MS/IM student Pranay Parmar won first place in the Data Visualization Competition sponsored by the University of Illinois Library's Scholarly Commons. The competition provides students with an opportunity to demonstrate their skills in visually communicating information. Winners were announced on October 22 at the 2019 Scholarly Commons Open House.

MS/LIS student Monica Hoh was invited by the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) to participate in the Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Book Fair). The event, which was held October 16-20 in Frankfurt, Germany, is the world's largest trade fair for books and draws more visitors than any other book fair.

As a young professional working to advance her career, Leep student Erica Halpern appreciates the flexibility and convenience of the iSchool's online MS/LIS program. She also is grateful for the George Bonn Scholarship that she received from the School, which removed a "huge financial burden" and has allowed her to focus on her studies.

This past summer MS/LIS students Kaylen Dwyer and Jasmine Wong participated in the Oxford-Illinois Digital Library Placement Program, an ongoing collaboration between Illinois and Oxford. The 2019 program partnered with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) as part of the grant "Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library Resources." The students proposed their own independent projects and were advised by faculty members at Oxford e-Research Center, David de Roure and Kevin Page, and iSchool partners Professor J. Stephen Downie and Visiting Research Services Specialist Ryan Dubnicek.

iSchool faculty and students will participate in the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting, which will be held October 19-23 in Melbourne, Australia. The theme of this year’s conference is “Information…Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime, Anyway.” The meeting, now in its 82nd year, is the premier international conference dedicated to the study of information, people, and technology in contemporary society. Associate Professor and MS/IM Program Director Catherine Blake serves as co-chair for this year’s conference. Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox and Affiliate Professor Clara Chu are members of the ASIS&T Board of Directors, contributing to governance activities.

Faculty, staff, and students represented the iSchool at the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC), held on October 1-4 in Orlando, Florida. Produced by AnitaB.org and presented in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), GHC is the world's largest gathering of women technologists.

A travel grant provided by the iSchool will allow MS/LIS student Morgan Sherlock to present her research with Laurel Post (MS '19) and Affiliate Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (MS '94) at the Charleston Conference without the extra financial stress. In the paper they will be presenting, "Behind the Gate: Early Career Researchers' Motivations for Using ResearchGate," the coauthors examine the motivations behind why early career researchers use the academic social network site ResearchGate and how publishers and librarians can use these findings to better understand and support their user communities.

PhD student Lo Lee will present work from Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh's research group at the Connected Learning Summit 2019, which will be held October 2-5 at the University of California, Irvine. The mission of the summit is to "fuel a growing movement of innovators harnessing emerging technology to expand access to participatory, playful, and creative learning." The program includes presentations and workshops ranging from speculative design, to game walkthroughs, sharing work in progress, and research panels.

MS/IM student Raghav Sethi discusses his summer internship at Deloitte US.

iSchool researchers will present their work at the Workshop on Research Objects 2019 (ro2019), which will be held in conjunction with eScience 2019 on September 24-27 in San Diego, California. The Research Objects approach proposes a way to "package, describe, publish, archive, explore, and understand digital research outputs by reusing existing Web standards and formats." Workshop participants will explore recent advances and challenges remaining to increase Research Object uptake among data providers, researchers, and other stakeholders.