In the ongoing challenge to develop new technological innovations, great minds don’t think alike. It was the diverse intellectual backgrounds and strengths of each teammate that allowed a group of four Illinois graduate students to tackle a design challenge that required a multidisciplinary approach. GSLIS master’s student Chris Nixon called on his friends Berenice Vargas, a fellow GSLIS…

CIRSS researchers made a strong showing as they shared their expertise in scientific data curation at the 47th annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The meeting was held December 15-19 in San Francisco, California, and is the largest worldwide conference in the geophysical sciences, gathering more than 24,000 Earth and space scientists, educators, students, and other…

GSLIS doctoral candidate Melissa Villa-Nicholas has been awarded The Barbara and Donald Smalley Graduate Research Fellowship for the 2015 academic year given by the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, where she is pursuing a graduate minor in queer studies. This $12,000 fellowship supports graduate students working on their dissertation and is awarded to a graduate minor in gender and women…

GSLIS alumna Gemma Petrie (MS '11) is one of twenty Chicago residents featured in the Chicago Reader's 2014 People Issue. As a user experience researcher at Mozilla, Petrie studies technology education and learning and finds ways to make technology accessible to people around the world. Read Petrie's GSLIS alumni profile to learn more about her work.

The GSLIS eUpdate, published every other month, summarizes current news, events, alumni and advancement highlights, and continuing professional development opportunities. Other publications that may be of interest to alumni and friends are listed on the GSLIS Publications web page. IN THIS ISSUE GSLIS Spotlight GSLIS News Summary Continuing Professional Development Alumni News…

The staff and board of trustees of the Orland Park (Illinois) Public Library are the 2014 recipient of the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award given by the faculty of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and cosponsored by Libraries Unlimited. Mary Weimar, director of the library, and Nancy Healy, president of the…

GSLIS faculty members Catherine Blake and Michael Twidale are working as expert advisors to the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Information Resource Center (VIReC) on a project to analyze the socio-technical aspects of VA’s HSRData-L Listserv. VIReC is a VA Health Service Research & Development Service (HSR&D) resource center that supports VA researchers in need of information…

Since August of 2011, the Mix IT Up! project has engaged GSLIS students and community organizations to work together on issues related to youth advocacy and information technology. The IMLS-funded program is wrapping up at the end of the fall semester, so we sat down with Principal Investigator Rae Montague (MS '00, PhD '06) and Project Coordinator Joe Coyle (MS '11) to reflect on its impact in…

Lori Kendall, GSLIS associate professor, recently gave an invited lecture in the Marshall McLuhan Lecture Series at the National Communication Association (NCA) 100th Annual Convention. NCA is dedicated to fostering and promoting free and ethical communication, focusing on how people use messages to generate meanings within and across various contexts, cultures, channels, and media.…

Six GSLIS alumni have been selected to participate in the American Library Association’s 2015 class of Emerging Leaders. Anna Coats (MS '11), Xiaoyu Duan (MS '12), Isabel Gonzalez-Smith (MS '11), Paolo Gujilde (MS '09), Ximin Mi (MS '13), and Bethany Tschaepe (MS '11) are included in this year's class of fifty individuals from across the country. Now in its ninth year, this leadership…