iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the 2024 Illinois Library Association (ILA) Annual Conference, which will be held on October 8-10 in Peoria. The theme of this year's conference is "Libraries are Lit: Sparking Innovation and Imagination."

Members of the iSchool community will present their research this week at the Library Research Seminar, a program of the American Library Association’s Library Research Round Table. Library Research Seminar VIII: Telling Library Stories will be held from September 16-18 at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Associate Professor Kate McDowell will present three keynotes on data storytelling this fall. Her first keynote will be given at Library Research Seminar VIII: Telling Library Stories, which will be held from September 16-18 at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Associate Professor Kate McDowell has been awarded a $578,677 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant RE-256709-OLS-24), under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports "developing a diverse workforce of librarians to better meet the changing learning and information needs of the American public by enhancing the training and professional development of librarians, developing faculty and library leaders, and recruiting and educating the next generation of librarians."

Kyungwon Koh, associate professor and director of the Champaign-Urbana (CU) Community Fab Lab, has been awarded a $149,995 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant LG-256680-OLS-24). The award is part of the National Leadership Grants for Libraries program, which supports "projects that address critical needs of the library and archives fields and have the potential to advance practice in these professions to strengthen library and archival services for the American public."

A toolkit for public librarians can help them use data to communicate the value of their services and justify their funding needs. The Data Storytelling for Librarians Toolkit helps librarians present data in story form using narrative strategies. It was developed by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign information sciences professors.

Leep (MSLIS online) student Morgan Rondinelli shares her experience as a mentally ill library professional in the article, "What's Missing in Conversations about Libraries and Mental Illness," which was recently published in the open access, peer-reviewed journal In the Library with the Lead Pipe. 

Associate Professor Kate McDowell will deliver two keynotes on library data storytelling this month. 

Assistant Professor Travis Wagner is collaborating on a project that explores how library and information science research and medical library partnerships can inform lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) community health workers. The research aims to address the problem of health disparities among LGBTQIA+ populations. 

A new guide to children's literature and culture includes a chapter by doctoral candidate Andrew Zalot. The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture, edited by Claudia Nelson, Elisabeth Wesseling, and Andrea Me-Ying Wu, was released at the end of November.

Doctoral candidate Julia Burns Petrella successfully defended her dissertation, "Educating Pre-Service School Librarians about Race, Racism, and Whiteness," on December 4.

Associate Professor Maria Bonn has co-edited a new book on scholarly communication librarianship with Josh Bolick, head of the David Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication and Copyright at the University of Kansas, and Will Cross, director of the Open Knowledge Center at North Carolina State University. Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge was recently published by the Association of College and Research Libraries and is available as an open access edition.

Associate Professor Emily Knox testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary on September 12. She was one of five witnesses offering testimony for the hearing "Book Bans: Examining How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature." 

The effective use of data storytelling could positively impact public library managers' approaches to data collection and their advocacy for libraries, according to Associate Professor Kate McDowell. However, cultural roadblocks to data storytelling must be addressed for the process to be successful, McDowell discovered in a recently completed study.

Library professionals have long held sacred the right of patrons to privacy while using library facilities, and the privilege is explicitly addressed in the American Library Association's Bill of Rights. The advent of the digital age, however, has complicated libraries' efforts to secure and protect privacy, Associate Professor Masooda Bashir has learned.

PhD student Jamillah R. Gabriel will give the keynote address at the 17th Annual Digital Commonwealth Conference, which will be held virtually on April 11. Digital Commonwealth provides resources and services to support the creation, management, and dissemination of cultural heritage materials held by libraries, museums, historical societies, archives, and other cultural institutions in Massachusetts. The theme of this year's conference is "Facing the Digital Future: Addressing Systemic Issues in Cultural Heritage."

As the calls for banning books in schools and libraries have increased exponentially in recent years, so have the requests for scholarly responses from Associate Professor Emily Knox, who has focused her career on studying intellectual freedom, information access and ethics, and book banning.

Librarians need to be able to communicate about social justice issues, and teaching social justice storytelling to library school students will help them develop the skills to do so, two researchers say. Associate Professor Kate McDowell and Nicole Cooke, a former Illinois information sciences professor who now teaches at the University of South Carolina, analyzed how to teach those skills through a storytelling assignment with their students.

PhD student Jamillah Gabriel and iSchool alumna Katrina Spencer (MS/LIS ’16) gave the keynote address at the Society of American Archives Annual Conference, which was held on August 25-27 virtually and in Boston, Massachusetts.

A new project led by Associate Professor Kate McDowell and Assistant Professor Matthew Turk will help libraries tell data stories that connect with their audiences. Their project, "Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians," has received a two-year, $99,330 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant RE-250094-OLS-21), under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports innovative research by untenured, tenure-track faculty.