Being a key-holding member of Makerspace Urbana—one of the few who have twenty-four hour access to the maker lab—comes with more responsibility than just locking up when you leave. Emily Knox, iSchool assistant professor and Makerspace Urbana keyholder, spoke recently with Illinois Public Media’s The 21st Show about the group’s efforts to create a diverse and inclusive space.

Assistant Professor Vetle Torvik has been named the iSchool's Centennial Scholar for 2016-2017. The Centennial Scholar award is endowed by alumni and friends of the School and given in recognition of outstanding accomplishments and/or professional promise in the field of library and information science.

Professor Bertram Ludäscher will present the international tutorial at the thirty-first Brazilian Symposium on Databases (SBBD2016) in Salvador-Bahia on October 4-7. SBBD, an official event of the Brazilian Computer Society, is the largest venue in Latin America for presenting and discussing research results in the database domain.

A new resource for educators—Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook, a two-volume set published in September by the Association of College & Research Libraries—examines the theory and practice of critical pedagogy in the LIS classroom. Volume one includes chapters written by iSchool Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke and affiliated faculty member Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (MS '94).

Provenance information describes the origin and history of artifacts. Because of the vital role played by data and workflow provenance in support of transparency and reproducibility in computational and data science, creating tools for capturing and using provenance information is an important yet challenging task.

“Play can be hard work and serious business,” say the organizers of Extending Play, a conference series that addresses play as more than a leisure activity, considering the factors that shape and influence our notions of both play and playability.

Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke is a founding member of the advisory board for Our Voices, a new ALA initiative that seeks to increase diversity in the production and distribution of children’s books. Sponsored by ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom and Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services, Our Voices offers interested libraries a template to promote the growth of diverse, quality content in library collections.

Nine iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Summer 2016. 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

Music, politics, art, prison justice, comics . . . the topics of zines are as diverse as the individuals creating them. Unlike a traditional magazine, a zine is self-published, small in scale, and more personal. On September 16, iSchool Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre answered questions about zines and her role as caretaker of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center (UCIMC) Zine Library on the Harukana Show, a broadcast of UCIMC's radio station WRFU, which is also webcast internationally.

Created in 1941, Wonder Woman has been a popular comics hero for decades. Associate Professor Carol Tilley will join fellow comics fans and scholars to celebrate the character’s seventy-fifth anniversary at the Wonder Woman Symposium on September 22-24 in Cleveland, Ohio.