The iSchool is pleased to announce that Visiting Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek will transition to the role of assistant professor, effective August 16.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Yun Huang will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2019, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. She is currently an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.

Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch presented his research and served as a session chair at the ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP), which was held June 9-12 in Larnaca, Cyprus. UMAP is an international conference for researchers and practitioners working on systems that adapt to individual users and groups of users and that collect, represent, and model user information. The theme of this year's conference was "Making Personalization Transparent: Giving Control Back to the User."

Doctoral candidate Aiko Takazawa successfully defended her dissertation, "'Tutteli to Japan': a Case Study of Spontaneous Collaboration in Disaster Response," on May 17.

Doctoral candidate Paige Cunningham successfully defended her dissertation, "Exploring Communication Patterns in Massive Open Online Courses," on May 6.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Nigel Bosch has joined the faculty. He also holds a joint appointment with the Department of Educational Psychology in the College of Education.

Associate Professor and MSLIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke will discuss her research on fake news, misinformation, and disinformation at the 2018 Public Interest Technology Summit, which will be held on October 13 at Harvard University. The summit is hosted by digital HKS, an independent project at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs that is committed to teaching public leaders to understand how to design, build, and engage with digital technologies as they relate to civic participation, digital equity and inclusion, governance of government platforms, and accountability.

Doctoral candidate Kirstin Phelps will participate in ISIC 2018: The Information Behaviour Conference, which will be held October 9-11 in Krakow, Poland. The conference is a platform for a broad and multidisciplinary community of researchers to present and discuss how people engage with information in a myriad of contexts.

When Nintendo introduced the Wii home video game console in 2006, the company needed to show the general public how the Wii was unlike other game consoles currently on the market. To do so, Nintendo created an experience trailer to help potential users understand how it would feel to use the Wii. Professor and MS/IM Program Director Michael Twidale and Stefan Rennick-Egglestone, a senior research fellow in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham, discuss this area of research in their article, "Experience Trailers."

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Kyungwon Koh will join the faculty in August 2018. She is currently an associate professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Koh's areas of expertise include digital youth, the maker movement, learning and community engagement through libraries, human information behavior, and competencies for information professionals. 

In "Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-Truth Era," a new American Library Association (ALA) Editions Special Report, Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke argues that the current situation represents a golden opportunity for librarians to impart these important skills to patrons, regardless of their age or experience.

Visiting Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek has received the 2017 Elfreda A. Chatman Research Award for her research proposal, "An Exploration of Everyday Information Behavior." The award is presented by the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Special Interest Group (SIG), Information Needs Seeking and Use (USE).

Assistant Professors Rachel M. Magee and Deborah Stevenson will present research on youth and technology at the Digital Media & Learning Conference 2017 from October 4-6 at the University of California, Irvine. The conference is an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the UC Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (MS '94), faculty affiliate and editor of Library Trends, and her colleagues from Simmons College have been awarded a National Forum grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Hinchliffe is professor and coordinator for information literacy services at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, one of the largest public university libraries in the world.

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."

Cass Mabbott, PhD student, will participate in Information Seeking in Context (ISIC): The Information Behaviour Conference to be held September 20-23 in Zadar, Croatia. This biannual conference is devoted to information-seeking behavior and information use, focusing this year on analytical investigations of the connection between information research and information behavior and practices.

It is at this intersection of people and institutions that doctoral candidate Cheryl Thompson is conducting her research. Specifically, she explores how organizations develop data expertise and services to support science.

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.

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 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.