Ashley Batchelder, a master's student in the Leep online program, presented her library's physical activity programs at the Association for Rural and Small Libraries (ARSL) Conference, which was held from September 13-15 in Springfield, Illinois. Batchelder, who is an assistant children's librarian at the Mt. Zion (IL) District Library, took part in the session, "Let's Get Moving at the Library! Physical Activity Programs for Fun and for Health." She presented two programs that promote physical activity at her library: the Music and Movement program she developed and the library's Annual Garden Party that kicks off the summer reading program.

Doctoral candidate Kinyetta Nance discusses her summer internship at Facebook in California.

Doctoral student Jessica Cheng will present her research at the 18th European Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop, which will take place on September 13 in Porto, Portugal. The workshop, held in conjunction with the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2018) and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI 2018), will explore the potential of knowledge organization systems (KOS) such as classification systems, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, and lexical databases in the context of current developments and possibilities.

Doctoral candidate Jacob Jett presented his research in digital cultural heritage collections at the Japanese Association for the Digital Humanities annual conference (JADH 2018), which was held September 9-11, in Tokyo, Japan. The theme of this year's conference was "Leveraging Open Data."

The identification of proper names of people, organizations, and locations from raw texts, referred to as Named Entity Recognition (NER), can be highly accurate when researchers use NER tools on a large collection of text with proper syntax. However, using existing NER tools for analyzing social media text can lead to poor identification of named entities. TwitterNER, an open-source tool developed by doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra, who is supervised by Assistant Professor Jana Diesner, can help researchers interested in performing NER on social media text.

Two iSchool master's students have been selected by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Committee on Diversity and Leadership to participate in the Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce (IRDW) as ARL Diversity Scholars.

Members of the Diesner research group will present a paper and posters at the 4th Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which will be held July 13-15 at Northwestern University. Assistant Professor Jana Diesner is a program committee co-chair for the conference.

Doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra will present his research at the 29th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, which will be held July 9-12 in Baltimore, Maryland. The conference will focus on the role of links, linking, hypertext, and hyperlink theory on the web and beyond.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, which will take place from July 2-6 at the University of Oxford. The annual summer school offers training in the digital humanities through hands-on workshops and lectures.

Seven master's students have been named 2018-2019 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. Established in 1997, the Spectrum Scholarship Program promotes diversity among graduate-level students pursuing degrees in library and information studies through ALA-accredited programs.