Mapping Information Access is a collaborative academic research project to study and understand the landscape of information access and availability in public schools and libraries in the United States.
There are more than 18,000 public school districts and more than 9,000 public library systems in the US. Each of these institutions is as a central node of information access for the…
Across the country, colleges and universities are struggling to meet demand for accessible forms of course materials for students with an array of disabilities. At present, each institution is addressing this problem individually, at great expense, and often without full campus coordination, much less consortial collaboration. Locating digital files is difficult and entails numerous sources.…
Scientific and technical information is often translated for the public, by knowledge brokers such as journalists, Wikipedia editors, activists, and public librarians. This project will research how knowledge brokers assess the quality of scientific and technical information and the implications for public access, information literacy, and understanding of science. The project will use case…
Scholarly publications today are still mostly disconnected from the underlying data and code used to produce the published results and findings, despite an increasing recognition of the need to share all aspects of the research process. As data become more open and transportable, a second layer of research output has emerged, linking research publications to the associated data, possibly along…
Teaching Assistant Professor Jill Naiman has received a $506,912 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to digitize predigital scientific literature. Her project, "The Reading Time Machine: Transforming Astrophysical Literature into Actionable Data," is a collaboration with Harvard University and the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a digital library portal operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. With over 15 million records, ADS is one of the most important archives in the scientific field of astronomy.
PhD student Courtney Richardson has been selected as a Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) fellow by Imagining America (IA), a consortium that "brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory 'America' and world." Fellows are selected for their creative and intentional commitment to public engagement and unique approach to engaged scholarship.
The iSchool is pleased to announce that Madelyn Sanfilippo will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2020. She is currently a postdoctoral IT policy researcher at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University.
Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox has coauthored a chapter in the book Freedom of Information and Social Science Research Design, which is being published by Routledge this month. Edited by Kevin Walby and Alex Luscombe, the book demonstrates how Freedom of Information (FOI) law and processes can contribute to social science research design across sociology, criminology, political science, anthropology, journalism, and education.
David King (MS '78, PhD '94) believes libraries must be reinvented to meet the needs of professional practitioners. This "out of the box" mindset has led him to design and build digital libraries for professionals providing services to victims of crime and abuse.
Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox has been named the iSchool's Centennial Scholar for 2019-2020. Endowed by alumni and friends of the School, the Centennial Scholar award recognizes outstanding accomplishments and/or professional promise in the field of library and information science.
Assistant Professor Emily Knox and iSchool alumnus James LaRue (MS '81), director of the American Library Association's (ALA's) Office for Intellectual Freedom and the Freedom to Read Foundation, will serve as panelists for a special forum on March 5 at the University of Oregon. The event is part of the University's 2018 event series, which aims to address challenging, contemporary issues of free expression on college campuses.
The Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI) at the iSchool will close as a separate entity effective July 1, 2018, subject to the approval of the Senate of the Urbana-Champaign campus. Its programs and initiatives will continue in the form of a distributed research model.
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.
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."
Jon Gant, research associate professor and director of the Center for Digital Inclusion, will speak Monday at Michigan State University’s Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law.
Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been elected to the Board of Trustees of the Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF). Her one-year term will begin at the annual meeting of the board during the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in June.
Assistant Professor Emily Knox will speak at the Information Ethics Roundtable on April 8 at the University of Arizona. This annual interdisciplinary meeting addresses the ethical questions raised by life in an information society.
GSLIS and the Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF) are pleased to announce a partnership to offer an online graduate-level course on intellectual freedom for library and information science (LIS) students around the country.
Assistant Professor Emily Knox will participate in a panel discussion on “Libraries and Public Access to Books” at the Tucson Festival of Books on Saturday, March 12. Knox and fellow experts will explore the topic of information access and the ways libraries have shaped conversations surrounding issues of access.
William H. Dutton, Quello Professor of Media and Information Policy at Michigan State University, will deliver the Spring 2016 Windsor Lecture at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, March 14, in GSLIS Room 126. His lecture is titled, "Information Power Shifts and the Fifth Estate." A reception will be held in the GSLIS east foyer immediately following the lecture.
Illinois English professor Ted Underwood wants to know how the language describing male and female characters in works of fiction has changed since the late eighteenth century. He’s using data mining tools to gather information from thousands of books to answer that question.
GSLIS Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been named a 2015 Instructor of the Year by the Web-based Information Science Education (WISE) Consortium. Knox was nominated by students for her excellent instruction in the Fall 2015 course, Intellectual Freedom and Censorship (LIS590FRL).
Library Trends, GSLIS’s scholarly publication edited by Professor Alistair Black, issued a two-part special issue in 2014-2015 commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain. “Libraries in a Post-Communist World: A Quarter of a Century of Development in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia,” was published as issues two and four of Volume 63 and guest edited by Hermina…
GSLIS master’s students Jessica Colbert and Annabella Irvine will participate in the Midwest Bisexual Lesbian Gay Transgender Ally College Conference (MBLGTACC) this week, where they will lead a workshop on locating LGBT materials in libraries and will represent the GSLIS student group, Queer Library Alliance (QLA). Held annually, the interdisciplinary conference is organized by students and is…
