McDonough passes away

Associate Professor Jerome (“Jerry”) McDonough passed away at his home on September 17 after a long illness. He is survived by his spouse, Associate Professor Lori Kendall, and extended family and many beloved friends and colleagues.

McDonough was born in Inglewood, California, in 1963. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a BA in rhetoric, and both a master’s and PhD in library and information studies. While a doctoral student, he was instrumental in creating METS, a metadata standard used in libraries and other institutions worldwide.

Prior to joining the faculty of the iSchool in 2005, McDonough served as the head of the Digital Library Development Team at New York University. His research focused on sociotechnical aspects of digital libraries, with a particular interest on issues of metadata and description as well as digital preservation of complex media and software. He was also well known for his work on preserving intangible cultural heritage. At the iSchool, McDonough taught Sociotechnical Information Systems (IS 504), Digital Preservation (IS 543), and Metadata in Theory and Practice (IS 575). “Jerry was deeply devoted to the field of library and information science and what it could do for people and communities, and his many contributions will endure. He expertly taught extraordinary courses at the very heart of our discipline, holding students to high standards while caring deeply for them and their success,” said Allen Renear, professor and special advisor for strategic initiatives in the Office of the Provost and former iSchool dean (2012-2019). “In addition to teaching key courses for our MS/LIS and MS/IM programs, Jerry was a dedicated research mentor,” said Linda C. Smith, professor emerita and interim executive associate dean. “He guided the work of several students in completing master’s theses and doctoral dissertations. Topics investigated by students ranged from digital video standards to the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. They valued his support at every stage in the research process.”

McDonough was an active participant in metadata standards activities for digital libraries, having served as chair of the METS Editorial Board, an international group of volunteers committed to maintaining editorial control over METS, its XML Schema, the METS Profile XML Schema, and official METS documentation. He also served on the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Standards Development Committee and on the Open Digital Rights Language Initiative (ODRL) International Advisory Board. “This is a great loss for our community,” said Dean Eunice E. Santos. “Jerry was a kind and caring leader who contributed significantly to our School’s progress through his fair-minded and equitable approach to academic governance as well as his ability to anticipate the consequences of complex strategies. This ability carried over into his relationships with colleagues and students.”

A celebration of McDonough’s life will be held at a later date. Donations in his memory may be made to the Lou and Jean Malnati Brain Tumor Institute at Northwestern University.

one of the world’s foremost data artists and a leading voice for the ethical use of big data. His data-inspired artwork has been shown around the world, including in New York’s Times Square and Museum of Modern Art, the Ars Electronica Center in Austria, and the National Seoul Museum in Korea. In addition to his artwork, Thorp is the author of Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future, which was recently published by Macmillan. Thorp created the original web-based A Library of Color while serving as the Innovator-in-Residence at the Library of Congress. “Library of Color uses customwritten text analysis software to extract color words (red, blue, sand, blood, grass) from titles of collections material. The results are displayed as wide color palettes, where each slice represents an individual book, photograph, map, or other object,” said Thorp. The iSchool’s Library of Color is a permanent media piece, installed on a flat-screen video wall. “The piece will exist in a kind of ‘dream state’ where it explores the collections color palette over time. The system will never repeat itself, taking a long and always changing path through color space,” said Thorp.

According to the committee in charge of selecting the artist and artwork, this new digital installation will embrace the iSchool’s foundation, history, and values, while also exemplifying the School’s commitment to shaping the future of information using a creative, interdisciplinary approach.

Koh selected as Fab Lab research director

With her focus on the maker movement in libraries and community engagement, Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh is a natural for her new role as director of research for the CU Community Fab Lab. Short for “fabrication laboratory,” the Fab Lab encourages individuals to develop new ideas, solve problems, and make things. Free and open to anyone who is interested, the Fab Lab promotes personal growth, economic development, and cross-cultural understanding. “The C-U Fab Lab was one of the first places I visited when I joined the iSchool in 2018,” said Koh. “Its strong community engagement mission and focus on youth and families—including those from nondominant cultures—is such a wonderful fit for my research.” 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. This past semester, she co-taught Make, Design, and Learn in Libraries (IS 582MD). The Fab Lab has developed relationships with several community partners over the past decade, including the UNCC (Urbana Neighborhood Connections Center), The Urbana Free Library, and Urbana Middle School. “I’m looking forward to working with the Fab Lab team to further increase its full potential as a community-research partnership centerpiece and PreK-12 pipeline on campus, which will expand the capacities of the University to work with the community and ultimately benefit the entire campus and community,” said Koh.

