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.

A project led by iSchool Professor Les Gasser, "Simulating Social Systems at Scale (SSS)," has laid the groundwork for a prestigious award to a student researcher. Santiago Núñez-Corrales, an Informatics PhD student directed by Gasser, was recently chosen from among several hundred applicants to receive an ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational & Data Science Fellowship.

Several iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research at Digital Humanities 2017, the annual conference of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. The event will be held in Montreal, Canada, on August 8-11.

Bonnie Mak will join book artists, conservators, and archivists for a discussion of the future of the book at the symposium, "Codex: History, Art, and Practice." Hosted by the Ohio Preservation Council and the State Library of Ohio, the symposium brings together information professionals from across the state who are interested in the preservation of documentary heritage.