Spring 2022 Intersections

PEOPLE I INFORMATION I TECHNOLOGY

SPRING 2022

Intersections

The iSchool at Illinois educates leaders in the information sciences who impact our communities, nation, and world.

SPRING 2022 School of Information Sciences University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Published by the iSchool Communications Office. For more information or to submit story ideas, please contact brya@illinois.edu.

Dean: Eunice E. Santos Editor: Cindy Ashwill Managing Editor: Cindy Brya Contributing Writers: Cindy Ashwill, Cindy Brya, Frankie Blanco Photography: Cindy Brya, L. Brian Stauffer, Thompson-McClellan Photography, Michelle Hassel, Shawn Miller, Amanda Elzbieciak Design: Pat Mayer 501 East Daniel Street Champaign, Illinois 61820 ischool@illinois.edu ischool.illinois.edu Phone: (217) 333-3280

Intersections

Contents

Wong receives RUSA award

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Hayden delivers Windsor Lecture

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Students participate in apprenticeship

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Dapier’s book named among the best

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People use information for analysis, inquiry, collaboration, and play—and in so doing, change the world. The iSchool at Illinois is dedicated to shaping the future of information through research, education, and engagement, both public and professional. Intersections highlights our current work in these areas as well as achievements of our students, alumni, faculty, and staff.

On the cover: MS/IM student Linyao Li and BS/IS student Jared Canty visit in the fourth floor student lounge of the new iSchool space in the Hub Champaign Daniel building.

NEWS Letter from the Dean Wong receives RUSA’s highest honor, the Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award Tilley to serve on Lynd Ward Prize jury Hoeim recognized for outstanding humanities research Seo named an Emerging Scholar by ISLS New Faces—Spring 2022 iSchool launches new undergraduate degree in data science Game Studies and Design minor introduced Hayden delivers Windsor Lecture Fielder delivers 2022 Gryphon Lecture Cora Thomassen passes away

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RESEARCH New grant to help libraries increase information literacy Project to help scientists mitigate risks of environmental pollutants Wang receives Meta grant for research on social media advertising and privacy in Global South He receives grant to improve performance of deep learning models New project helps people who are blind safeguard private visual content Huang leads effort to make online learning more accessible Digital exhibit focuses on the evolution of Star Wars

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FEATURES New life for letterpress printing Apprenticeship program a win for students and library Nunn named a 2021 Fiddler Innovation Undergraduate Fellow

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ALUMNI Children’s book authored by Dapier named among the best of 2021 SUCHO plays instrumental role in saving Ukrainian cultural heritage online Librarians share their zine experiences in new publication Get to know Ellen Janowski, Knowledge Management Associate at Invenergy LLC Mentoring offers benefits to alumni, students

CLASS NOTES

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GIVING Miranda receives inaugural Balz Scholarship Katharine L. Sharp Scholarships support deserving students

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Letter from the Dean

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s the spring semester concludes, our School has many reasons to celebrate, including the ability to gather again for events such as our Gryphon Lecture, student showcase,

and convocation. We continue to be a leader in the field of information sciences, focusing on contemporary challenges and paving the way for innovation and collaboration.

This issue of Intersections shares the stories of our most recent successes. It is rewarding to see our faculty recognized nationally for their teaching and research. Their work benefits society in diverse areas of impact, such as strengthening information literacy services, mitigating the risks of environmental pollutants, facilitating fraud detection, and making online learning more accessible while protecting privacy for underrepresented groups and people with disabilities.

The iSchool is advancing and growing rapidly. In addition to our recently launched BS in information sciences, we are in the process of adding a BS in information sciences plus data science as part of a cross-campus educational initiative. You can learn more about this degree as well as our

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new Game Studies and Design Minor in the pages that follow.

In addition to our recently launched BS in information sciences, we are in the process of adding a BS in information

Our students continue to excel through experiential opportunities, including specialized internships and apprenticeships, as well as prestigious research fellowships. Our alumni play a key role in these learning experiences for students by serving as site supervisors and mentors, offering guidance and facilitating professional connections.

We are so proud of the efforts of our students, faculty, staff, and alumni to make the world a better

sciences plus data science

place. In particular, I’d like to draw attention to recent efforts to preserve Ukrainian cultural heritage

as part of a cross-campus

by creating an online archive. I also would like to recognize the financial contributions of alumni and

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educational initiative.

friends, whose generosity makes a meaningful difference in the lives of our students. The excellence and humanistic values of our School are reflected through these altruistic endeavors.

Sincerely,

Eunice Santos, Dean

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Wong receives RUSA’s highest honor, the Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award Adapted from a RUSA press release

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djunct Lecturer Melissa A. Wong (MS/LIS ’94) has been selected as the 2022 winner of the Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award, the Reference and User Services Association’s highest honor.

Wong has helped shape reference librarians and influenced the reference librarianship field for years. After serving as a librarian and library director, her focus shifted from direct reference service in a library setting to preparing emerging professionals, magnifying the effect of her positive impact. She has been teaching in the iSchool’s top-ranked LIS program for over two decades, beginning with a reference and information course and expanding to include courses on instructional strategies, administration and management of libraries, and e-learning, to name a few. Her teaching receives stellar

reviews, and her name is consistently on the UIUC list of “Teachers Ranked as Excellent.”

Her work as an author and editor is another area where her impact has had and will continue to have lasting significance.

After contributing to the fourth edition of the notable and fundamental textbook Reference & Information Services, she was asked to coedit the fifth edition and served as lead editor of the most recent sixth edition. Under her leadership, critical changes were made to the textbook, including expanding its scope and weaving diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout.

Wong has also co-authored an open access textbook called Instruction in Libraries and Information Centers and authored a book on instructional design as well as other publications.

“First and foremost, I consider myself an educator,” she said. “When I write for publication, edit textbook chapters, or step into the classroom, my goal is to empower LIS students to become the best information professionals they can be, ready to serve their communities through high quality, engaging library services.

Reference services have changed over the years but remain at the heart of the library’s mission. To have my professional peers feel I’ve been successful as an educator is the highest honor.”

Sponsored by EBSCO, the Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award consists of $5,000 and a citation to an individual or group that has made a distinguished contribution to reference librarianship.

Tilley to serve on Lynd Ward Prize jury

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ssociate Professor Carol Tilley has been selected to serve as a judge for the 2022 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, which is presented to the best graphic novel, fiction or nonfiction, published in the previous year by a living U.S. or Canadian citizen or resident. The annual award is sponsored by Penn State University Libraries and administered by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress.

An in-demand speaker on the history of comics readership, Tilley served as a judge for two other comics awards, the 2016 Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards (the Eisners) and the 2020 Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards (the Ringo Awards).

“In my previous service on comics awards juries, I worked with my fellow

judges to establish a ballot across multiple categories that others then voted on,” she said. “With the Lynd Ward Prize, it’s different. The other judges and I will select the winner and any additional honorees for a single award category, so it feels like the pressure is higher! I’ve long admired Lynd Ward’s masterful wordless novels told through wood engravings as well as his award-winning illustrations for children’s books. As someone who straddles the scholarly worlds of comics

and children’s print culture, I am so happy to help keep Ward’s rich legacy visible.”

Tilley is a founding member and past president of the Comics Studies Society. She serves as director of research for Reading with Pictures, a nonprofit organization that promotes literacy through the use of comics in the classroom, and as associate editor for peer-reviewed scholarship for Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society.