Bonn elected ASIS&T director-at-large

Associate Professor Maria Bonnhas been elected to the Board of Directors of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Bonn’s research focuses on scholarly communication and open culture and on collaboration in the humanities. She teaches largely in the areas of academic librarianship, scholarly communication, and publishing. In addition to chairing the ASIS&T publications committee, Bonn shepherded the relaunch of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), and helped develop the association’s new publication, Information Matters. “ASIS&T and its members do invaluable work in creating and sustaining human and technological systems for the benefit of all,” said Bonn. “As a director-at-large, my goal will be to increase the visibility and impact of the scholarship that comes from the ASIS&T community.”

Stevenson retires

Deborah Stevenson retired from the University of Illinois on July 31. Stevenson served as editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books since 2001. From 2010-2019, she was director of the iSchool’s Center for Children’s Books (CCB).

“The reviews produced under her direction—approximately one-third of which she pens herself—directly influence which children’s books appear on library and school shelves across the country, shaping three rising generations of American adults, as readers, consumers of information, and global citizens,” said Sara L. Schwebel, professor and CCB director.

Stevenson has served on major children’s book award committees of the American Library Association (ALA), including the Newbery Medal, Caldecott Medal, and Batchelder Award. In addition, she has served on or chaired the Scott O’Dell Award committee since 2011. Her articles have appeared in The Horn Book Magazine, The Lion and the Unicorn, and the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and she is a senior editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. She is the coauthor, with Professor Emerita Betsy Hearne, of Choosing Books for Children: A Commonsense Guide and coeditor of the in-progress Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Children’s Literature.

“It has been a joy and a privilege to work with my talented and dedicated colleagues at the iSchool, and I’m honored to have been able to add my contribution to the School’s longstanding commitment to youth and the librarians who serve them,” said Stevenson.

Dubin and Kilicoglu named NCSA Faculty Fellows

Teaching Associate Professor David Dubin and Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu have been named National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Faculty Fellows for the 2021-22 academic year. This competitive program for faculty and researchers at the University of Illinois provides seed funding for new projects that include NCSA staff as integral contributors to the research.

Dubin received funding for “Analyzing and Visualizing Linguistic Variation in Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers,” a project he will be conducting with Silvina Montrul, professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and in the Department of Linguistics. The researchers plan to build a “syntactically and morphologically annotated corpus” with speech samples of 500 monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English in the U.S. and Mexico.

“Through improving workflow support and addressing the data management needs for this case study, our project will investigate why existing automation tools and encoding standards are underutilized and how computational resources can better improve researchers’ productivity and lead to new discoveries,” said Dubin.

In the Fall 2021 semester, he will draw on the ontologies and data models from his NCSA Faculty Fellow project for use as examples and case studies for his course, Knowledge Structures for Information Organizations (IS 595-KSI).

Kilicoglu received funding for his project, “Identifying Conflicting Claims in Clinical Literature Using Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Graphs,” in which he plans to build a literature mining tool to more easily pinpoint biomedical claims made in scientific publications and how they relate to current knowledge.

“Conflicting information is common in biomedical research and can have serious consequences for clinical practice and public health,” said Kilicoglu. “Patients, caregivers, and providers are increasingly exposed to conflicting health information through news and social media, which may exacerbate their cognitive biases and lead to errors in judgement. Understanding the evidence base around clinical claims, in particular the conflicts and controversies, is critical for establishing clinical practice guidelines and identifying knowledge gaps for which additional studies may be needed.”

Quealy-Gainer named editorof The Bulletin

Kate Quealy-Gainer (MS/LIS ’09) has been selected as editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, one of the nation’s leading children’s book review journals for school and public librarians. She has over a decade of experience with the publication, starting as a reviewer while a student in the MS in library and information science program.

“I had worked in the Center for Children’s Books as a grad assistant, and upon graduation, the then-editor Deborah Stevenson asked me if I wanted to stay on as assistant editor,” she said. “I was thrilled!”

Quealy-Gainer looks forward to taking a larger role in the production of The Bulletin and would like to create more opportunities to engage with the field and the community “as a resource for all things related to contemporary youth literature.”

“We are delighted that Kate has accepted the position of editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books,” said Sara L. Schwebel, professor and CCB director. “Her deep subject knowledge; sharp, critical eye; and long association with the Center makes her the ideal person to oversee the journal’s editorial content during its historic 75th year of production.”

Quealy-Gainer also serves as an adjunct lecturer at the iSchool, teaching courses in children’s literature, materials, and programming; teen materials; and youth services.

