This summer MS/LIS student Nicole Miller returned home to San Antonio, Texas, to complete a practicum with the public library system that first sparked her interest in library and information science. When Miller was a teenager, she logged over 450 hours of community service with the teen program at the San Antonio Public Library. After completing her BA in literary studies from The University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson, she volunteered again at the library while finishing applications for master’s degree programs.

Join iSchool faculty and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place from September 24-26 in Knoxville, Tennessee. The theme of ALISE 2019 is "Exploring Learning in a Global Information Context." Dean and Professor Eunice E. Santos will provide welcoming remarks at the iSchool-sponsored School Representative's Breakfast at 7:30 a.m. on September 25.

Two students in the MS in information management (MS/IM) program received top honors for their performance as interns at the University's Research Park. Saurav Yadav was named "Most Outstanding Graduate Intern" for his work at the COUNTRY Financial DigitaLab, and Harshit Gupta received the award for "Best Technological Innovation" for his work as a data scientist technology intern at Syngenta.

Garrick Sherman successfully defended his PhD dissertation, "Document Expansion and Language Model Re-estimation for Information Retrieval," on August 22.

Doctoral candidate Jacob Jett successfully defended his dissertation, "Towards a General Conceptual Model for Bibliographic Aggregates," on August 12.

After completing her MS/LIS degree, Lauren Camarillo would like to work in an academic library with first-year and/or first-generation students. She recently was selected to participate in the 2019-2021 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Kaleidoscope Diversity Scholars Program, which offers financial support as well as professional development opportunities. 

Leep student Ben Chiewphasa recently received a 2019 W. David Rozkuszka Scholarship from the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) of the American Library Association. The scholarship provides financial assistance to individuals enrolled in an MS/LIS degree program who are currently working with government documents in a library. Chiewphasa works as an adjunct government information librarian and cataloging specialist at the University of Montana and will transition to a tenure-track faculty government information librarian position at the University when he graduates in August.

Doctoral candidate Shubhanshu Mishra successfully defended his dissertation, "Information Extraction from Digital Social Trace Data with Applications to Social Media and Scholarly Communication Data," on June 24.

Doctoral candidate Jimi Jones successfully defended his dissertation, "So Many Standards, So Little Time: An Analysis of Two Video Digitization Standards Groups," on June 19.

During his time at the iSchool, recent MS/LIS graduate Billy Tringali established and launched the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS), an open-access publication dedicated to providing an ethical, peer-reviewed space for academics, students, and independent researchers to share their research in the field of anime, manga, cosplay, and fandom studies. A fan himself, Tringali has been drawn to popular culture scholarship since he was an undergraduate studying English and anthropology at Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.