The School of Information Sciences is pleased to announce the appointment of Clara M. Chu and Jaya Raju as coeditors-in-chief of its quarterly journal Library Trends, effective February 1, 2021. Their extensive editorial experience and unique combination of global, multicultural, and diverse perspectives will advance the journal's reputation as an essential tool for professional librarians and educators.

It is important for patients to understand the information they need for making health decisions, yet studies have shown that a large segment of the population lacks the health literacy to do so. Health literacy refers to capacity of people to obtain, process, and understand health information needed for making health decisions. Assistant Professor Jessie Chin addresses this topic in the paper, "Health Literacy, Processing Capacity, Illness Knowledge, and Actionable Memory for Medication Taking in Type 2 Diabetes: Cross-Sectional Analysis," which was recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Associate Professor Masooda Bashir will present her privacy research at the 14th International Computers, Privacy & Data Protection Conference (CPDP2021), which will be held virtually on January 27-29. The conference brings together academics, lawyers, practitioners, policymakers, industry, and civil society to discuss emerging issues and trends in privacy and data protection. This year’s theme is "Enforcing Rights in a Changing World."

A paper coauthored by Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo and Yan Shvartzshnaider (New York University) has been named a finalist for the Lee Dirks Award for Best Full Research Paper at iConference 2021. Five finalists were selected for the award, which recognizes "the most exceptional completed research paper" presented at the conference. The winner will be announced during iConference 2021, which will take place online from March 17-31.

Adjunct Assistant Professor Ellen Knutson (MS '02, PhD '08) and Quanetta Batts, director of outreach and engagement at The Ohio State University Libraries, have coauthored a chapter in the new book, Ask, Listen, Empower: Grounding Your Library Work in Community Engagement (ALA Editions, 2020). Edited by Mary Davis Fournier and Sarah Ostman, the book features contributions by leaders active in library-led community engagement and serves as both an educational resource for LIS students and a "go-to handbook" for current programming, adult services, and outreach library staff.

This semester, students in the Business Information Group (BIG), the student consultancy group associated with Associate Professor Yoo-Seong Song's Applied Business Research class (IS 514), worked with clients in the areas of facial recognition technology, digital healthcare, telemetry-based marketing automation, cybersecurity, and market entry strategy.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been invited to guest edit a special theme issue of the Harvard Data Science Review dedicated to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report on Reproducibility and Replication in Science. The Harvard Data Science Review, an open access platform of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, has a primary emphasis on reproducibility, replicability, and readability, along with broad Data Science topics.

After forty years of service to the iSchool, Associate Professor Terry L. Weech (MS '65, PhD '72) will retire at the end of December. Weech is well known for his teaching and research, his positive influence on students as an advisor and mentor, and his contributions to international librarianship and intellectual freedom.

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider has received an award from the University of Illinois Research Board for her project, “Identifying Potential Bias in Science Using Citation Network Structures.” According to Schneider, citation bias happens when authors ignore relevant research and present one-sided evidence, which mispresents what is known about a topic. Citation bias benefits authors in the short-term by bolstering grants and papers, but it can have severe negative consequences for scientific inquiry.

Professor Emeritus Alistair Black discussed his research at the UK's Library and Information Group Work-in-Progress Conference, which was held virtually on November 27. At the conference, he presented an analysis of the 1962 feature film Only Two Can Play as a tool for learning about the history of the post-war public library in the UK.

Associate Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Maria Bonn will present her research at OE (Open Education) Global 2020, which will be held virtually from November 16-20.  The conference attracts researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators, and students to discuss and explore how Open Education advances educational practices around the world.

Professor Ted Underwood, PhD students Wenyi Shang and Yuerong Hu, MS/IM students Anirudh Sharma and Shubhangi Singhal, and English PhD student Peizhen Wu will present their research at the Workshop on Computational Humanities Research (CHR2020), which will be held virtually from November 18-20. The purpose of the workshop is to "foster the formation of a community of humanities scholars that rely on a wide range of computational approaches" and to serve as a stepping stone toward the creation of a research-oriented, open-access computational humanities journal.

PhD student Linh Hoang will present her research with Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider and Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch at the AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) Annual Symposium, which will be held virtually from November 14-18. The symposium showcases the latest innovations from the community of biomedical informatics researchers and practitioners.

Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and PhD student Linh Hoang will present their research at the AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) Annual Symposium, which will be held virtually from November 14-18. The symposium showcases the latest innovations from the community of biomedical informatics researchers and practitioners.

Professor Emeritus Boyd Rayward was recently interviewed in Mons, Belgium, at a meeting of scholars involved in the HyperOtlet research project. This multi and transdisciplinary project is focused on Le Traité de documentation, a major book in the history of information sciences that was written in 1934 by Paul Otlet, a Belgian lawyer, bibliographer, internationalist, and pacifist whose ideas foreshadowed current digital and other technologies such as the Internet, hypertext, and Wikipedia.

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and William Aspray, senior research fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, have co-edited a new book, Deciding Where to Live: Information Studies on Where to Live in America, which was recently published by Rowman & Littlefield. Their book explores major themes related to where to live in America and shows how "changes in media and information technology are shaping both our housing choices and our understanding of the meaning of personal place."

Associate Professor Jana Diesner will present her research on biases in data science at the Big Data Summit, which will be held virtually on November 12. The annual summit brings together experts from the University of Illinois Research Park, industry, and academia to share knowledge about big data and its business applications through panel discussions, keynote presentations, and networking opportunities. This year's summit will include sessions on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and digital transformation.

A paper coauthored by Assistant Professor Yun Huang and PhD student Si Chen received an Honorable Mention Award at the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020), which was held virtually on October 17-21. Approximately 1,000 papers were eligible for consideration for Best Paper awards, with the top one percent recognized as Best Papers and five percent as Honorable Mentions. Coauthors included Xinyue Chen, an undergraduate at Peking University, and Xu Wang, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Teaching Associate Professor Judith Pintar has been selected to serve as project manager for the third and final year of Training in Digital Methods for Humanists (TDMH), a pilot program run by the Humanities Research Institute (HRI). The goal of the program, which is funded by the Investment for Growth Initiative of the Provost and the Vice Chancellor for Research, is to help humanities faculty acquire the digital tools, computational methods, and technological expertise they need for their teaching and research.

Members of Associate Professor Jana Diesner's Social Computing Lab will present two posters at the 11th Annual Maritime Risk Symposium, which is being held virtually from October 26-30. The symposium, hosted by the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI), will focus on maritime resilience and the impact of COVID-19 with regard to resiliency for future global upsets.