News

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Seo named an Emerging Scholar by ISLS

Hoiem recognized for outstanding humanities research

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ssistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem has received the Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Prize for Best Faculty Research for her paper, “The Progress of Sugar: Consumption as Complicity in Children’s Books about Slavery and Manufacturing, 1790-2015.” The award recognizes outstanding humanities research by a faculty member at the University of Illinois.

In her paper, which was published in Children’s Literature in Education in June 2021, Hoiem analyzes “production stories,” a genre of books and media that teaches how everyday things are made. Since they started in the eighteenth century, children’s production stories have evolved from picturebooks to TV episodes and web video series. Hoiem focuses on stories of sugar production in her paper and accompanying web resource, Production Stories.

Hoiem will present at the Children’s Literature Association’s annual conference in June, proposing a collaborative booklength project on production stories.

“Working with other scholars, I would like to cover essential materials, such as coal, plastic, water, and bread, which have been the subject of children’s books for centuries, and which have shaped our concepts of childhood,” she said. “Books about these commodities raise ethical questions concerning labor, consumption, and environmental justice.

Visit the Production Stories website: iopn.library.illinois.edu/omeka/s/ProductionStories

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ssistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been selected as an Emerging Scholar by the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS), which is dedicated to the empirical investigation of learning in real-world settings and the use of technology-facilitated learning. Funded by the Wallace Foundation, the Emerging Scholars Program elevates and supports the work of scholars from marginalized and underrepresented groups whose research focuses on “addressing educational injustices through the research methodologies and/or topics under study.” As an Emerging Scholar, Seo received a $10,000 grant for his project, “Data Accessibilization: Making Data Science Education Accessible for Blind Learners.”

According to Seo, blind students face extra challenges in data science education, because most data science tools and curricula are designed with visually oriented modalities.

“Among the five procedures of common data science workflow (i.e., importing, wrangling, transforming, visualizing, and modeling), data visualization is considered as the most challenging point for blind people to interpret,” he said.

His project will focus on data visualization, with the goal of designing and developing a data representation system to engage blind learners.

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New Faces—Spring 2022

Beth Lewis Office Administrator Lewis provides administrative support for Research Services, Student Affairs, and Enrollment Management.

Christopher Lueg Professor Lueg’s research areas include human computer interaction and information behavior.

Emily Maemura Assistant Professor Maemura’s research focuses on data practices and the activities of curation, description, characterization, and re-use of archived web data.

John Milas Office Support Specialist Milas supports enrollment management and graduate application processing.

Mary Schiavone Office Support Specialist Schiavone serves as the primary receptionist at 614 E. Daniel Street and supports undergraduate affairs.

Siggi Schroth Office Support Specialist Schroth serves as the primary receptionist at 501 E. Daniel Street.

Kristin Sexton Office Administrator Sexton provides administrative support for the Assistant Dean for Advancement and coordinates iSchool events.

Seth Turner Digital Marketing and Web Specialist Turner assists with social media, electronic communications, advertising, and video production.

Bri Wisehart Business Administrative Associate Wisehart supports the activities of the finance and human resources offices.

News

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iSchool launches new undergraduate degree in data science

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n the Fall 2022 semester, the iSchool will offer a new degree, the Bachelor of Science in Information Sciences + Data Science (BS/ IS+DS). The degree is part of a campus-wide partnership to provide interdisciplinary education in data science. It consists of a collaboration between the iSchool and other colleges, including the Gies College of Business, Computer Science Department in the Grainger College of Engineering, and the Department of Statistics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Data science is the art of extracting new knowledge and finding meaningful information in a vast amount of data. Its guiding principles include data collection, storage, integration, analysis, inference, communication, and ethics. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 27.9% growth in data science occupations from 2016 to

2026. The new degree programs at the University of Illinois will prepare students to work in data science roles in marketing, finance, healthcare, government—any industry that generates data.

The BS/IS+DS will require a total of 123 course credit hours and include cross-college courses in mathematical foundations, data science fundamentals, computational fundamentals, and social impact in data science. As part of the coursework, students are required to complete six hours of meaningful research or discovery experiences, such as a practicum, independent study, or approved study abroad coursework.

“Our School is uniquely positioned to provide students with the skills they need to be successful in the rapidly growing field of data science,” said Dean and Professor

Eunice E. Santos. “We currently offer data science pathways in two of our degree programs and have a number of faculty working in this important research area, so partnering with other units on campus on the new data science degrees is a natural next step. Students in the BS/IS+DS will learn how to derive and present impactful insights from data, leading to a deeper understanding that builds knowledge and wisdom. It is the human-centered approach we take toward data collection, analysis, and visualization that sets the iSchool apart.”

Continuing University of Illinois students may apply to transfer into the BS/IS+DS program for the upcoming fall semester, while new students may apply to the program for fall 2023 admission.

Game Studies and Design minor introduced

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new minor offered by Informatics Programs will foster critical skills in academic game studies and technical skills in game design. Open to undergraduates from all colleges and majors, the Game Studies and Design Minor will serve students who are interested in the study and design of games and the digital, extended, and virtual reality (XR/VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies involved

with the crafting of interactive systems and interfaces relevant to game, film, education, and media industries, as well as other emerging professions.

Students minoring in Game Studies and Design are required to take three core courses, which will provide an introduction to game studies and design, offer social/historical perspectives on the videogame industry, and introduce the tools and principles of game design. In addition to these core courses, students must complete three approved upperlevel Game Studies electives totaling at least nine credit hours. Students in the minor can choose a combination of classes or focus on an area of interest

through suggested pathways, including Design; Education and Research; Film and Media; Games and Society; Music and Sound; Performance and Dance Technologies; Programming; Theater and Production; Visual Arts; Writing and Narrative Design.

In 2020, the iSchool assumed administration of Informatics Programs, which fosters interdisciplinary research, education, and community engagement involving the application of computing and information in diverse areas, including the natural sciences, humanities, arts, and social sciences as well as engineering and business.

Hayden delivers Windsor Lecture

Fielder delivers 2022 Gryphon Lecture

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rigitte Fielder, associate professor in the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of WisconsinMadison, delivered the 2022 Gryphon Lecture on April 8. Sponsored annually by the Center for Children’s Books (CCB), the lecture features a leading scholar in the field of youth and literature, media, and culture. In “Picturing Young, Gifted, and Black: Phillis Wheatley’s Image and the Creative Black Child,” Fielder discussed Phillis Wheatley, the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry.

Fielder is the author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press, 2020) and coeditor of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Her teaching interests include early African American literature; nineteenth-century U.S. literature, race, gender, and sexuality studies; children’s literature and childhood studies; and human-animal studies.

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ibrarian of Congress Carla Hayden delivered the 2022 Windsor Lecture on April 21. The lecture was co-sponsored by the University Library and Center for Advanced Study. In her presentation, “Engaging Library Users in a Pandemic and Post Pandemic World,” Hayden discussed inviting patrons to enter a library’s front door and digital door and engaging a diverse library community both onsite and virtually.

Hayden was sworn in as the 14th Librarian of Congress on September 14, 2016. The first woman and first African American to lead the national library, Hayden was nominated to the position

by President Barack Obama on February 24, 2016, and her nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on July 13.

The Windsor Lecture honors the career of Phineas L. Windsor, who served as director of the University of Illinois Library and iSchool from 1909 to 1940.

