Daniel S. Katz, iSchool affiliated faculty member and assistant director for scientific software and applications at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), was the keynote speaker for the International Workshop on Science Gateways – Australia (ISGW-A) during the 11th eResearch Australasia Conference, and was the closing plenary speaker for the conference, which was held from October 16-20 in Brisbane, Australia.

According to Associate Professor Kate McDowell, storytelling is one of the few ways you can help people quickly understand cause, effect, and what they can do. For that reason, storytelling is a valuable tool for nonprofits wishing to educate the public about their mission and attract more volunteers and donations.

Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn and colleagues in Kansas and North Carolina have received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS LG-72-17-0132-17) to fund their project exploring the need for and components of an open educational resource (OER) for teaching library students and professionals about scholarly communication.

Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke presented her research on October 3 as part of the Digital Dialogues series at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). The series is the signature events program of MITH, a digital humanities center that is jointly supported by the University of Maryland (UMD) College of Arts and Humanities and UMD Libraries.

Assistant Professors Rachel M. Magee and Deborah Stevenson will present research on youth and technology at the Digital Media & Learning Conference 2017 from October 4-6 at the University of California, Irvine. The conference is an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the UC Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.

Jana Diesner, assistant professor and PhD program director at the iSchool, is co-principal investigator on a multi-institutional initiative funded by the Army Research Lab to enable new predictive battlefield analytics and services. Diesner will collaborate on the project with researchers from Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering.  

Professor and Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) Director Bertram Ludäscher and collaborators are presenting their joint work and tools for data quality, cleaning, and provenance at the 33rd Annual Biodiversity Information Standards conference, TDWG 2017, from October 1-6 in Ottawa, Canada. The annual conference provides a forum for developing standards and demonstrating new technologies and tools for biodiversity informatics. 

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (MS '94), faculty affiliate and editor of Library Trends, and her colleagues from Simmons College have been awarded a National Forum grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Hinchliffe is professor and coordinator for information literacy services at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, one of the largest public university libraries in the world.

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.