Fourteen GSLIS instructors were named to the University’s List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Spring 2015.

Research Associate Professor Jon Gant will lead a series of webinars this fall designed for local government officials across the state of Illinois. Webinars will focus on e-government topics, such as best practices (September 17), technology planning (October 15), and using data and analytics (November 19). 

Assistant Professor Emily Knox is the 2015 recipient of the Illinois Library Association (ILA) Intellectual Freedom Award.The award, presented by the ILA Intellectual Freedom Committee, recognizes an individual or group for outstanding contributions in defending intellectual freedom or the advancement of these principles.

Research Associate Professor David Dubin and doctoral candidate Cheryl A. Thompson will participate in the sixth Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary Meeting in Paris, France, on September 23-25. Dubin will cochair a meeting of the Research Data Provenance interest group, and represent that group in a joint meeting with the Metadata, Data in Context, and Metadata Standards Catalog…

Associate Professor Christine Jenkins, who has been a member of the GSLIS faculty since 1994, retired on May 31.

At GSLIS, Jenkins taught courses on literature and resources for young adults; youth services librarianship; literacy, reading, and readers; the history of children’s literature; and gendered perspectives in LIS. In addition to her GSLIS appointment, Jenkins was also a faculty member in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

GSLIS Professor Michael Twidale and doctoral candidates Karen Baker and Nic Weber participated in the Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems (CSST) Summer Research Institute, held on July 20-24 at The Nature Place near Colorado Springs, Colorado. CSST is a community of scholars from academia and industry who apply concepts of socio-technical systems to tackle an array of current…

Professor Michael Twidale has joined a research collaboration based at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) that seeks to discover correlations between the treatment of convicts sentenced to transportation from Europe to Tasmania in the first half of the nineteenth century and health trends among their descendants.   UTAS Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart is leading the research group in the…

Bonnie Mak has been named visiting senior fellow at the Center for Humanities and Information (CHI), a newly-formed collaboration at Pennsylvania State University between the university’s College of the Liberal Arts and the University Libraries.   Mak joins faculty and graduate students from Penn State as well as two postdoctoral fellows to form CHI’s inaugural class of scholars for the…

Two members of the GSLIS faculty have been elected to national officer positions of Beta Phi Mu, the international library and information studies honor society. Linda Smith (MS '72), professor and associate dean for academic programs, has been elected vice president and president-elect. She will serve one year as vice president, one as president, and a third year as past president.…

Several members of the GSLIS community gave presentations at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, which was held on July 20-24 at the University of Oxford. Attendees followed one of eight workshops throughout the week, and attended several additional lectures and a poster session. Presenters from GSLIS included: J. Stephen Downie, professor and associate dean for research; Nushrat Khan…

Several members of the GSLIS faculty and student body will participate in Library History Seminar XIII on July 31 - August 2 at Simmons College. The seminar, which takes place every five years, is sponsored by the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association. The theme of the 2015 event is “Libraries: Traditions and Innovations.” Presentations by GSLIS faculty and students…

GSLIS is pleased to announce that Jodi Schneider will join the faculty in August 2016. For the next year, Schneider will be a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh, supported by the National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at INRIA, the national French Computer Science Research Institute, funded by a highly competitive ERCIM Marie Curie Fellowship.

GSLIS is pleased to announce that Rachel Magee will join the faculty this fall. Magee’s research focuses on how young people engage with technology, and considers their social relationships and values as important factors in their technology use. She is also interested in developing technologies, strategies, and techniques to better support teens’ information access and use. “Rachel is a…

GSLIS is pleased to announce that Peter Darch will join the faculty this fall. After receiving his doctoral degree in computer science from the University of Oxford, Darch was most recently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, working on the Knowledge Infrastructures project. Darch conducted longitudinal case studies of the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere…

Think of a scientist at work, and you might picture someone at a lab bench, doing a physical experiment involving beakers or petri dishes and recording his or her findings, which will eventually form the basis for a scientific paper. That’s the old model of science, says University of Illinois professor of library and information science Victoria Stodden, who was recently interviewed by the…

How do heritages travel? How is trans-Atlantic tourism shaped by heritage? To what extent have traditions crossed and recrossed the Atlantic? Professor Alistair Black and fellow scholars from both sides of the Atlantic will gather in Liverpool, UK, July 13-16 to discuss these questions. Trans-Atlantic Dialogues on Cultural Hertiage: Heritage, Tourism, and Traditions is hosted jointly by the…

Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre 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 in 2016.

Associate Professor Bonnie Mak has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), a global network of book historians. Mak’s eight-year appointment (2015-2023) will be confirmed at the society’s annual meeting and conference held July 7-10 in Longueuil and Montreal, Canada. Established in the early 1990s, the SHARP…

Associate Professor Carol Tilley will join thousands of her fellow comic book fans in San Diego July 9-12 for Comic-Con International, one of the largest comics and entertainment events in the world. Tilley will share her expertise in comics and comics history through her participation in the following panel discussions: "Lost (and Found) Comics Studies of the Past," with authors Brad Ricca…

Three members of the GSLIS community will participate in Digital Humanities 2015 (DH2015), the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. The event will be held June 29 - July 3 at the University of Western Sydney. Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will participate in a panel discussion titled, "Digital Dunhuang: Enhancing Virtual…