A paper coauthored by Assistant Professor Yun Huang and PhD student Si Chen received an Honorable Mention Award at the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020), which was held virtually on October 17-21. Approximately 1,000 papers were eligible for consideration for Best Paper awards, with the top one percent recognized as Best Papers and five percent as Honorable Mentions. Coauthors included Xinyue Chen, an undergraduate at Peking University, and Xu Wang, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Doctoral candidate DeAnza Williams successfully defended her dissertation, "BlackBoyYALit: Seeing Black Boys in 21st Century Young Adult Literature," on November 5.

Shannon O'Rourke Kasali's involvement with libraries started before she arrived at Illinois for her MS/LIS degree. While working in the Democratic Republic of Congo, she witnessed the lack of accessibility to books. In response, O'Rourke Kasali crowd-funded $27,000 to purchase 27,000 books, leading to the creation of Books for Congo. Since 2016, the organization has established 16 libraries in two provinces in the country, distributing over 56,000 books and training 30 librarians.

Members of Associate Professor Jana Diesner's Social Computing Lab will present two posters at the 11th Annual Maritime Risk Symposium, which is being held virtually from October 26-30. The symposium, hosted by the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI), will focus on maritime resilience and the impact of COVID-19 with regard to resiliency for future global upsets.

Doctoral candidate Rezvaneh (Shadi) Rezapour will present her research at the 2nd Annual Michigan Institute Consortium for Data Scientists in Training, a virtual event held from October 29-30. Rezapour is part of the Institute’s 2020 cohort, which includes researchers from 28 universities. The competitive program offers graduate students and postdocs the opportunity to participate in research talks, networking sessions, and mentoring opportunities.

A paper authored by Informatics PhD student Donald Keefer and Assistant Professor Karen Wickett, "Adapting Research Process Models for the Design of Knowledge Engineering Applications," has received the Best Short Paper Award at the 2020 Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting.

For Julie Knutson, the iSchool's online MS/LIS program is "incredibly convenient," allowing her to continue authoring children's nonfiction while working toward her goal of becoming a school librarian.

"My first job out of college was at Temple University's Paley Library. After that experience, I kept returning to the idea of school librarianship. Really, the best I can describe it is as an unshakable drive to work in this space—with kids—to help them not just find books they love, but also to develop into discerning consumers of information, passionate researchers, and empowered makers," said Knutson.

A record fifteen iSchool master's students were named 2020-2021 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. This "Spectrum Scholar Spotlight" series highlights the School's scholars. MS/LIS student Krystal Madkins holds a BA in sociology from Bryn Mawr College and an MPH in epidemiology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

iSchool faculty and students will participate in the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), which will be held virtually from October 22-November 1. The theme of this year's conference is "Information for a Sustainable World: Addressing Society's Grand Challenges." The meeting is the premier international conference dedicated to the study of information, people, and technology in contemporary society.

A poster coauthored by Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek, PhD student Lo Lee, and Stephann Makri, senior lecturer at City, University of London, has been selected to receive the SIG USE Best Information Behavior Conference Poster Award at the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting, which will be held virtually from October 22-November 1. The award recognizes the best poster within the scope of information behavior, "broadly defined to include how people construct, need, seek, manage, give, and use information in different contexts."