Gifts from alumni and friends provide generous support for this ongoing lecture series.

Cora Thomassen passes away

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ora Thomassen passed away on December 23, 2021.

Thomassen earned her MS/LIS degree from the University of Illinois in 1955. She became the librarian at South Haven, Michigan, public schools, and then librarian to an extension of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. In 1961, she accepted an assistant professor of library science position at the U of I, becoming a tenured associate professor in 1969. During the summer of 1964, she also taught at the University of Hawaii. In 1965-66, she was granted a leave from the U of I to teach at the University of Iowa, helping implement their graduate library science program.

Her list of visiting lectureships and authored publications is extensive. Professional and community committee memberships and involvements kept her extremely busy and challenged.

Throughout her professional career, her fields of interest included library materials and services for children and young adults and audio-visual services for libraries. Thomassen took early retirement from the U of I in 1983 to become the director of the City Public Library in her hometown of Pella, Iowa.

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Research

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New grant to help libraries increase information literacy

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ssistant Professor Jodi Schneider has been awarded a three-year, $416,760 Early Career Development grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant RE-250162-OLS-21), under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports innovative

research by untenured, tenure-track faculty.

Her project, “Strengthening Public Libraries’ Information Literacy Services Through an Understanding of Knowledge Brokers’ Assessment of Technical and Scientific Information,” seeks to clarify how knowledge brokers—such as journalists, Wikipedia editors, and activists—assess the quality of scientific information. The project has implications for public access, information literacy, and understanding of science on policyrelevant topics.

“Library-based services to knowledge brokers have the potential to change the amount of misinformation circulating,” said Schneider. “Complex scientific and technical information is highly relevant

to the average person: It affects policy, legislation, and choices people make in their day-to-day lives.”

For her project, Schneider will interview knowledge brokers and analyze documents they have written. Each year of the project will focus on a different case study: COVID-19, climate change, and artificial intelligence and labor. During the last 18 months of the project, Schneider will work with five public libraries to codevelop services that they can use.

“By implementing the services developed in this project, public libraries will be able to help consumers of information become more discerning about the sources they deem reliable as well as more skilled at processing information for themselves,” she said.

Project to help scientists mitigate risks of environmental pollutants

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n addition to killing insects and weeds, pesticides can be toxic to the environment and harmful to human health. A new project led by Associate Professor Dong Wang and Huichun Zhang, Frank H. Neff Professor of Civil Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, will help scientists mitigate the environmental and ecological risks of pollutants such as pesticides and develop remediation strategies for cleaner water, soil, and air. The researchers have received a three-year, $402,773 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for their project, “Machine Learning Modeling for the Reactivity of Organic Contaminants in

Engineered and Natural Environments.”

According to Wang, of the more than 100,000 synthetic (mostly organic) chemicals, thousands have been released into the environment to become organic chemicals. Examples include pesticides, petroleum hydrocarbons, organic solvents, flame retardants, and pharmaceutical and personal care products.

“To mitigate or assess the risks associated with these contaminants, it is important to understand their fate and transport in the environment, such as biodegradation and sorption on soils/ sediments. In both cases, there is a major need for quantitative models that allow

prediction of the reactivity of organic contaminants in these processes,” he said.

Existing models that are used to predict the reactivity of organic contaminants rely heavily on conventional statistics.

For their project, the researchers will develop machine learning models to predict the reactivity of thousands of these contaminants in engineered and natural environments.

He receives grant to improve performance of deep learning models

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Wang receives Meta grant for research on social media advertising and privacy in Global South

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ssociate Professor Yang Wang has received a one-year, $100,000 grant from Meta for his project, “Global South Citizens’ Privacy Perceptions and Management of Targeted Ads on Social Media.” His doctoral students Tanusree Sharma, Smirity Kaushik, and Yaman Yu will serve as co-investigators.

The goal of the project is to learn from users in the Global South, with a focus on India and Bangladesh, about their experience with targeted ads.

“Users from marginalized communities tend to be disproportionally affected by practices such as user profiling and targeted advertising,” said Wang. “While there is a large body of literature on users in western developed countries, we know little about users in the Global South. Through our project, we hope to uncover unique experiences and challenges faced by these individuals.”

The researchers will consider four social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube), because of their popularity in the Global South and their use of ads and adrelated privacy settings. The project will consist of a series of semi-structured interviews, large-scale surveys, and co-design sessions. Participants will be recruited through the doctoral student researchers’ personal social networks, word of mouth, and social media communities.

“Our project is motivated by the cultural, economic, and development differences in the Global South, where the western definition of privacy is often not applicable,” said Sharma. “Also, I represent an individual from an underrepresented group—women in a South Asian country, Bangladesh. This provides additional motivation to understand the culture in a better way while we can uniquely position ourselves to conduct this research and study the users.”

ssociate Professor Jingrui He has been awarded a two-year, $149,921 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve the performance of deep learning models. For her project, “Weakly Supervised Graph Neural Networks,” she will focus on the lack of labeled data in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a deep learning method designed to perform inference on data described by graphs.

A graph is a structured way to represent data, with nodes representing entities and edges representing the relationships between these entities. GNNs provide an easy way to conduct node-level, edge-level, and graph-level prediction via machine learning. However, they usually require a large amount of label information to train the model parameters. According to He, the lack of labeled data in graphs can render many existing deep learning models ineffective in achieving the desired performance. Her new project involves a work-around so that GNNs can use unlabeled data and other relevant information.

“For example, in fraud detection, the number of known fraudulent transactions is usually very small compared to the total number of transactions, hence the lack of labeled data. Most existing GNN models tend to suffer from such label scarcity. In my new project, we aim to address this issue by leveraging weak supervision or additional information (besides the limited label information), such as labeled data from other related applications and/or access to a domain expert, in order to compensate for the lack of labeled data,” said He. In addition to fraud detection, areas such as agriculture and cancer diagnosis could also benefit from this research.

He’s project will lead to a suite of new models, algorithms, and theories for constructing high-performing GNNs with weak supervision, and for understanding the benefits of weak supervision with respect to the model generalization performance and sample complexity.

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Research

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New project helps people who are blind safeguard private visual content

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eople who are blind take pictures and videos and share them with others but face a unique challenge—they cannot independently review their pictures and videos to identify unnecessary private or sensitive content. A set of new algorithmic and interactive techniques being developed by researchers at the iSchool and partner institutions will empower people who are blind to independently safeguard private information in their pictures and videos.

Principal investigators on the project include Associate Professor Yang Wang; Danna Gurari, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Leah Findlater, associate professor in the Human Centered Design & Engineering Department at the University of Washington. The collaborative project, “Novel Algorithms and Tools

for Empowering People Who Are Blind to Safeguard Private Visual Content,” received a four-year, $1,199,993 grant from the National Science Foundation, with the U of I team led by Wang receiving $315,931.

According to the researchers, accidental privacy leaks are common, with more than one out of every 65 images taken by people who are blind showing a diversity of private content, such as prescription pills, home addresses, and tattoos. No solutions currently exist to protect people who are blind from possible identity theft, blackmail, legal liability, and, of course, embarrassment because of these privacy leaks. The goal of the new project is to design novel computer vision algorithms and end-user mechanisms that empower people who are blind to independently safeguard private information in their pictures and videos.

