Professor Ted Underwood has received a $73,122 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to investigate the consequences of error in digital libraries. While digital libraries represent an immense storehouse of knowledge, the texts are full of errors because of the imperfect process by which they are transcribed optically.

Emma Lipka joined the iSchool on April 6 as the recruitment and yield specialist. She comes to the School from Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, where she served as assistant director for marketing-admissions for graduate studies.

PhD student Clair Irwin (MS '16, CAS '18) has a personal connection to her research on the embodied information behaviors of people with diabetes.

People are being asked to change their behavior to help contain the spread of COVID-19. Dean Eunice E. Santos and PhD students Suresh Subramanian and Vairavan Murugappan studied the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and the social phenomena and events that influenced whether people in Mexico decided to cross the border into the U.S. at various times during the outbreak. Their work provides insights that can help public health officials plan for events such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. They talked with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel.

iSchool-affiliated partners on this project include Lisa Bievenue, director of informatics programs for Illinois Informatics Institute (campus leadership team member and campus/community distributed fabrication lead); Jeff Ginger (PhD '15), iSchool adjunct lecturer and Illinois Informatics Institute program coordinator for campus and community outreach (project design team member; design lead and fabrication contributor/coordinator); Amanda Elzbieciak (MS '17), CUC Fab Lab information manager (PPE fabrication); and Kristin Walters, MS/LIS student and CUC Fab Lab communications team member (social media assistance). More information is available on the CUC Fab Lab: Covid-19 Response web page, including videos about the fabrication process for face shields and the face shield build.

Associate Professor Kate McDowell has received funding from the Center for Social and Behavioral Science Small Grant program at the University of Illinois to help community organizations tell more effective data stories.

The goal of the "Data Storytelling for Community Organizations" project is to develop and pilot a toolkit, based on the iSchool's Data Science Storytelling course (IS 590DST), to bring storytelling in information science to community organizations. The project will create a data storytelling kit for community organizations, position public libraries to distribute this toolkit, and support community organizations using the toolkit.

Two professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been awarded a 2020 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
This year’s fellows are David Sepkoski, a professor of history and iSchool affiliate professor, and Janice N. Harrington, a poet and professor of English.

When Sarah Okner (MS '09) and her colleagues at Vernon Area Public Library in Lincolnshire, Illinois, learned that the library would be closing to the public because of COVID-19, they started making plans to connect virtually with community members.

Ian Brooks, iSchool research scientist and director of the Center for Health Informatics, and Sebastian Garcia Saiso, director of the Department of Evidence and Intelligence for Action in Health for the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), presented their preliminary social media analytics research on COVID-19 at the World Health Organization (WHO). 

PhD student Courtney Richardson will be the keynote speaker for "Storytelling with Data," a webinar hosted by LACONI (Library Administrators Conference of Northern Illinois) on April 10. The webinar will teach participants how they can interpret and communicate library information to community stakeholders using persuasive storytelling and data visualization.