Amanda McGrory is surprisingly calm when she talks about juggling her master’s degree classes, work at the iSchool's Help Desk, and race trainings with the University’s wheelchair track team. On top of these activities—which make up her normal routine—McGrory is preparing to travel to Rio de Janeiro to compete in the 2016 Paralympic Games.

For master’s student Catherine Mardula, librarianship is the family business. She’s following in the footsteps of her mother, an iSchool alumna, as well as her aunt and grandmother, all of whom are librarians. Catherine is pursuing special collections librarianship and—thanks to her Alternative Spring Break experience at the University of St. Andrews—cataloging.

Two iSchool master's students undertook placements at Oxford University this summer and presented their work at a seminar earlier this month. The placements were part of the Oxford-Illinois Digital Library Placement Program, an ongoing collaboration between Illinois and Oxford. Catherine Blauvelt (MS '16) and Alex Kinnaman spent six weeks at the Oxford e-Research Centre and Bodleian Libraries, respectively.

Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke and doctoral candidate Jeanie Austin will speak this week at the National Diversity in Libraries Conference, which will be held August 10-13 at the University of California, Los Angeles.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in the upcoming International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) World Library and Information Congress in Columbus, Ohio, on August 13-19. This annual conference brings together LIS professionals and students from more than one hundred and twenty countries and provides opportunities for networking and professional development.

Two iSchool master's students have been selected by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Committee on Diversity and Leadership to participate in the Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce (IRDW) as ARL diversity scholars: Siobhan McKissic and Nisha Mody.

Doctoral students Kahyun Choi and Yun Hao and Professor J. Stephen Downie will present their paper, "WiMIR: An Informetric Study On Women Authors In ISMIR," at the 17th International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference. Coauthors of the paper include Xiao Hu (PhD '10), Jin Ha Lee (PhD '08), Audrey Laplante, and Sally Jo Cunningham.

Master’s student Krystal Cooper will share the stage next week with researchers and industry professionals at the Broadening Participation in Visualization Workshop (BPViz). She will participate in a panel discussion on “The Many Paths to Visualization.”

Doctoral student Jacob Jett, faculty affiliate Timothy W. Cole, Research Associate Professor David Dubin, and Professor and Dean Allen H. Renear will present, “Discerning the intellectual focus of annotations,” at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2016.

iSchool master's student Maryjo Siergiej has won the 2016 Young Adult Services Symposium student stipend from the Young Adult Library Services Association. The stipend will provide Siergiej with up t

Doctoral candidate Jinseok Kim has been awarded a Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship by Beta Phi Mu, the International Library and Information Studies Honor Society. Up to six recipients are selected each year for this prestigious award, a national competition among doctoral students who are working on their dissertations. 

Kristyn Caragher (MS '14) successfully completed her Certificate of Advanced Study (CAS) on July 12 with the presentation of her project, "Anti-Oppression Workshop Series at the University Library."

Master's student Galen Kelly has focused his studies on knowledge management and applied business research and supplemented his educational experience by working as a business research consultant. He is currently completing an internship in product strategy at U.S. Cellular and preparing to graduate this August.

At the same time that humanity shifts toward digital ways of living and working, the proportion of senior citizens among the world's population is growing. Rejecting the idea that aging is just a matter of declining minds and bodies, iSchool doctoral candidate Noah Lenstra (MS '09, CAS '11) has explored digital literacy among older adults in Champaign-Urbana using information infrastructure theory and the extended case method.

A recent analysis of online conversations about President Obama’s proposed plan for tuition-free community colleges, America's College Promise, indicates that a significant number of people oppose the plan.  iSchool doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra and researchers examined the content and civility of comments that were posted on websites during the week following Obama's announcement.

Doctoral candidate Shameem Ahmed successfully defended his dissertation, "mHealth Literacy: Characterizing People’s Ability to Use Smartphone-based Health-related Applications," on June 30.

Doctoral candidate Melissa Villa-Nicholas successfully defended her dissertation, "Latinas in Telecommunications: Intersectional Experiences in the Bell System," on June 30.

Developed in the 1940s and 1950s, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy measures physical and chemical properties of atoms or molecules by measuring change in the magnetic resonance of the nuclei of atoms. The process is used by scientists for a variety of applications, such as substance identification. In biomolecular science, NMR supports discovery and identification of new drugs, disease and metabolic research, study of structural biology, and more.

Doctoral student Steve Witt (MS '95) is the recipient of the 2016 Donald G. Davis Article Award given by the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association (ALA). The award will be presented on June 26 at the 2016 ALA Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida, at the Library History Round Table Research Forum.

Doctoral candidate Noah Lenstra (MS '09, CAS '11) successfully defended his dissertation, "The Community Informatics of an Aging Society: A Comparative Case Study of Public Libraries and Senior Centers,” on June 20.