“A person who is blind who takes a photo or wants to reshare a photo can use our system or app to screen the photo for private/sensitive content,” explained Wang. “The app will tell the user whether the photo contains any private/sensitive content and what that private content is. The user can then choose to have the app blur the private content in the photo before making the decision to share the edited photo with others or post it on social media.”

The resulting app could be adapted to benefit other populations, such as people with low vision, people with cognitive impairments, aging adults, and children.

Huang leads effort to make online learning more accessible

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hile traditional closed captions represent the spoken part of a video, important content may not be expressed, to the detriment of audiences who depend on captions to understand the material being presented. With the increasing reliance on videos in online learning, this becomes even more problematic. A new collaborative project being led by Assistant Professor Yun

Huang will focus on explanatory captions, which give insight into a video’s visual and audio content as well as the spoken word.

Her project, “Advancing STEM Online Learning by Augmenting Accessibility with Explanatory Captions and AI,” has received a three-year $526,006 grant (totaling $849,994 with two collaborators at Gallaudet University and the University of Notre Dame) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“Explanatory captions have the potential to play a new role in STEM learning,” said Huang. “This project will work to devise effective Q/A mechanisms and interaction designs, such as chatbots,

that enable students and instructors to generate explanatory captions for STEM videos in a collaborative manner.”

The proposed technologies will make videos more accessible to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community and non-native English speakers. Evaluation sites will include Gallaudet University, the world’s only liberal arts university dedicated exclusively to educating deaf and hard-of-hearing learners, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which has the largest international student population among U.S. public universities.

Digital exhibit focuses on the evolution of Star Wars

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or MS/LIS student Ben Ostermeier, the digital exhibit he curated for the U of I Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML), “Starkiller to Skywalker: How Star Wars Evolved from Script to Screen,” was a labor of love.

A Star Wars fan, Ostermeier spent ten months curating the exhibit, although background work on the exhibit actually started earlier, as a project for one of his MS/LIS courses.

Why did you pick Star Wars for your exhibit?

My work with Star Wars began in my Data Science in the Humanities course I took in Spring 2021 with Professor Ted Underwood. In that class, we analyzed how men and women are portrayed in movies using a data set of more than 600 films. For the course’s final project, I decided to focus on the portrayal of gender in Star Wars films throughout its 40-year history, as I am a big fan of the franchise. To do this, I created a data set of the Star Wars original trilogy and Star Wars sequel trilogy. The following summer, I added the prequel trilogy as well.

For my RBML assistantship, I worked on projects to improve our digital exhibits platform and develop a web interface for the digital exhibit site.

Since I knew we had the shooting script for Star Wars, and I had already done the work for my class, I decided to create a digital exhibit about the shooting script and use the dialogue data set I already had for the original film as a point of comparison with the script.

View the Star Wars digital exhibit at go.ischool.illinois.edu/star-wars

How did the library acquire the Star Wars script?

We don’t actually know the precise provenance of the Star Wars script, but we know the library acquired it prior to 1982, as the script contains a note that it was transferred to the “Rare Book Room” (as RBML was known at the time) in June 1982. This means it somehow made its way to the University of Illinois Library between the script’s creation in 1976 and 1982.

How did you figure out the word counts for characters and deleted scenes?

For the data set I created for class, I first obtained subtitle files for each film and converted them to spreadsheet format. I then had to go through and identify the speakers of each line of dialogue, which I typically did either by memory or by consulting the film itself or the published script. This was fairly straightforward for most of the dialogue, but Star Wars is rather notorious for giving very minor background characters not only names but extensive backstories. I spent a lot of time on the Star Wars fan wiki Wookieepedia to figure out those characters.

I digitized the script using our scanner in RBML and then performed optical character recognition on it in the Scholarly Commons, where I am also a graduate assistant.

Then I moved the text into a spreadsheet like the data set for the film itself. To determine word count for both characters and genders, I used the Python Data Analysis Library pandas to analyze the text of both the script and the film.

What was the most interesting fact that you discovered while working on the project?

I already kind of knew this, but the 2017 film Rogue One used archival footage of Red Leader and Gold Leader in its space battle. This footage was originally shot for Star Wars in 1976 but ultimately cut from the film, and some of the dialogue in the Rogue One archival footage is from the shooting script—meaning that George Lucas wrote some dialogue in the 1970s that eventually made its way into a movie in 2017.

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Features

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New life for letterpress printing

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he old, green hand press that used to be stationed on the first floor of the iSchool building is getting a new lease on life. It has been moved to the ChampaignUrbana Community Fab Lab, where students and community members will be using it for letterpress printing. The Washington-style hand press, which was manufactured in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century by Reliance, was used for teaching and fine printing at the University of Illinois for decades before becoming a show piece at the iSchool.

Moving the hand press to the Fab Lab so that it could be used again for printing was the brainchild of Associate Professor Ryan Cordell, whose research interests include book arts, book history, print culture, and digital humanities. The hand press is part of Cordell’s book arts lab, which includes a C&P platen press from the late nineteenth century and a Vandercook model 14 proofing press from the 1940s.

Cordell traveled to Wisconsin in December with Tad Schroeder, the iSchool’s assistant director of facilities, and Kadin Henningsen, an English PhD student who is also a local printer, to pick up the C&P and Vandercook presses, cabinets of type, and related supplies.

“These three models will help teach three different eras of letterpress history,” said Cordell.

“While we can learn something

about print culture by reading scholarship about it, actually working with type, ink, and paper can generate material insights that are not always apparent in more abstract discussions of the period.

In addition, there are many aspects of contemporary technology that descend directly from historical ancestors.”

While the Reliance press needs to be refurbished before it is operational, the other presses are already in use in Cordell’s course, BookLab: Print to Programming (IS 583BL), in which students discuss a set of readings and then complete a hands-on lab in a textual technology. In the future, the presses will be used by students from a range of majors—English, literature, art, history, and more.

Ryan Cordell

“Students in BookLab learned how to set type and print a basic project,” said Cordell.

“Most of them chose a favorite poetic stanza, song lyric, or short prose excerpt.

By the end of our weeks in the press, they had printed those stanzas on paper we had made at the U of I’s Fresh Press during an earlier lab.”

According to Cordell, it’s especially important for information science students to experience a letterpress printer in order to expand their technological imagination.

“Many of our most deeply held ideas about information organization and design came into being during the letterpress era, using letterpress technologies, and when students learn those technologies it generates both historical insight and inspires new frameworks for the future,” he said.

“Letterpress requires both expression and precision—it’s something in between art and engineering, which fits perfectly in an interdisciplinary space like the iSchool.”

Cordell looks forward to hosting classes and workshops, as well as visiting scholars and artists, and anticipates that students will begin to develop independent projects in the press as well.

Emilie Butt, the Fab Lab’s instruction and engagement coordinator, operates the C&P platen press.

Apprenticeship program a win for students and library

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S/LIS students Samantha Lynn and Savannah Adams are earning course credit while exploring their interests through the iSchool’s apprenticeship program with The Urbana Free Library. In the two-semester program, apprentices work 15 hours per week at the library and earn up to six credits through both a practicum and an independent study. The apprentice has both a faculty supervisor and library supervisor, who meet to discuss the student’s progress in the program. Each student receives tuition support in the fall and a fellowship in the spring to complete the independent study.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, Adams worked in the Conservation Unit at the U of I Oak Street Library Facility, where she discovered a passion for conservation. She decided to apply for the apprenticeship program because she thought it would be beneficial to “understand, firsthand, the different components that make up the field of library preservation as a whole.”