“It’s a reader’s dream to be able to look at upcoming books for youth and get to review them,” she said of her work at The Bulletin. “I also work with a great staff of reviewers, and it’s always a delight to discuss not only the books but also the latest trends in children’s books and how they can be used in both public and school library settings.”

Schneider receives NSF CAREER award

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to assess how to identify potential sources of bias in research and how confident we can be in the conclusions drawn from a particular body of evidence. This prestigious award is given in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Schneider’s project, “Using Network Analysis to Assess Confidence in Research Synthesis,” will be supported by a five-year, $599,963 grant from the NSF.

According to Schneider, although policy makers use the best available science in informing their decision making, experts can come to different conclusions in synthesizing this knowledge. For her new project, she will use network analysis and text mining to develop a novel framework of tools and workflows that will reveal potential sources of bias in expert literature. “This research could facilitate datadriven decision-making in a broad range of areas,” she said. “We’ll focus on four areas: conservation, energy policy, healthcare, and sustainable development. For example, in energy, our research could help in determining the carbon footprint of various forms of food production.”

For the educational component of her NSF CAREER award, Schneider will develop two iSchool courses—Bibliometrics and Research Assessment, with PhD student Tzu-Kun (Esther) Hsiao, and Systematic Reviewing and Evidence Synthesis with Caitlin Clarke, teaching assistant professor in Kinesiology and Community Health and an iSchool affiliate. In addition, she will work with middle school students on a video to attract underrepresented students to STEM careers.

Kaushik and Wang receive best privacy paper award at SOUPS 2021

Apaper authored by PhD student Smirity Kaushik and Associate Professor Yang Wang received the IAPP SOUPS Privacy Award at the 17th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2021). The symposium, which was held August 8-10, brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners in humancomputer interaction, security, and privacy. In the paper, “‘How I Know For Sure’: People’s Perspectives on Solely Automated Decision-Making (SADM),” Kaushik, Wang, and coauthors Yaxing Yao (University of Maryland Baltimore County) and Pierre Dewitte (KU Leuven) describe the findings of their online study to explore people’s understanding of SADM. According to the researchers, while the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union has granted citizens some rights regarding SADM, including obtaining an explanation of such processing, “it is unclear how organizations should support people in effectively exercising such rights.” “SADM is widely applicable in job searches, healthcare, banking loan approval, and others,” said Kaushik. “However, SADM system-based decisions could lead to discrimination, social segregation, and loss of privacy. As a result, they could significantly or legally affect people.” The paper’s authors offer design recommendations, including an icon for SADM processing that companies could add to their websites, “sandbox for SADM” to allow people to experiment with the SADM process, and personalized explanation templates to inform people about how SADM made a decision. They also offer policy recommendations such as mandating notifications to alert users when they are being subjected to SADM processing, similar to cookie notification.

Bruce authors new book on

thinking with maps

Professor Emeritus Chip Bruce has authored a new book on the nature and importance of maps. In Thinking with Maps: Understanding the World through Spatialization, which was recently published by Rowman & Littlefield, he demonstrates how the concept of maps and mapping has implications and applications across all spheres of intellectual endeavor.

“Maps for me represent the essence of interdisciplinary or holistic understanding of the world. The fact that they are created by so many different people, for different purposes, makes them a challenge to understand, but also an unending source of pleasure,” wrote Bruce in the foreword of his book.

Thinking with Maps shows that maps are valuable not only for geographic knowledge but for providing “mechanisms for rejuvenating our engagement with the world.” According to Bruce, in writing the book he hoped to continue his exploration of the world that he started in his book, Education’s Ecosystems: Learning through Life.

Bruce’s work has focused on inquirybased learning, community inquiry, and the information and communication practices that help people in communities learn and work together.

Schwebel edits book on Newbery Medal books

Sara L. Schwebel, professor and director of the Center for Children’s Books, and Jocelyn Van Tuyl, professor of French at New College of Florida, have coedited a new book, Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children’s Literature at the Newbery Centennial, published by Routledge. The Newbery Medal, the oldest and most influential children’s book award in the United States, marks its 100th anniversary this year.

