The field of library and information science (LIS) has a long history of research on the preservation of materials in libraries and archives. However, that research has focused almost exclusively on tangible aspects of cultural heritage. Associate Professor Jerome McDonough, Associate Professor Lori Kendall, and Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn have released a white paper as part of their work on the Preserving Intangible Cultural Heritage project.

Nicole A. Cooke, assistant professor and MS/LIS program director, will present a workshop at the two-day international symposium, Diversity by Design: Reframing Diversity Discourse in Canada, which will be held on September 13-14 in Toronto. The event will bring together institutions of higher education, information and cultural institutions, community partners, and governmental organizations.

Twenty-four iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Spring 2017. 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.

Associate Professor Terry L. Weech has been awarded a Scroll of Appreciation by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) for "his distinguished contribution to IFLA and the library profession, especially in the internationalization of library and information science education."

Members of the Whole Tale Archaeology Working Group will meet with fellow computational archaeologists, environmental scientists, and other researchers for the first "Prov-a-thon" on practical tools for reproducible science. Held in conjunction with the DataONE All-Hands Meeting in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, the two-day workshop on August 31 and September 1 is cosponsored by the NSF-funded projects Whole Tale, DataONE, and the Arctic Data Center.

Professor Michael Twidale, program director for the iSchool's MS in information management, is the 2017 recipient of the Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). The award recognizes Twidale's unique teaching contributions through his methods of explaining highly technical material to students in various learning environments.

Thanks to a new online resource for paleoenvironmental data and models under development at Illinois and partner institutions, historian Richard Flint can gauge whether environmental factors played an important role in driving the migration of Pueblo Indians from the Spanish province of New Mexico in the seventeenth century. Using SKOPE (Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments), scholars such as Flint and the larger community of archaeologists will be able to discover, explore, visualize, and synthesize knowledge of environments in the recent or remote past.

Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Her three-year term as a director-at-large will begin on November 1, 2017.

The yt project, an open science environment created to address astrophysical questions through analysis and visualization, has been awarded a $1.6 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue developing their software project. iSchool Assistant Professor Matthew Turk is leading the project with collaborators.

A project led by iSchool Professor Les Gasser, "Simulating Social Systems at Scale (SSS)," has laid the groundwork for a prestigious award to a student researcher. Santiago Núñez-Corrales, an Informatics PhD student directed by Gasser, was recently chosen from among several hundred applicants to receive an ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational & Data Science Fellowship.

Several iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research at Digital Humanities 2017, the annual conference of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. The event will be held in Montreal, Canada, on August 8-11.

Bonnie Mak will join book artists, conservators, and archivists for a discussion of the future of the book at the symposium, "Codex: History, Art, and Practice." Hosted by the Ohio Preservation Council and the State Library of Ohio, the symposium brings together information professionals from across the state who are interested in the preservation of documentary heritage. 

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider will serve as a keynote speaker for the eighth annual VIVO Conference, which will be held August 2-4 in New York City. VIVO is member-supported, open-source software and an ontology for representing scholarship.

Professor Emeritus Alistair Black discussed his research on British military intelligence at the conference "Information and Communication in Wartime," which was held July 25-26 at the University of London.

Assistant Professor Matthew Turk is partnering on a project to help resolve the growing gap between food supply and demand in the face of global climate change. Led by Amy Marshall-Colón, principal investigator and assistant professor of plant biology, Crops in silico (Cis) will integrate a suite of virtual plant models at different scales.

The Institute of Contemporary Art's "artful book club," ICA Reads, has selected Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, as its 2017 pick for a book of critical and societal importance. This reinterpretation of Octavia E. Butler's science-fiction masterpiece, Kindred, was adapted by iSchool alumnus and adjunct lecturer Damian Duffy (MS '08, PhD '16) and illustrated by John Jennings.

Two iSchool faculty members, Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke and Assistant Professor Emily Knox, have articles published in the July 2017 edition of The Library Quarterly. The subject of the edition is "Aftermath: Libraries, Democracy, and the 2016 Presidential Election, Part 1."

Nicole A. Cooke, assistant professor and MS/LIS program director, has received two grants from the American Library Association (ALA) for her diversity research. The grants, worth $7,500, include the Carnegie Whitney Award and the ALA Diversity Research Grant. 

Associate Professor Terry Weech and doctoral candidate Aiko Takazawa will discuss their research on the economics of information at the International Conference on Business and Information (BAI), which will be held July 4-6 in Hiroshima, Japan.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem will present her research on the representation of slavery in children's nonfiction books at the Children's Literature Association conference (ChLA 2017), which will be held on June 22-24 in Tampa, Florida.