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.

The Library Instruction Round Table (LIRT) of the American Library Association has chosen Melissa Bowles-Terry (MS '09), associate director of the Faculty Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, as the 2020 recipient of the LIRT Librarian Recognition Award. The Librarian Recognition Award was created to recognize an individual's contribution to the development, advancement and support of information literacy and instruction.

MS/LIS student Dykee Gorrell has been selected to participate in the Cornell Summer School on Designing Technology for Social Impact. The program, which will be held June 15-19 at Cornell University, is designed to foster a strong cohort of underrepresented researchers working on topics related to the social impact of information technology.

Teaching Assistant Professor Martin Wolske has joined the editorial board of the Journal of Community Informatics. The journal includes scholarly articles and notes from the interdisciplinary field of Community Informatics, which involves the study and practice of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in support of community-defined development goals.

Adjunct Lecturer Kristen Mattson will present "Information Literacy in Today's World: A Pandemic, Fake News, and Elections," on April 14 as part of the Follett Community Webinar Series. In her talk, Mattson will examine how (and why) information can be misleading and suggest strategies and resources for educators to use when teaching information.

A poster coauthored by Assistant Professor Peter Darch was a finalist for the Best Poster Award at iConference 2020, which was held virtually on March 23-27. The poster's lead author is Live Kvale, a doctoral student at Oslo Metropolitan University co-advised by Darch.

Sixteen iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Fall 2019. 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. Only those instructors who gave out ICES forms during the semester and who released their data for publication are included in the list.