Many digital archival collections are limited due to factors such as privacy concerns and copyright. AEOLIAN combines innovative AI methods and the knowledge of scholars from multiple cultural institutions to address the accessibility of these collections, ultimately making them more accessible. Additionally, the project aims to foster collaboration amongst scholars and practitioners from…
Science is fast outgrowing the capabilities of today's Internet infrastructure. To fully capitalize on big data, artificial intelligence, advanced computation and the Internet of Things requires robust, interconnected computers, storage, networks and software. Uneven progress in science cyberinfrastructure has led to bottlenecks that stymie collaboration and slow the process of discovery.…
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…
Library makerspaces offer community members the opportunity to tinker, design, experiment, and create with a range of technology in an informal learning space. However, because current makerspaces and maker tools are highly vision oriented, blind and visually impaired (BVI) people have limited access to these learning opportunities. This project (…
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.…
This project is a repository of community-designed open resources for teaching about scholarly communication and for doing scholarly communication work in libraries. The SCN is intended to be the locus of an active, inclusive, empowered community of practice for teaching scholarly communications to emerging librarians, where practitioners, LIS educators, and library students work together to…
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…
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…
Associate Professor Terry Weech and more than a dozen GSLIS students will travel to Lyon, France, next week to participate in the BOBCATSSS 2016 symposium, held January 27-29.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been awarded a new research grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore the benefits for users of linked open data (LOD) for digitized library special collections. Timothy Cole (MS '89), mathematics librarian in the University Library and coordinator for library applications within the Center for Informatics Research in Science and…
The group HP Kids Read is the 2015 recipient of the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award, given annually by the faculty of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and cosponsored by Libraries Unlimited.
Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn will serve as a guest columnist for the "Scholarly Communication" column in College & Research Libraries News twice in the coming months. Bonn’s first column was published in the magazine’s October 2015 issue. In “Maximizing the benefits of open access: Strategies for enhancing the discovery of open access content,” she discusses current models of open access and…
Open Access Week 2015 will be recognized around the world October 19-25. GSLIS Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will deliver the keynote address for Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University’s OA Week celebration. Her talk, "Scholarly communication in the era of big data and big computation," is sponsored by the Virginia Tech’s University Libraries, Division of Computational…
Associate Professor Carol Tilley will participate in Banned Books Week with a talk at Harper College titled, “Comics, Classrooms, and Censorship.” Her talk is one of several events hosted by Harper College Library during the week of September 27 - October 3, when the American Library Association will hold their annual celebration of the freedom to read. She will speak on Wednesday, September 30,…
The National Science Foundation has awarded $6 million to US Ignite—an independent, nonprofit organization whose mission is to spur development of advanced Internet applications that enable transformative public benefit—for a project to develop “living lab” communities across the country. Participating cities will serve as testing grounds for smart gigabit applications. Announcement of the grant…
The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded GSLIS a $248,205 National Leadership Grant for the project, “App Authors: Closing the App Gap II.” Principal investigator Deborah Stevenson, assistant professor and director of the Center for Children’s Books, and co-PI Kate McDowell, associate professor and assistant dean for student affairs, began work on the IMLS-funded planning phase of…