“Newbery Medal-winning books rarely go out of print, enjoying permanent spots on library shelves. But children’s literature has changed considerably in the hundred years since the awards’ inception,” said Schwebel. “Should Newbery Medal-winning books remain in perpetual circulation, being introduced to each new generation of schoolchildren? There has been a dearth of scholarship on the prize-winning books despite their outsized influence.” The book presents 14 essays written by contributors who examine Newbery winners that have been understudied by literary scholars. Each chapter analyzes a title illustrating how it responds to contemporary concerns around race, class, gender, disability, nationalism, and globalism. “When I first entered the field, I set myself the task of reading all of the Newbery winners,” said Schwebel. “I wondered, on more than one occasion, ‘why did this title win the prize?’ The contributors of this volume speculate on just that question, presenting wonderful arguments for texts whose import had previously been obscure to me—and to many others.” A historian and children’s literature scholar, Schwebel’s work centers on the way books, media, and school instruction shape young people’s conceptualizations of the past. She is the author of Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms (2011) and the editor of Island of the Blue Dolphins: The Complete Reader’s Edition (2016) and

The Lone Woman and Last Indians Digital Archive.

New series focuses on responsible data science and AI

The iSchool’s Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) is highlighting responsible data science and artificial intelligence (AI) in a special speaker series this fall. Topics include equity, fairness, biases, ethics, and privacy.

“While data science, AI, and related technologies and methods are disruptive and pervasive, they can also be empowering and transformative. To leverage the potential benefits of these technologies while harnessing risks and harm, we need to approach tech in a responsible way, where responsibility refers to the workforce, products, and services,” said Associate Professor Jana Diesner, who organized the series with Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch.

Speakers are new and established thought leaders and role models in the field, representing a diversity of thought and backgrounds. Attendees are invited to engage with the iSchool in a wider discussion on topics that impact society at large.

INTERSECTIONS FALL 2021 Model helps predict, analyze decision-making on adopting Type 2 diabetes medical guidelines

Health care workers often don’t adopt new guidelines for best practices in medical care until well after those guidelines are established. A team of researchers led by Professor and Dean Eunice E. Santos has developed a new computational modeling and simulation framework to analyze decision-making and identify effective dissemination strategies for medical guidelines.

The research team examined guidelines for Type 2 diabetes that were established in 2012 and were still not adopted years later. The researchers found that health care workers’ specialties, patient volume, and experience were among the factors that affected acceptance of individualized glycemic-control guidelines.

The team developed a novel computational framework that incorporates the interactions and influences among health care workers, along with other intricacies of medical decision-making, to simulate and analyze a wide range of real-world scenarios. The researchers introduced the Culturally Infused Agent Based Model (CI-ABM) and reported their findings in the cover article for the June issue of the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics. Their research highlights that modeling and simulating human behaviors must take into account factors such as sociocultural context and complex social interactions, without which the models can lead to a profound misunderstanding of human decision-making, they said. “One of the major challenges is capturing the decision-making of the actors and the factors that influence them. This is especially true when the agents are human beings (e.g., health care workers), where their behavior is uncertain and the information about the factors that influence their decision-making is often incomplete and/or contradictory,” they wrote. The modeling system incorporates social networks and cultural influences that guide decision-making, and it captures how beliefs evolve over time due to personal and external factors. It provides the ability to model real-world events that involve incomplete, imprecise, and conflicting information, and it provides a way to handle uncertainty in human behavior. These aspects of their computational model led to better analysis and prediction of guideline-dissemination behaviors, the researchers said.

Santos and her colleagues used the model to analyze the dissemination of a Type 2 diabetes guideline that recommends individualizing glycemic goals for patients. The researchers found that including sociocultural factors and information about social interactions of health care workers in their model increased the accuracy of predicting guideline-adoption behaviors of various demographic groups.

Bonn and Twidale explore the concept of“informated food”

Associate Professor Maria Bonn and Professor Michael Twidale have a two-part concept piece on “Informated Food” in the ASIS&T publication, Information Matters. It is one of the first featured pieces in this new digital-only forum for information science, which shares research evidence and industry developments, news, and opinion with various audiences. The concept of informated food explores the very broad idea of information that is connected to food. It includes the stories that are attached to the food we buy and consume, from recipes and cookbooks that are passed down through generations to the narratives and notes that precede today’s online recipes. Through digital technologies, consumers share information and personal stories about food that are valued both emotionally and economically. In the marketplace, information shared regarding food includes ingredient lists, nutritional labeling, and the ubiquitous “sell by” or “best by” date on food packaging. Consumers are also interested in the provenance of food, especially in regard to luxury items such as wine, cheese, olive oil, chocolate, and honey. Bonn and Twidale address these topics as well as how informated food facilitates consumer decision-making, allows producers to distinguish their products, and promotes an understanding of the economic and social impacts of food. They are interested in the role of information throughout the entire food supply chain, from production to consumption, as it occurs on the family farm as well as in large industry. They encourage further work on informated food to benefit broad research areas, including agriculture, food processing, popular culture, tourism, small scale entrepreneurship, rural