Melissa Newell joined the iSchool on July 15 as director of undergraduate affairs. In this new position, she provides leadership and strategic direction for the administration of the Bachelor of Science in information sciences (BS/IS) degree, undergraduate student experience, and undergraduate recruitment and admission.

Twenty-seven iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Spring 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.

Professor Emerita Linda C. Smith presented her research at two conferences this month, the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) UK Conference and the LibPMC: International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries.

Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner gave a keynote talk and presented a paper at the 5th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which was held July 17-20 at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. IC2S2 brings together academic researchers, industry experts, open data activists, and government agency workers to explore challenges, methods, and research questions in the field of computational social science.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Yun Huang will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2019, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. She is currently an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.

Professor Emerita Selma Richardson passed away on July 10, 2019, in Urbana. An authority on school library media services, Richardson worked in a number of school libraries, including Oak Park and River Forest High School, before joining the University of Illinois in 1974. For over a decade, she was responsible for multiple editions of the American Library Association publication, Magazines for Children: A Guide for Parents, Teachers, and Librarians. She was also a historical children's book scholar whose research focused on public library services to children in Illinois. 

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Jessie Chin will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2019, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. She is currently a research assistant professor in biomedical and health information sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The iSchool Alumni Association (ISAA) honored its 2019 award recipients at the ISAA annual meeting and reception, which was held on June 23 during the annual meeting of the American Library Association in Washington, DC.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Yang Wang will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2019, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He is currently an assistant professor and co-director of the Social Computing Systems Lab (SALT) in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.

Affiliate Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, professor and coordinator for information literacy services and instruction in the University Library, in collaboration with Kyle Jones, assistant professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at the Indiana University-Indianapolis (IUPUI), has been awarded a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for Prioritizing Privacy: Training to Improve Practice in Library Analytics Projects.