Eight iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Summer 2017. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning.

The field of library and information science (LIS) has a long history of research on the preservation of materials in libraries and archives. However, that research has focused almost exclusively on tangible aspects of cultural heritage. Associate Professor Jerome McDonough, Associate Professor Lori Kendall, and Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn have released a white paper as part of their work on the Preserving Intangible Cultural Heritage project.

Nicole A. Cooke, assistant professor and MS/LIS program director, will present a workshop at the two-day international symposium, Diversity by Design: Reframing Diversity Discourse in Canada, which will be held on September 13-14 in Toronto. The event will bring together institutions of higher education, information and cultural institutions, community partners, and governmental organizations.

Twenty-four iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Spring 2017. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning.

Associate Professor Terry L. Weech has been awarded a Scroll of Appreciation by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) for "his distinguished contribution to IFLA and the library profession, especially in the internationalization of library and information science education."

Members of the Whole Tale Archaeology Working Group will meet with fellow computational archaeologists, environmental scientists, and other researchers for the first "Prov-a-thon" on practical tools for reproducible science. Held in conjunction with the DataONE All-Hands Meeting in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, the two-day workshop on August 31 and September 1 is cosponsored by the NSF-funded projects Whole Tale, DataONE, and the Arctic Data Center.

Professor Michael Twidale, program director for the iSchool's MS in information management, is the 2017 recipient of the Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). The award recognizes Twidale's unique teaching contributions through his methods of explaining highly technical material to students in various learning environments.

Thanks to a new online resource for paleoenvironmental data and models under development at Illinois and partner institutions, historian Richard Flint can gauge whether environmental factors played an important role in driving the migration of Pueblo Indians from the Spanish province of New Mexico in the seventeenth century. Using SKOPE (Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments), scholars such as Flint and the larger community of archaeologists will be able to discover, explore, visualize, and synthesize knowledge of environments in the recent or remote past.

Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Her three-year term as a director-at-large will begin on November 1, 2017.

The yt project, an open science environment created to address astrophysical questions through analysis and visualization, has been awarded a $1.6 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue developing their software project. iSchool Assistant Professor Matthew Turk is leading the project with collaborators.