Adams serves as the archives apprentice for the Champaign County Historical Archives of The Urbana Free Library and also works at the reference

desk. Her practicum project this semester involved Savannah Adams and Samantha Lynn digitizing and cataloging recently acquired home and building surveys conducted by the resources and expertise that you often Preservation and Conservation Association can’t find in a textbook or classroom (PACA) of Champaign County. setting,” said Lynn, who also worked at a “I love both learning from, and working public library while earning her bachelor’s with, the people at the archives. Everyone degree in linguistics from the University of is incredibly knowledgeable and has taught Georgia. me so much. A wonderful bonus is being While the apprenticeship program is able to learn about the local history of valuable for students, the Library also Champaign County, specifically historic benefits. According to the apprentices’ preservation and the architectural history supervisors, Donica Swann, director of of Champaign-Urbana,” she said. archives and public safety, and Rachel As an apprentice in Adult and Youth Fuller, director of adult & youth services Services, Lynn worked at the adult and acquisitions, “Apprentices contribute reference desk this semester and assisted to the Library’s mission by providing with projects such as children’s craft kits, excellent information services and programming and events, and collection supporting programming and collection development. She will move to the development. Working with apprentices, children’s question desk in the spring and library staff stay current on emerging continue to assist as needed with projects trends in the field; and, at the same time, in various departments. apprentices learn to apply library best “Not only have I been exposed to a wide practices in a real-world environment with range of experiences, but the librarians professional mentorship and support. We at The Urbana Free Library have been love working with students to discover excellent mentors. I truly feel like a part of their interests and helping them grow as the team, and whenever I have a question, professionals!” the librarians have provided access to

Nunn named a 2021 Fiddler Innovation Undergraduate Fellow

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S/IS student Alistair Nunn has been honored by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) as a 2021 Fiddler Innovation Undergraduate Fellow. Nunn was among seventeen undergraduates from various fields who were selected from NCSA’s SPIN, REUINCLUSION, and Design for America programs. The fellowship, which includes a $1,500 award, recognizes contributions to research for real-world impact and solutions.

Nunn is a senior from Chicago who started their SPIN (Students Pushing Innovation) internship in summer 2020, working on a natural language processing project with the NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL). Their project uses machine learning to build an impact classification model based on Amazon and YouTube reviews for scientific documentaries that were created in the AVL lab. Their mentors for the project include Teaching Assistant Professor Jill Naiman.

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Children’s book authored by Dapier named among the best of 2021

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ike the character in his latest book, Mr. Watson’s Chickens, Jarrett Dapier (MS/LIS ’15) has three chickens. Dapier, a librarian-turned-author, writes at his home in Evanston, Illinois, where he lives with his wife, two children, and pets (including a dog and two cats as well as the chickens).

Mr. Watson’s Chickens, illustrated by Andrea Tsurumi, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was chosen by NPR and BookPage as one of the best books of 2021.

“Mr. Watson’s Chickens was born when I dreamed one night that I read it to a class of first-graders,” said Dapier. “In the dream, I read aloud the part of the book in which Mr. Watson loses all his chickens, and they are repeatedly discovered by different people who are irritated to find hens in their midst. In the dream, as in the final book, the people that find the chickens bellowed, ‘Whose chickens are these?!’ and Mr. Watson responded, ‘That’ll be me!’

And, then there was the refrain, which remains in the book, ‘Said Mr. Watson with a 1-2-3!’ In the dream, the children enjoyed the book, and I greatly enjoyed reading it to them.”

When Dapier startled awake from his dream, he had the good sense to write it down, which led to his award-winning picture book. Dapier has written six books so far, of which four have found homes with publishers. Jazz for Lunch! and Mr. Watson’s Chickens, were published last fall

by Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books and Chronicle Books, respectively. His next picture book, The Most Haunted House in America, is scheduled to be published

by Abrams Kids in August 2022. Dapier’s fourth book is a young adult graphic novel slated to be released in 2023 by Chronicle Books. The other two are awaiting homes with publishers.

“The Most Haunted House in America is a story told in rhythm and rhyme about three skeleton drummers that get invited

“

This education naturally led me back into thinking about writing for kids, something that I’d always

”

wanted to do,

by the First Lady to play their drums at a special Halloween celebration at the White House. It’s partially inspired by my own experience playing the drums dressed as a skeleton at the Obamas’ White House Halloween celebration in 2009,” said Dapier, a lifelong drummer whose love of music has also shaped his writing.

Dapier admits that over the years he has read “an irrational number” of books aloud to his own children, now aged 11 and 15, which helped him become very well acquainted with the world of picture books. His experience with picture books also includes a stint teaching reading enrichment classes to four- to seven-year-olds after he completed his bachelor’s degree in rhetoric and creative writing from the U of I. Before

enrolling in the iSchool’s MS/LIS program, Dapier served as a teen librarian at the Evanston (IL) Public Library, and most recently, he worked as a young adult librarian at the Skokie (IL) Public Library.

These experiences helped him realize that children’s librarians are a valuable resource for aspiring writers—“always bursting with recommendations.”

Dapier’s decision to write for youth was also influenced by iSchool coursework, such as Literacy, Reading, and Readers (IS 571 LR), taught by Associate Professor Emerita Christine Jenkins.

“Her course really urged us to think deeply about how reading is acquired, consider what is going on in the brain as literacy develops, and analyze how pictures and words intertwine to create in the minds of young readers the images, sounds, voices, and comprehension skills needed to enjoy and understand books.

This education naturally led me back into thinking about writing for kids, something that I’d always wanted to do,” he said.

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SUCHO plays instrumental role in saving Ukrainian cultural heritage online

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s the tragic scenes of war in the Ukraine unfold on TV, computer, and cellphone screens across the world, people wonder what they can do to help the besieged country. iSchool alumni are among those working to make a difference by capturing Ukrainian museum and library websites, digital exhibits, text corpora, and open access publications in order to preserve Ukraine’s cultural heritage.

Quinn Dombrowski (MS/LIS ’09), academic technology specialist in the Library and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University, is coorganizing the initiative Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) with Anna Kijas of Tufts University and Sebastian Majstorovic of the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage.

“While we may not think of it this way, the internet ultimately comes down to physical things that exist in the real world— like servers and cables,” said Dombrowski.

“A lot of cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives, and museums) have invested a lot of time and resources in developing their websites, many of which include digitized collections (scans of manuscripts and documents, 3D models, virtual tours) or even just catalogs of their holdings.”

According to Dombrowski, SUCHO has taken a multi-pronged approach to web capture: submitting more detailed manifests of URLs to the Wayback Machine to ensure better coverage, gathering data and files from major collections and adding them to an Internet Archive collection for easier discovery, and creating high-fidelity web archive files that can be “played back” in a browser as if they were a live site, using the open source software WebRecorder.net.

Quinn Dombrowski

Dena Strong

Dena Strong (MS/LIS ’14), senior information design specialist at the University of Illinois, jumped at the chance to get involved in SUCHO and now serves as its community engagement coordinator.

She is one of over 1,300 volunteers from around twenty time zones involved in the effort. Like Strong, volunteers don’t need to read Cyrillic; they just need to be willing to serve.

