As an undergrad Christopher Murphy first heard about the iSchool at Illinois from a librarian friend at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Now as an MS/LIS student, intellectual property researcher for John Deere, and volunteer in the community, Murphy has seen for himself how important building a professional network can be.

When iSchool master’s student Alison Rollins saw that Nerinx Hall High School had a job opening for a librarian, she jumped at the chance to work for her alma mater. She was hired in in August, bringing several years of experience in youth services for public libraries.

Doctoral candidate Brittany Smith successfully defended her dissertation, "Motivation and Skill Acquisition in an Online Amateur Multimedia Community: A Case Study," on October 10.

Several University of Illinois iSchool faculty and students will participate in the 2016 Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting, which will be held October 14-18 in Copenhagen, Denmark

Doctoral student Paige Cunningham will participate this week in the conference, Learning with MOOCs III: Being and Learning in a Digital Age, to be held October 6-7 at the University of Pennsylvania.

Cass Mabbott, PhD student, will participate in Information Seeking in Context (ISIC): The Information Behaviour Conference to be held September 20-23 in Zadar, Croatia. This biannual conference is devoted to information-seeking behavior and information use, focusing this year on analytical investigations of the connection between information research and information behavior and practices.

It is at this intersection of people and institutions that doctoral candidate Cheryl Thompson is conducting her research. Specifically, she explores how organizations develop data expertise and services to support science.

Master's student Alison C. Rollins is one of five recipients of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Awarded by the Poetry Foundation, the fellowship is one of the largest awards offered to young poets between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one in the United States. The $25,800 prize is intended to encourage the further study and writing of poetry.

Jesus Espinoza has been quite busy so far during his time at the iSchool. In addition to his classes and graduate assistant position with the University Libraries, he is a member of the Student Advisory Board to the School’s Student Affairs office, vice president of the American Library Association (ALA) Student Chapter and co-chair of the group’s Lecture and Professional Development Committee, an ALA Spectrum Scholar, and an Association of Research Libraries Diversity Scholar.

Associate Professor Bonnie Mak and doctoral student Beth Strickland will travel to Barcelona, Spain, at the end of the month to speak at the joint conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (4S/EASST). The event, “Science and Technology by Other Means,” will be held at the Barcelona Internacional Convention Centre on August 31 - September 3.