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.

Professor Bertram Ludäscher will be presenting research with group members during Philadelphia Logic Week 2019. The event, which will be held from June 3-7 at St. Joseph's University, brings together several conferences dedicated to the research on logic, knowledge representation, reasoning, transformations and provenance.

Doctoral candidate Aiko Takazawa successfully defended her dissertation, "'Tutteli to Japan': a Case Study of Spontaneous Collaboration in Disaster Response," on May 17.

Each year, the School recognizes a group of outstanding students for their achievement in academics as well as a number of attributes that contribute to professional success. The following student awards were presented at the School's Convocation ceremony on May 12, 2019.

In her work at a women's prison in Illinois, MS/LIS student Christinna Swearingen noticed that while a lot of the prisoners love books, many of them struggle to read. Her response to this problem was to create a Prison Book Club to engage readers at all levels of ability.

Drexel University's College of Computing and Informatics has selected PhD student Jessica Cheng as a LEADS-4-NDP 2018-2019 Fellow. LEADS-4-NDP, the LIS Education and Data Science for the National Digital Platform program, is part of the Institute of Library and Museum Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program.

Doctoral candidate Paige Cunningham successfully defended her dissertation, "Exploring Communication Patterns in Massive Open Online Courses," on May 6.