“Once we get through the bulk data ingest, there’s going to be a lot of cataloging and metadata work to do on what’s shaping up to be terabytes—if not petabytes—of material,” she said.

Assistant Professor Zoe LeBlanc is involved in the initiative, helping to “crawl and scrape” sites, add to tutorials and documentation on the SUCHO site, and organize publications “to make sure that processes that have been developed during SUCHO get preserved for future crises.”

Thanks to SUCHO, websites for cultural organizations such as the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art, IvanoFrankivsk Center City Children’s Library, and Kharkiv’s National Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet can be preserved in this time of conflict and uncertainty.

Zoe LeBlanc

“There’s nothing I could do from this side of the ocean to help the people on the ground save lives and artifacts and buildings and history. But Notre Dame is being rebuilt from 3D scans taken by an art historian. Maybe something we’re backing up today can be used for a purpose like that,” said Strong. “In the meantime, the people who are on the ground can focus on keeping themselves and their historic treasures safe, knowing we’re taking care of the digital infrastructure.”

Added Dombrowski, “It’s a funny project, insofar as the best outcome for us is for all of this to be unnecessary. We want these servers, and the people who take care of them and their contents, to emerge unscathed from this war. But we want to have these archives just in case, to help the Ukrainian librarians, archivists, and curators rebuild when the time comes.”

SUCHO has been funded by emergency grants from the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH) and has received service credits and technical support from Amazon Web Services.

To learn more or get involved with the initiative, visit sucho.org.

Alumni

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Librarians share their zine experiences in new publication

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ines—small-scale, self-published works about anything and everything—have made their way from homes to libraries over the years. As libraries’ zine collections grow, librarians must address the acquisition and circulation of these unique publications and develop new ways to promote the creation of future zines. iSchool alumni Ann “A’misa” Matsushima Chiu (MS/LIS ’15), Ziba Pérez (MS/LIS ’12), and Josh Lupkin (MS/LIS ’08) recently penned chapters on this topic for Zines in Libraries: Selecting, Purchasing and Processing (ALA Editions/CORE, 2022).

Chiu, social sciences librarian at Reed College, a small liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, also serves as librarian of the Reed Zine Library, which has a circulating collection of about 700+ zines.

According to Chiu, zines have helped diversify the library’s collection by inserting

Ann Chiu

Zeba Pérez

primary source material from authors from marginalized and minoritized identities.

“The zines at Reed are primarily by people of color, LGBTQIA+ folks, Portlanders, and Reedies, and on the topics of social justice, activism, mutual aid, body positivity, immigration, and anticapitalism,” said Chiu. “I often collaborate with student organizations to help them create zines as tools for community organizing and activism. Recently, we’ve had students bring in their own zines for the library, and a few faculty members are now using zines as alternative final paper formats.”

The Reed Zine Library hosts workshops every semester, including “Zine-in-a-

Josh Lupkin

Hurry” events where participants start and finish a collaborative collage zine in an hour. It also brings in special guest artists and writers, which helps attract new users to the library, especially during student orientation.

At the Los Angeles Public Library, where Ziba Pérez (MS/LIS ’12) serves as a young adult librarian, zines started circulating five years ago, and patrons can check them out with their library cards. The library’s website features a special zine section, which advertises upcoming zine workshops and fests.

“Holding zine programming is important in bringing new voices to the collections and in connecting the collections to the community,” said Pérez. “I just did a zine workshop at a local

Get to know Ellen Janowski, Knowledge Management Associate at Invenergy LLC

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llen Janowski (MS/IM ’18) is a knowledge management associate at Invenergy LLC, a leading, privately held, global developer and operator of sustainable energy solutions.

In this role, she supports, maintains, and deepens the knowledge management (KM) practices across the core facets of people, processes, and technology. According to Janowski, KM is more than a specific technology: it is a practice that makes a company more efficient and effective through the allocation of information held by individuals within the organization.

As a KM associate on Invenergy’s Business Transformation team, Janowski supports Invenergy’s work developing, building, and operating clean energy power plants with

KM, change management, and process improvement efforts. Invenergy’s projects involve considerable information and knowledge transfer among different business units and teams at the company.

Her team ensures the information transfer happens seamlessly and proposes solutions if it does not.

“One project I’m working on that I’m particularly excited about is developing a structured onboarding program with the aim of giving new employees the tools they need to be successful at the company and in their role,” said Janowski.

One of Janowski’s favorite aspects of working for Invenergy includes the learning culture.

high school and showed the students how to make zines. I brought zines from our branch library collection to the school library to share as examples and for students to borrow on the spot with their library cards.”

Josh Lupkin (MS/LIS ’08), Charles Warren Librarian for American History at Harvard University’s Widener Library, developed an interest in underground periodicals, comics, and graphic culture when he worked at Tulane University. He appreciates the underrepresented voices and formats of zines and understands the difficulties in adding them to library collections.

“Even at a comparatively well-resourced research library, zines present real logistical issues across the lifecycle that become even more acute when you try to acquire them in a responsible and ethical way from communities outside of North America,” he said. “Many professionals in GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) fields have been talking about methodologies of community archives, and I consider these discussions when thinking about zines. Just as bringing zines into library collections requires careful collaboration with stakeholders, so does the process of helping/persuading faculty to take a chance on incorporating them into curricula.”

“Everyone I’ve met is very open to teaching you about what they do, and as a result, I’m learning a lot about the renewable energy industry without having an engineering background. I’m proud to work at a company that is solving today’s energy challenges to build a more sustainable world,” she said.

For Janowski, having a proactive KM practice at a company like Invenergy is crucial to prevent the loss of tacit information that helps a business grow and be more efficient.

“I truly believe there is something extraordinary about sharing knowledge across an organization,” she said.

Mentoring offers benefits to alumni, students

Dan Andree

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Marci Cohen

hen he was a student, Dan Andree (MS/LIS ’18) became involved in the School’s mentoring program for the chance to have a one-on-one exchange with a professional in his field of interest. He was matched with Marci Cohen (MS/ LIS ’00), assistant head of the music library at Boston University. In addition to speaking with his mentor over the phone, Andree had the opportunity to visit her place of work in Boston and get an idea of her day-to-day work.

“As a music librarian, I was excited to work with Dan because of his interest in music librarianship,” said Cohen. “I was fascinated to hear about his background as a musician who had traveled the world but who turned to librarianship as a more viable long-term career. We talked about his career aspirations, my own career path, what the job market looked like, and the pluses and minuses of different types of jobs and institutions.”

In addition to reviewing Andree’s resume and advising him on cover letters and interviewing, Cohen discussed the career advantages she gained through her involvement in professional organizations.

For Andree, the mentoring experience gave him valuable insight into the role and responsibilities of a professional in music librarianship.

“All students should take advantage of this great opportunity to build professional relationships,” he said. “Whether you know what direction you will take your degree, or you are still exploring the many pathways made possible by an MS/LIS, mentorship provides invaluable perspective while pursuing career opportunities.”

Likewise, Cohen recommends mentoring to all iSchool alumni.

“I recently blurted out, ‘What’s the point of knowing stuff if you don’t share it with others?’ which summarizes my attitude towards mentorship and librarianship,” she said. “It’s a meaningful way to give back to the university community, and it bridges the gap between the classroom curriculum and what it takes to land that first job. Mentoring also gives students insight into how they want to build their career beyond just getting to that first paycheck.”

