Inclusive Gigabit Libraries: Learn, Discuss and Brainstorm consists of an educational campaign to raise awareness of next generation networks and how libraries might participate in U.S. Ignite-related initiatives; at least six national forums for about 150 library leaders; development of at least five case studies; and a white paper that will synthesize the forums and case studies.

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INDICATOR is a novel information system for collecting, integrating, and analyzing data from multiple sources to provide public health decision makers real-time data on the health of their community. Data comes from sources as varied as emergency department visits, school attendance, veterinary clinics, and social media postings and together have been used to change public policy in outbreak…

Intelligence has always been an aspect of organized warfare. It was not until the 1870s, however, that the British Army effectively recognised this formally by establishing a dedicated division named the "Intelligence Branch," to be supported by libraries spread across a number of locations. The project explores the ways in which these services developed before the First World War and,…

iSchool faculty members Catherine Blake and Michael Twidale are working as expert advisors to the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Information Resource Center (VIReC) on a project to analyze the socio-technical aspects of VA’s HSRData-L Listserv. VIReC is a VA Health Service Research & Development Service (HSR&D) resource center that supports VA researchers in need of information…

This research project developed a strategy for implementing knowledge management systems to support collaborative work in disparately located high-performing teams in a large complex organization. This study provided the Air Force Center for Engineering and Environment (AFCEE) with guidance to implement the ANSR knowledge management system using SharePoint. AFCEE is responsible for protecting…

In order for older texts to be searchable, contemporary English needs to be translated into language from various historical timeframes. The project will develop software that will let people enter a query in contemporary English, and search over English texts throughout history—from Medieval times to the present day. The project will mostly involve training statistical models that assign…

Language is an information system. We're building computer-based models of language evolution so that societies of autonomous agents can develop their own languages, and as a foundation for theories of dynamic information systems of all kinds (e.g. mutually co-adapting distributed subject indexes, website structure evolution).

This project partners NILRC along with ten libraries in community colleges in Illinois and Missouri to build a diverse professional workforce that understands community-based library staffing and service strategies as well as the challenges of serving a non-traditional, diverse, commuter-based student population. The iSchool will work with the University of Illinois College of Education to…

For all the developments in XML since 1998, one thing that has not changed is the understanding of XML documents as serializations of tree structures conforming to the constraints expressed in the document's schema. Notwithstanding XML's many strengths, there are problem areas which invite further research on some of the fundamental assumptions of XML and the document models associated with it…

Gerard Salton is often credited with developing the vector space model (VSM) for information retrieval (IR). Citations to Salton give the impression that the VSM must have been articulated as an IR model sometime between 1970 and 1975. However, the VSM as it is understood today evolved over a longer time period than is usually acknowledged, and an articulation of the model and its assumptions…