The American Library Association (ALA) Council decided on July 23, 2024, that Sam Helmick (MSLIS '12) will be the 2024-2025 president-elect effective immediately. Helmick, who is community and access services coordinator at Iowa City Public Library, was recommended by the ALA Executive Board and confirmed by the Council.

iSchool faculty are studying ways to improve user experience, with a common goal of improving technology and applications for the needs of individual users. These researchers are working with diverse groups to gain feedback, and several current projects are focused on experiences for users with disabilities.

PhD student Puranjani Das has been selected as a recipient of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) SIG CMR Student Membership Award for the 2024-2025 academic year. She will receive a complimentary one-year membership in both ASIS&T and SIG CMR, a special interest group focused on classification and metadata research.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one million people have died in the past twenty-five years from a drug overdose. More than seventy-five percent of drug overdose deaths in 2021 involved an opioid. As opioid addiction and deaths have mounted over the decades, the business of making and selling prescription painkillers was hidden from the public. Thousands of lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies have since exposed the industry's deceptive practices. 

Doctoral candidate Jenna Kim successfully defended her dissertation, "Evaluating Pre-Trained Language Modeling Approaches for Author Name Disambiguation," on June 11, 2024.

A new master's degree program offered through Game Studies and Design, an Informatics program hosted by the iSchool, will provide professional training for students who are interested in working in video game studios, game-adjacent industries, or other businesses where game-related skills are increasingly in demand. 

Doctoral candidate Smit Desai successfully defended his dissertation, "Designing Metaphor-fluid Voice User Interfaces," on June 10.

Last month, Michael Ferrer showed appreciation for one of his MSIM instructors in a unique way—by inviting him for an insider’s look at his work as a reservist in the Illinois Army National Guard. For the ILARNG BOSS Lift, which took place on June 18 at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, Ferrer selected Michael Wonderlich, iSchool adjunct lecturer and senior associate director of business intelligence and enterprise architecture for Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS) at the University of Illinois.

A toolkit for public librarians can help them use data to communicate the value of their services and justify their funding needs. The Data Storytelling for Librarians Toolkit helps librarians present data in story form using narrative strategies. It was developed by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign information sciences professors.

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan will deliver the keynote at the 15th annual conference of the SHOT (Society for the History of Technology) Special Interest Group for Computing, Information, and Society (SIGCIS), which will be held on July 14 in Viña del Mar, Chile. SIGCIS is the leading international group for historians with an interest in the history of information technology and its applications. The theme for SIGCIS 2024 is "System Update: Patches, Tactics, Responses."