Penny Ames, admissions and records coordinator, has been selected as the winner of the 2023 Graduate College Excellence Award for Graduate Contacts. The award is given annually as part of the Graduate College's Annual Workshop for Directors of Graduate Study and Graduate Contacts. It recognizes staff members whose service has exceeded expectations in enhancing graduate students' experiences and has positively impacted their graduate program or department's operations.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 10,000 full-time school librarian positions have been lost nationwide over the past two decades. This loss is especially felt by students, since research suggests that reading, writing, and graduation rates improve where schools employ certified school librarians. Thanks to a new program cosponsored by the iSchool and Chicago Public Schools (CPS), five school libraries that had been shuttered for five or more years now have a school librarian in place, with more to come.

The PhD degree program at the iSchool celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2023. This profile is part of a special series featuring PhD alumni. Noah Lenstra (MSLIS '09, CAS '11, PhD '16) is an associate professor of library and information science at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

As the Pathways Intern with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Division of Preservation and Access, Daniel Evans published two Jupyter notebooks for researching U.S. print culture. The notebooks, located on the Library of Congress's GitHub repository, will provide researchers with a downloadable data set of newspaper title essays and starter code so that they can create queries specific to their own research needs and interests.

Emily Bruce (MSLIS '17) has found school librarianship to be challenging but rewarding in the six years she has worked in the field. Bruce has experience working in elementary, junior high, and high school libraries, and she currently serves as the librarian at Lincoln High School in Vincennes, Indiana. Her favorite part of being a school librarian is restoring libraries to their full potential.

MSLIS student Rachel Riffe discusses her practicum experience at Forge Biologics.

Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo has co-edited a new book, Governing Smart Cities as Knowledge Commons, with Brett M. Frischmann (Villanova University School of Law) and Michael J. Madison (University of Pittsburgh School of Law). The book examines how several cities handle ethical, economic, political, and social issues arising from the cities' technologically advanced statuses.

Ten iSchool students were named 2022 Sylvia Murphy Williams Scholars by the Illinois Library Association (ILA). The scholarships, which include a one-year membership to the association and a scholarship to the ILA Annual Conference, are given to American Library Association (ALA) Spectrum Scholars who live in Illinois or who are attending graduate programs in library and information science in the state.

BSIS student Bea Verin discusses her internship experience with Nike. She especially enjoyed the “fun atmosphere” at the company and opportunity to collaborate with fellow interns.

Teaching Associate Professor Judith Pintar and Teaching Assistant Professor David Hopping have written a new book, Information Science: The Basics, which was recently published by Routledge.