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Class Notes

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DECADE: 2020s Akshay Bafna (MS/IM ’20) recently started as a manager for Salesforce Einstein Analytics team in KPMG LLP. He will support business in improving processes and workflow to enhance the data quality, provide insights from data coming from different sources in Salesforce Tableau CRM, and work on automation and AI/ML Einstein discovery reports in Salesforce platform.

In March 2022, Marilyn Creswell (MS/LIS ’20) was hired by the University of Michigan Law Library as an information resources assistant intermediate.

Katelin Deushane (MS/LIS ’21) is a youth services librarian at Sarasota County (FL) Libraries.

Rebecca Flore (MS/LIS ’21) is the special collections metadata librarian at the University of Chicago.

Rebecca Greenlee (MS/LIS ’21) has accepted a position with the Education Justice Project as a community library co-coordinator, where she will be working with community and student librarians in the community library located within the Danville (IL) Correctional Center.

Dyamond Hutton (MS/LIS ’21) accepted a fulltime position digitizing the collection dealing with President Truman’s decision to desegregate the military in 1948.

Clarissa Ihssen (MS/LIS ’21) is a science liaison and reference librarian for Georgetown University Library.

Hannah Kauffmann (MS/LIS ’21) has accepted a position as the visiting instructional librarian at Saint Paul College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Diana Liao (MS/LIS ’20), education associate at the Japan House at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was selected by the Rare Book School as a Cultural Heritage Fellow for the 2022–2024 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion & Cultural Heritage.

Eileen López (MS/LIS ’20) has been promoted to senior design researcher for Arity, a telematics and behavioral insights company.

Kristy Lueshen (MS/LIS ’21) is the student success resident librarian at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Michael DeNotto (MS/LIS ’12) has been promoted to associate librarian/professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

Alysha Rooks (MS/LIS ’20) authored the book, The Black Joke, The True Story of One Ship’s Battle Against the Slave Trade, which was recently published by Simon & Schuster.

Jason Driver (MS/LIS ’11) has been named director of the Kitsap Regional Library in Kitsap County, Washington. He served most recently as a district chief at Chicago Public Library, overseeing 14 branches and the supervision of 125 staff.

Ernestina (Tina) Saenz (MS/LIS ’20) was recently promoted to project cataloging librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Tarida Anantachai (MS/LIS ’11) has started a new position as director of inclusion and talent management at the North Carolina State University Libraries.

Holly Eberle (MS/LIS ’15) is an ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom Blogger (2020-2022), ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee member (2019-2021), and leader of a YALSA Teens’ Top Ten club at the Algonquin Area Public Library District, where she serves as teen outreach & programming librarian (2022-2023).

Joe Askins (MS/LIS ’12) has accepted the position of technical services manager at the Fayetteville (AR) Public Library. He was previously the head of instructional services for the University of Missouri Libraries in Columbia.

The American Library Association has selected Mandi Goodsett (MS/LIS ’13), performing arts & humanities librarian at Cleveland State University in Ohio, as the 2022 Lois Ann GregoryWood Fellow.

Quetzalli Barrientos (MS/LIS ’15) became the open education research librarian at Gutman Library (Harvard Graduate School of Education) in August.

John Gough (MS/LIS ’14) chaired the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) 2022 DRIVE/Conference on March 8-9 in New Orleans.

Betty Bayer (MS/LIS ’19) has opened a bookstore, Betty’s Books, in Webster Groves, Missouri. It is a one-of-a-kind, family-friendly specialty bookstore featuring comics, graphic novels, and manga for all ages.

Julie Hyatt (MS/LIS ’12) is a proposal content administrator for Health Care Service Corporation, which operates Blue Cross and Blue Shield divisions in five states.

DECADE: 2010s

Erin Bell (MS/LIS ’18) reports that in 2021 she bought her first car, bought and moved into a new home, and was promoted to library manager.

Kelsey Berryhill (MS/LIS ’15) started her new role as the State Historical Society of Iowa’s reference librarian in August 2021, where she heads the Research Center operations. Prior to this, she was at the Missouri State Archives for five years as a reference archivist.

James Conley (MS/LIS ’13) was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives in Chicago after serving as a volunteer exhibit curator for six years.

Furthermore, he was elected co-president of the Board and invites all librarians and interested parties to drop by for a visit.

Bradley Kuykendall (MS/LIS ’15) started a new role as assistant branch manager at Dayton (OH) Northwest Public Library.

Anna Lapp (MS/LIS ’17) started at the Cincinnati (OH) Public Library as a youth librarian in May 2021 after working in Washington state. In April 2022, she moved to the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library to work as a youth librarian.

Starting August 1, 2022, Noah Lenstra (PhD ’16) will be an associate professor with tenure in the Department of Library and Information Science at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Adam Mann (MS/LIS ’13) has changed careers and is now a software engineer.

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Xiying Mi (MS/LIS ’11), digital initiatives metadata librarian at the University of South Florida, has been named an Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Leadership and Career Development Fellow.

Jhani Miller (MS/LIS ’15) has received a Code4Lib 2022 Diversity Scholarship and Public Library Association (PLA) 2022 Scholarship and the All of Us Professional Development Award from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NNLM).

Daniel Mills (MS/LIS ’18) is now a software librarian at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, after receiving two promotions in two years. He credits the iSchool’s culture of “you can always change paths,” keeping himself open, embracing changes, and learning new skills for leading to his success.

Stephanie Norick (MS/LIS ’15) started a new position as a Tableau business intelligence senior analyst with Salesforce.

Katie (Lucas) Potempa (MS/LIS ’17) started a new position in January as a corporate archivist at Caterpillar Inc. Colin Rhinesmith (PhD ’14) has been appointed as senior director of research and fellowships for Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

Lian Ruan (PhD ’11), iSchool research affiliate and head librarian at the U of I Illinois Fire Service Institute (IFSI), received a $50,000 IMLS American Rescue Plan Grant Program award for her project, “Experienced-Based Knowledge Management Initiatives to Support Illinois Firefighters’ Dynamic Needs in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.” She and her team also received an ALA American Rescue Plan: Humanities Grants for Libraries to develop a Children Fire Safety Literacy Reading and Discussion Program.

Miguel Ruiz (MS/LIS ’13), library supervisor at the Arlington (VA) Public Library, has been named to the American Library Association (ALA) Policy Corps.

Mikki Smith (PhD ’17) became the medical librarian for Guthrie, based at Robert Packer Hospital in Sayre, Pennsylvania, in November 2021. She was awarded a 2022 Hospital Libraries Professional Development Grant by the Hospital Library Caucus of the Medical Library Association, and she is a member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals.

In 2020, Libby Snyder (MS/LIS ’14) became the K-5 librarian for Gray’s Woods Elementary in the State College Area School District in Pennsylvania. She also served as the chair of the 2018 Lee Bennett Hopkins Award committee for the Pennsylvania Center for the Book.

Cassidy Steinke (MS/LIS ’15) recently accepted the position of public services manager for the Matteson Area Public Library District in Matteson, Illinois.

Rachel Stewart (MS/LIS ’18) recently accepted a position as librarian at the Tolono (IL) Public Library District.

In December 2021, Christinna Swearingen (MS/LIS ’19) started a new position as the library director for Rusk County Community Library in Ladysmith, Wisconsin. She has volunteered with the Library of Congress on a metadata project since January 2021.

