MS student Vivian Alvarez works with tweens and teens at the Rudy Lozano Branch of the Chicago Public Library, which is located in the Mexican-American community of Pilsen. As part of her job, she develops programming for youth that nurtures learning and strengthens communities.

Master's student NaVosha Copeland is a 2017 recipient of the Harold T. Pinkett Minority Student Award given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The award will be presented at a ceremony during the SAA Annual Meeting in July.

Doctoral candidate Chris D'Arpa successfully defended her dissertation, "'Procure, propagate, and distribute among the people': The information service functions of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1862-1888," on May 30.

Doctoral student Craig Willis has received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to work with the biomedical and healthCAre Data Discovery Index Ecosystem (bioCADDIE)/DataMED team on a pilot project this summer. The award is based on his participation in the 2016 bioCADDIE Dataset Retrieval Challenge.

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 14, 2017.

The University of Illinois has long been a leader in accessibility for persons with disabilities. This tradition continues with a new web app called "Access Illinois" created by MS student Mark McCarthy and his team members Matt Arensdorf (undergraduate student, computer science) and Emily Chen (PhD student, computational linguistics). The app earned the team first place in HackCulture.

Doctoral candidate Andrea K. Thomer successfully defended her dissertation, "Site-Based Data Curation: Bridging Data Collection Protocols and Curatorial Processes at Scientifically Significant Sites," on May 8.

Doctoral candidate Cheryl Thompson successfully defended her dissertation, "Data Expertise and Service Development in Geoscience Data Centers and Academic Libraries," on May 8.

iSchool faculty and students will participate in the University of Illinois Social Media Analytics Summit, which will be held on Tuesday, May 2, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. The event will take place at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) auditorium.

With a passion for making books accessible to anyone at any age, Justin Williams made it his mission to seek a career in a library that would allow him to connect with others and make an impact in their lives through the use of stories and information. Williams is set to graduate this May and has a job lined up at as a teen librarian for the White Oak Library District in Lockport, Illinois.