Associate Professor Terry L. Weech will discuss the accreditation of library and information studies (LIS) programs at the Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS) 10th international conference, which will take place on June 16-19 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The conference aims to provide a broad forum for the exploration of ideas in the field of LIS, information studies, and related disciplines.

Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch presented his research and served as a session chair at the ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP), which was held June 9-12 in Larnaca, Cyprus. UMAP is an international conference for researchers and practitioners working on systems that adapt to individual users and groups of users and that collect, represent, and model user information. The theme of this year's conference was "Making Personalization Transparent: Giving Control Back to the User."

During his time at the iSchool, recent MS/LIS graduate Billy Tringali established and launched the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS), an open-access publication dedicated to providing an ethical, peer-reviewed space for academics, students, and independent researchers to share their research in the field of anime, manga, cosplay, and fandom studies. A fan himself, Tringali has been drawn to popular culture scholarship since he was an undergraduate studying English and anthropology at Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

Affiliate Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe has been elected as a member of the board of directors for the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP).

Postdoctoral Research Associate Rhiannon Bettivia (PhD '16) is the co-author of a chapter in Politics of Scale: New Directions in Critical Heritage Studies, a newly published book edited by Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Suzie Thomas, and Yujie Zhu. In the chapter, "The Dynamics of Scale in Digital Heritage Cultures," Bettivia and Elizabeth Stainforth, a lecturer at the University of Leeds, examine scalar politics as enacted through Europeana, the EU digital platform for cultural heritage, and the Digital Public Library of America.

Professor Bertram Ludäscher will be presenting research with group members during Philadelphia Logic Week 2019. The event, which will be held from June 3-7 at St. Joseph's University, brings together several conferences dedicated to the research on logic, knowledge representation, reasoning, transformations and provenance.

High School District 214, located in Arlington Heights, Illinois, is the recipient of the American Association of School Librarians' (AASL) 2019 National School Library of the Year Award. Sponsored by Follett, the annual award honors a single school or district-wide school library that exemplifies implementation of AASL's "National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries." High School District 214 has an iSchool connection: two of the district’s librarians, Dawn Ferencz and Kim Miklusak, have participated in the School's continuing education program.

Starting this weekend, the University of Illinois will host the 2019 ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), a major international forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. The conference will be held from June 2-6 at the iHotel and Conference Center in Champaign. In addition to the University, cosponsors of JCDL include the iSchool and University Library.

Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox has published a paper, "Silencing Stories: Challenges to Diverse Books," in The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI). According to Knox, over the past few years, there have been an increasing number of diverse books on the Most Challenged Books List from the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom. Her latest work expands on a previous discourse analysis of censorship on challenges to diverse books through more robust analysis of the challenge cases.

Doctoral candidate Aiko Takazawa successfully defended her dissertation, "'Tutteli to Japan': a Case Study of Spontaneous Collaboration in Disaster Response," on May 17.