May News Digest

The GSLIS news digest highlights recent news, events, and accomplishments of GSLIS faculty, staff, and students. For more news, follow us on Facebook and Twitter!

News From GSLIS at Illinois

Faculty News

Downie introduces HTRC to scholars in Hong Kong
J. Stephen Downie, professor and associate dean for research, traveled to Hong Kong this spring to speak to scholars at the University of Hong Kong about the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), of which he is co-director. The HTRC enables advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge and ensures that this cultural record is preserved long into the future. Downie shared current and planned projects, including work on enabling the nonconsumptive analyses of copyrighted materials, and discussed the ways in which scholars can work with and through the HTRC, which is open to institutions worldwide.

NSF supports Efron’s work with temporal data in search
The National Science Foundation is supporting Assistant Professor Miles Efron’s work to improve search with a three-year, $408,908 grant. Efron is working on new algorithms that build upon the current strengths of search but add a new dimension—time. “We are at a point where soon we won’t have the luxury of ignoring the temporal aspect of data,” said Efron. “In order for search to be successful, time has to make its way into search engines.”

Jenkins, Stevenson to present at ALSC preconference
Associate Professor Christine Jenkins and Center for Children’s Books Director Deborah Stevenson will each host a breakout session at this year’s ALA ALSC Preconference, “A Wild Ride: 75 Years of the Caldecott Medal,” on Friday, June 28, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Jenkins will lead “The Caldecott Medal and Social Issues,” and Stevenson will co-host a breakout session on “Serving on the Caldecott Committee.”

McDonough appears on CBC
Associate Professor Jerome McDonough recently was a guest on CBC Radio’s Spark with Nora Young. McDonough spoke with Young about digital preservation and gaming, emphasizing the importance of preserving not only the software and the servers, but also the nuances of gaming culture and history.

McDowell travels to Amsterdam
Assistant Professor Kate McDowell recently traveled to libraries that serve youth in Amsterdam as part of a developing research project about current trends and transformations in youth services librarianship. McDowell received the GSLIS Centennial Scholar Award to fund this trip.

Palmer delivers distinguished lecture
Carole Palmer, professor and director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship, delivered the inaugural Ed Mignon Distinguished Lecture in Information Science at the University of Washington iSchool on May 16, 2013. Her talk was titled, “Data Curation and the Reuse Value of Digital Research Data: Meeting the Aims of Multiple Disciplines and Stakeholders.” Palmer has led education initiatives in data curation since 2005, including two academic programs: a specialization in data curation in the GSLIS master’s program and a biological information specialist option in a cross-departmental bioinformatics master’s degree. She currently is a member of the National Academy of Sciences study committee on Future Career Opportunities and Educational Requirements for Digital Curation, after serving previously on the study committee on Building Cyber-infrastructure for Combustion Research.

Tilley’s comic research receives media attention
Assistant Professor Carol Tilley’s recent paper, “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications that Helped Condemn Comics,” published in Information and Culture: A Journal of History, has received a great deal of press coverage, including an article in The New York Times, and has been popular in Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets. She also has authored a book chapter, “Comics in the Classroom: Using Comics in Language Arts Classrooms in the 1930s and 1940s,” published in Graphic Novels in the Classroom: Essays on the Educational Power of Sequential Art, edited by Carrye Kay Syma and Robert G. Weiner. At the ALA Annual Conference in June, Tilley will headline a program called, “Busting the Comics Code: Comics, Censorship, and Librarians.”

Congratulations to Miles Efron and Kate McDowell!
This spring, faculty members Miles Efron and Kate McDowell were notified that they have been awarded tenure and will be promoted to associate professor effective August 16, 2013. Congratulations to Miles and Kate!

Staff and Student News

GSLIS poster earns honorable mention at iConference
Doctoral student Shameem Ahmed, Associate Professor Catherine Blake, Assistant Professor Kate Williams, doctoral student Noah Lenstra, and master’s student Qiyuan Liu earned an Honorable Mention award at the 2013 iConference for their poster, “Identifying Claims in Social Science Literature.” The poster presented initial findings from the application of the Claim Framework, typically used in biomedical literature, to social science research.

