Dean Allen Renear presented Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden with her honorary degree at the University of Illinois Commencement on May 11, 2019. Below are his remarks and the video from commencement.

Dustin Janes, office administrator at the iSchool, worked at a bagel factory before joining the University of Illinois in 2012. He joined the School in 2019.

Starting this weekend, the University of Illinois will host the 2019 ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), a major international forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. The conference will be held from June 2-6 at the iHotel and Conference Center in Champaign. In addition to the University, cosponsors of JCDL include the iSchool and University Library.

The iSchool is pleased to announce the establishment of its first endowed professorship, the Mildred M. Luther and Kathryn Luther Henderson Professorship in Preservation and Technical Services. The professorship was established through the generosity of Mildred Luther (1926-2017), a loyal Illinois employee and alumna with a special family connection to the School.

In August 2019, the iSchool will welcome Sharon L. Comstock (PhD '12) as a senior lecturer and Inkyung Choi as a lecturer.

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of new directors for its master's degree programs. Associate Professor Maria Bonn will serve as program director for the MS in library and information science (MS/LIS), and Associate Professor Catherine Blake will serve as program director for the MS in information management (MS/IM). They will begin their three-year terms on May 16.

In Associate Professor Yoo-Seong Song's Applied Business Research class (IS 540), students learn advanced techniques of business research through hands-on experience with real-world clients. This semester, a team of students has been working with entrepreneur Douglass Lee, founder of the startup OneSoftDigm (OSD) and a senior in business at the University of Illinois.

Our School is grateful for talented and dedicated staff, who contribute greatly to our teaching and research excellence. This "Get to Know" series highlights our staff, sharing their friendly faces and stories of professional success. In this story, we are featuring Office Manager Dianne Tellschow.di 

MS/LIS student Vera Vasileva has been awarded an Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Student Scholarship to participate in the ACRL 2019 conference, which will be held April 10-13 in Cleveland, Ohio. At the conference, Vasileva will attend the presentation of "We Don't Need that Anymore, Exploring the Myths and Realities of the Impact of Digitization on Print Usage," a paper she coauthored with her graduate assistantship supervisor Thomas Teper, associate professor and associate dean of libraries for the University Library.

Eighteen iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Fall 2018. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Only those instructors who gave out ICES forms during the semester and who released their data for publication are included in the list.