iSchool master's student Lisa Morrison won the award for best paper at BOBCATSSS 2018, which was held in Riga, Latvia, from January 24-26. The BOBCATSSS Symposium is organized each year by library and information science students from European universities who plan and implement both the content and the management of the conference as a part of their studies.

Connect with iSchool faculty and staff next month at the 2018 ALISE Annual Conference and the ALA 2018 Midwinter Meeting in Denver. ALISE 2018 will be held February 6-9, and ALA Midwinter will be held February 9-13. A reception to honor the Kansas City Public Library, recipient of the 2017 Downs Intellectual Freedom Award, will take place on Saturday, February 10, from 5:30-7:00 p.m. in Ellingwood Rooms A and B at the Crowne Plaza Downtown Denver. The award is sponsored by the iSchool and Libraries Unlimited.

The Humanities Without Walls Consortium, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, fosters interdisciplinary, collaborative research, teaching, and scholarship in the humanities, sponsoring new areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation. On December 14, the Consortium announced the results of its latest research challenge initiative, "The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate." It awarded one of these grants—a multi-year investment of $138,360—to a team of humanists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The award will support their multi-year research project, titled "The Classroom and the Future of the Historical Record." 

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider (MS ’08) has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to develop a series of automated informatics tools for reviewing medical literature more quickly and easily. The project, “Text Mining Pipeline to Accelerate Systematic Reviews in Evidence-Based Medicine,” was funded through a subaward from the University of Illinois at Chicago that will cover $228,006 in direct costs.