Irish awarded IAS Colston Research Fellowship
Sharon Irish, project coordinator at the GSLIS Center for Digital Inclusion and lecturer at the School of Architecture at Illinois, has been awarded a 2013-2014 Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) Colston Research Fellowship from the University of Bristol in Bristol, England. Irish will investigate the roles of historical research and community-based organizations in the engagement, production, and sharing of local knowledge in marginal communities.

Lenstra honored by YMCA
Doctoral student Noah Lenstra was recently named recipient of the Fred S. Bailey Fellowship for Community Leadership, Service, and Activism by the University YMCA. The award supports graduate students who have shown a strong commitment to community organizing, activism, and/or service.

Lenstra, Emery present at Personal Digital Archiving
Doctoral student Noah Lenstra presented his paper, “Connecting Local & Family History with Personal Digital Archiving: Findings from Studies in Four Midwestern Public Libraries,” and master's student Jan Emery presented, "Personal Artifacting," at the Personal Digital Archiving 2013 conference at the University of Maryland on February 21, 2013.

Martaus attends International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
GSLIS doctoral student Alaine Martaus attended the 34th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts from March 20-23, 2013 in Orlando, Florida, where she chaired panels on “Defining Children’s Fantasy” and “Adaptations in and of Neil Gaiman for Children and Young Adults” and presented on a panel for “Mind(s) Gone Walking: Conceptualizing Gaiman’s Child Characters.”

Roberts, Sweeney travel to Dublin for panel presentation
In June, doctoral candidates Sarah Roberts and Miriam Sweeney as well as Institute for Communications Research doctoral student Ergin Bulut will travel to the International Association for Media and Communication Research annual meeting in Dublin to present their panel, “Demystifying the ‘Digital Economy’: Critical Interventions in Online Moderation, Anthropomorphized Virtual Agents, and Gaming.”

Roberts to attend international Summer School in June
Doctoral candidate Sarah Roberts has been accepted to the International Joint Summer School on Communication and Global Power Shifts in Vancouver, BC, Canada to be held in June. The Summer School examines the mutually constitutive relationships between rapidly transforming global communication systems and shifting structures of global political economic and cultural power.

Takazawa presents co-authored paper at ACM Conference
Doctoral student Aiko Takazawa presented a paper co-authored with Professor Mike Twidale, “When you wish upon a blog: how collaborative information seeking can interleave with CSCW,” at the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work held in February.

Yan receives CALA scholarship
Master’s student Liu Yan has received the Sheila Suen Lai Scholarship from the Chinese American Librarians Association based on her outstanding achievements.

School News

GSLIS ranked number one
This spring, U.S. News & World Report once again ranked GSLIS as the top graduate professional school of library and information science, a position held by GSLIS since the publication first started ranking LIS programs. GSLIS also ranked highly in a number of specialty groups, including first place in Services for Children and Youth and second place in Digital Librarianship. The School also placed in the top ten for Archives and Preservation, Health Librarianship, Information Systems, and School Library Media.
 
Announcing the creation of the UNESCO Center for Global Citizenship

Amani Ayad, coordinator for the LIS Access Midwest (LAMP) Program at GSLIS, and Barbara Ford (MS ’73), director of the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs at Illinois, are among the founders of the newly established UNESCO Center for Global Citizenship (UCGC), a community-university organization founded on the belief that multicultural knowledge and intercultural understanding generate a better, more interesting, more productive, and—above all—more peaceful world in which to live. UCGC is supported by the Center for Global Studies at the University of Illinois.
 
CCB hosts Walter Dean Myers
The Center for Children’s Books (CCB) along with the Children’s Book Council, hosted Walter Dean Myers, critically acclaimed author of children’s and young adult literature, during his visit to the Champaign area on March 25-26, 2013. Myers visited as part of his work as this year’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, established in 2008 by the Librarian of Congress to raise national awareness of the importance of young people’s literature as it relates to lifelong literacy, education, and the development and betterment of the lives of young people.
 
GSLIS hosts Community of Scholars visit
GSLIS hosted fourteen prospective students this spring as part of the campus-wide Community of Scholars (COS) Campus Visit Program, which brings admitted graduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to campus to meet with their academic programs and network with current and prospective students. GSLIS welcomed four doctoral students and ten master’s students, the largest group of students of any unit on campus.

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