Anna Oates (MS '18) won the National Records of Scotland Award for the Most Outstanding Student Work in Digital Preservation for her master's thesis work on the PDF/A standard. She received the award on November 29 at a ceremony at the Amsterdam Museum, as part of an international conference hosted by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network and the Amsterdam Museum on World Digital Preservation Day. According to the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), who sponsored the awards, this year marked the greatest number of nominations the organization has received to date, and those selected as finalists faced tough competition from entries across the world.

Doctoral candidate Jimi Jones will discuss his dissertation research at the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Digital Preservation 2018, which will be held October 17-18 in Las Vegas. NDSA is a consortium of more than 220 organizations committed to the long-term preservation and stewardship of digital information and cultural heritage, for the benefit of present and future generations.

Michèle Valerie Cloonan (MS '84, PhD '88), iSchool research associate professor and professor of the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, has authored a book addressing the social, cultural, and political issues in cultural heritage preservation. Her book, The Monumental Challenge of Preservation: The Past in a Volatile World, was recently published by The MIT Press.

Professor Emeritus Gerald McWorter (Abdul Alkalimat) and Associate Professor Kate Williams have coauthored a book on New Philadelphia, the first known town planned and legally registered in the U.S. by an African American, Gerald's great-great-grandfather, Free Frank McWorter.

Doctoral candidate Dianah T. Kacunguzi will present her research at the 10th Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in in Libraries International Conference (QQML 2018), which will be held on May 22-25 in Chania, Greece.

iSchool faculty and alumni played an active role in the Playful by Design Spring Symposium, which took place April 5-7 on the Urbana campus. The symposium, organized by the Playful by Design Research Cluster, included presentations and panel discussions as well as a new exhibit at the Spurlock Museum, movie screening, keynote address, and games and gaming make-a-thon. The event was sponsored by the iSchool, Illinois Informatics Institute, Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning, Spurlock Museum, CU Community FabLab, and Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

Rana Hutchinson Salzmann (MS '05) has been appointed director of education for the Society of American Archivists (SAA), effective January 2, 2018. She will be responsible for the design, development, marketing, implementation, and evaluation of SAA’s continuing education offerings and resources for archivists and other related professionals.

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.

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. 

A new book co-edited by Associate Professor Bonnie Mak investigates how archives, archival practices, and the notion of the archive are being explored across the disciplines. Showcasing the work of established and emergent scholars, as well as information professionals, Engaging with Records and Archives: Histories and theories bridges theory and practice to offer fresh perspectives on recordkeeping and archives.

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? Children playing this educational video game on their school's computer in the 1990s got an entertaining geography lesson while in hot pursuit of Carmen and her villains. Preserving a video game such as this for future generations to study and appreciate involves challenges beyond the obvious fact that computers no longer support the software needed to play the game.

Associate Professor Carol Tilley will present "Dear Sirs: I Believe You're Wasting Your Time" at the National Archives on October 27. The title of her talk, which is sponsored by the Center for Legislative Archives, refers to Senate hearings in the 1950s that investigated the link between comics and juvenile delinquency.

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library (KVML) opened its doors in 2011 with two staffers working in an eleven-hundred-square-foot donated space. Since then, the library's collections documenting the life and work of the author have grown, resulting in the need for a larger space and improved processes.

The American Statistical Society is one of many organizations taking action to preserve scientific research by ensuring reproducibility. To do this, the Society will require authors who publish papers in the Applications and Case Studies section of the Journal of the American Statistical Society (JASA) to provide code and data to the journal. Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been selected to serve as one of three new associate editors for reproducibility for JASA.

Associate Professor Jerome McDonough and Rhiannon Bettivia, who recently defended her dissertation at GSLIS, will participate in the third biennial conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, which will be held June 3-8 in Montreal. The theme of the conference is, “What Does Heritage Change?”

GSLIS doctoral students Ruohua Han, Emily Lawrence, and Beth Strickland participated in a panel discussion at the 2016 Personal Digital Archiving conference, hosted by the University of Michigan Library on May 12-14.

Doctoral candidate Rhiannon Bettivia successfully defended her dissertation, "Encoding Power: The Scripting of Archival Structures in Digital Spaces using the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model," at GSLIS on April 28.

A new book by Nicole Wedemeyer Miller (MS ’89), GSLIS adjunct lecturer, will be a resource for librarians looking to develop or enhance family history and genealogy services. Coauthored with Rhonda L. Clark, Fostering Family History Services: A Guide for Librarians, Archivists, and Volunteers, will be published by Libraries Unlimited in February 2016.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been awarded a grant of more than $25,500 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the efforts of GSLIS Associate Professors Jerome McDonough and Lori Kendall and Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn to cultivate a new research community focused specifically on the preservation of intangible cultural heritage.

GSLIS master’s student Kayla Hays and incoming CAS student Anna Trammell (MS '15) will present their poster, "Towards a 'Fully Realized Institutional Repository': Exploring Collaboration Between Archives and IRs," at ARCHIVES 2015. This annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists will be held August 16-20 in Cleveland, Ohio. Abstract: Clifford Lynch, whose definition of an…