Three representatives from GSLIS will travel to Prato, Italy, next week to participate in the Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN) Conference.

GSLIS faculty and students will participate in the 78th Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting, which will be held on November 6-10 in St. Louis.

Several members of the GSLIS community will participate in the 2015 Charleston Conference, an annual meeting that draws librarians, publishers, vendors, and others to discuss issues relating to the acquisition of books and serials. The conference will be held November 4-7 in Charleston, South Carolina. On November 6, Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn will participate in a panel discussion of…

Prior to the faculty vote to submit a proposal to change the name of our School, stakeholder feedback was solicited and shared with faculty. We valued the opportunity to hear from our alumni, students, faculty, and friends. As anticipated, we received a range of responses and viewpoints. The following information summarizes frequently occurring themes in the responses, which shared both…

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…