Doctoral candidate Julia Burns Petrella successfully defended her dissertation, "Educating Pre-Service School Librarians about Race, Racism, and Whiteness," on December 4.

Doctoral candidate Qiuyan Guo successfully defended her dissertation, "Exploring Chinese Celebrity Fans’ Online Information Behaviors and Understandings of Their Practices," on December 6.

Associate Professor Carol Tilley had an unexpected citation in her favorite medium—comic books! Dav Pilkey, author and illustrator of a number of bestselling and award-winning children’s books, including the popular Captain Underpants series, depicts Tilley's research on psychiatrist Fredric Wertham in his newest comic, Cat Kid Comic Club Influencers.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students presented their research at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual conference, which was held from November 8-11 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The society is an international, nonprofit association that fosters interdisciplinary scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine. 

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in the 2023 Charleston Conference, which will be held November 6-10 in Charleston, South Carolina. The conference is an annual gathering that draws librarians, publishers, vendors, and others to discuss issues relating to the acquisition of books and serials. 

The NSF-funded FABRIC project has completed installation of a unique network infrastructure connection, called the TeraCore—a ring spanning the continental U.S.—which boasts data transmission speeds of 1.2 Terabits per second (Tbps), or one trillion bits per second. Anita Nikolich, director of research and technology innovation and research scientist in the iSchool at Illinois, serves as co-principal investigator on the project.

PhD student Morgan Lundy won first place in the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) /Jean Tague-Sutcliffe Doctoral Student Research Poster Competition for her poster, "'Have a flare with me!': A content analysis, grounded theory, and collaborative design approach to disability storytelling on TikTok." For the competition, posters were judged on practical/theoretical significance, design and method of research, the student’s oral presentation, and the organization, clarity, and aesthetics of visual materials.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced that its draft Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Recommended Practice (NISO RP-45-202X) is available for public comment. The Recommended Practice is the product of a working group made up of cross-industry stakeholders, including Associate Professor Jodi Schneider, that was formed in spring 2022. 

Associate Professor Maria Bonn has co-edited a new book on scholarly communication librarianship with Josh Bolick, head of the David Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication and Copyright at the University of Kansas, and Will Cross, director of the Open Knowledge Center at North Carolina State University. Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge was recently published by the Association of College and Research Libraries and is available as an open access edition.

Associate Professors Halil Kilicoglu and Jodi Schneider are part of a team of researchers who have received a three-year, $947,925 grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM) to improve upon a tool clinicians, researchers, and systematic reviewers use to retrieve biomedical articles from bibliographic databases.