Lydia Tang (MS/LIS ’15) has been elected to a three-year Council term with the Society of American Archivists.

Billy Tringali (MS/LIS ’19) has started a new position as a research and instruction librarian at Babson College in his home state of Massachusetts. He recently published the second issue of the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, an open-access journal he started while he was a student at the iSchool.

Emilie Vrbancic (MS/LIS ’14), undergraduate experience librarian, has been promoted to associate librarian for the University of Washington Libraries.

Penelope Yocum (MS/LIS ’12) will start a new job in April as the registrar/ collection manager at the National Park Service Southeast Archeological Center in Tallahassee, Florida.

DECADE: 2000s Jeanie Austin (MS/LIS ’09, PhD ’17) was interviewed by Ithaka S+R about their new book, Library Services and Incarceration: Recognizing Barriers, Strengthening Access.

Diane Foote (MS/LIS ’06) has announced her retirement as executive director of the Illinois Library Association, which is scheduled for November 2022.

Migdalia Jimenez (MS/LIS ’07) started a new role as the branch manager of Mabel Manning Branch, Chicago Public Library.

Send us your news!

We’d love to hear from you! Send us your updates as well as any employment or internship opportunities, conferences of interest, or opportunities for iSchool alumni to connect in your area.

Office of Advancement and Alumni Relations School of Information Sciences 501 East Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820 ischool-advancement@illinois.edu (217) 300-5746 ischool.illinois.edu/engage/alumni

Class Notes

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Helen Linda (MS/LIS ’07) recently accepted the position of business and process analyst with the Vermont State Colleges System. She is a core member of the Transformation effort to unify three publicly funded institutions into the new Vermont State University entity.

Mark Lindner (MS/LIS ’06) passed away on January 31, 2022, in Bend, Oregon.

Safiya Noble (MS/LIS ’09, PhD ’12) was named the inaugural recipient of the NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award, which acknowledges leaders creating change within the social justice and technology realm to advance civil and human rights.

Rachel Scott (MS/LIS ’07), associate dean for information assets at Illinois State University’s Milner Library, has been selected as the new editor of Library Resources & Technical Services (LRTS) journal.

DECADE: 1980s Kurt A.T. Bodling (MS/LIS ’88) has been named director of the Appalachian Trail Museum’s Research Library in Gardners, Pennsylvania.

Cynthia R. Cockerham (MS/LIS ’80) passed away on January 22, 2022, in Williamsburg, Virginia.

DECADE: 1970s Elisabeth (Betty) Bachman Davis (MS/LIS ’70) passed away on December 13, 2021, in Chicago.

Kathryn Harris (MS/LIS ’71) was interviewed for the Southern Illinois University’s Saluki Stories: Oral Histories project. She holds a bachelor’s degree in French from SIU. She was also interviewed by NPR’s Community Voices

about her career, from learning French to library science.

At 92, Don Phillips (MS/LIS ’76) has become a great-grandfather again on March 9, 2022.

Carline Stottlar (MS/LIS ’79) passed away on October 17, 2021.

Mitsuko (Mitzi) Williams (MS/LIS ’74) passed away on November 11, 2021.

Olga Bornstein Wise (MS/LIS ’72) recently published her family history, From the Elbe to the Rio Grande. The book includes translations from German into English of important family resources and many images from her large family archive—“all organized thanks to skills gained in my studies in information science.”

Kerri Willette (MS/LIS ’05) coauthored the “Humans in the Loop” recommendations report from LC Labs, which was recently released by the Library of Congress.

DECADE: 1990s Anita Coleman (PhD ’96) served as a panelist for the webinar, “Conversations on Role of Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Breaking Digital Barriers, by Unboxing Empathy and Equity in the Post-COVID-19,” on January 5.

Jill Pifer (MS/LIS ’98), library director at the Fairview Heights (IL) Library, serves on the steering committee for an initiative called Illinois Libraries Present.

David Saia (MS/LIS ’95) has been appointed as chair of the ALA’s Stonewall Book Awards – Children’s and Young Adult Committee.

Leora Siegel (MS/LIS ’91), senior director of the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Lenhardt Library, was interviewed by Reaching Across Illinois Library System (RAILS) for a Specialized Libraries Spotlight.

Dipesh Navsaria (MS/LIS ’04), pediatrician and medical director of Reach Out and Read Wisconsin, and Associate Professor Sarah Park Dahlen MS/LIS ’09, PhD ’09) bumped into each other at the Empowering Readers, Empowering Citizens Convening, which was hosted by the Institute of Museum and Library Services on March 1-2 in Washington, D.C. Navsaria served as a panelist for the session, “Prioritizing Literacy Development.”

Giving

Miranda receives inaugural Balz Scholarship

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fter a few years in the workplace, it took a “leap of faith” for Callan Miranda to decide to return to school for an MS/LIS degree. A full-time employee at the Peoria Riverfront Museum, Miranda is happy with her choice to enroll in the iSchool’s Leep (online) program and thankful to be the

inaugural recipient of the Nancy and Dan Balz Scholarship. Nancy (BA LAS ’70, MS/LIS ’72) and her husband Dan (BS Media ’68, MS Media ’72) established the scholarship to help make education more affordable for returning students like Miranda.

Miranda discovered an interest in special collections and archives while earning her BA in English and a certificate in publishing from the University of Iowa.

As the type of student who learns best in a classroom setting, she was initially unsure about enrolling in an online master’s program. However, her concerns were quickly dispelled in her first semester at the iSchool.

“I can easily say the iSchool fosters a tremendous sense of community and

engagement, and I feel more connected to my peers and the program than I did during my in-person undergrad experience,” she said. “I also appreciate the variety of professors and lecturers that are an active part of the School, and I am grateful to learn from some of the most brilliant contributors in the field in the country.”

After she earns her MS/LIS, Miranda would like to continue working in museums, maintaining digital archives.

“I am extremely touched to be the first recipient for this scholarship, and I hope the future recipients realize the tremendous opportunity presented by Nancy and Dan Balz,” she said.

Katharine L. Sharp Scholarships support deserving students

T

hanks to the generosity of Lionelle (BA, LAS ’66, MS/LIS ’67) and James (BS, Business ’66; MS, Business ’67) Elsesser, four MS/LIS students are receiving Katharine L. Sharp Scholarships for the 2021-2022 academic year.

These scholarships are awarded to applicants and/or current students who show extraordinary potential for leadership in the profession and society.

“I’d like to thank Lionelle and James for their longstanding commitment to the iSchool,” said Dean and Professor Eunice E. Santos. “Their contributions through the years have benefited bright and talented students and enhanced the quality of our academic programs. In doing so, they have advanced the field of information sciences.”

Erika Mei Chua Holum BA, history and political science, Eureka College; MA, museum and exhibition studies, University of Illinois Chicago Holum is interested in a career working in archives, collections, and museums, with a particular focus on special collections.

Xochitl M. Quiroz BA, English literature, Macalester College Quiroz is most interested in working in reference and possibly as a subject specialist, but she is open to other paths within academic librarianship as well.

Sheridan Cazarez BA, Spanish, California State University Long Beach Cazarez is interested in public librarianship and would like to make libraries more accessible and relevant to Latinxs and Spanish speakers.

Eden Irwin BA, history, University of Chicago Irwin would like to work in archives, where she can make the past accessible to future generations.

INTERSECTIONS SPRING 2022

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Non Profit Org. U.S. Postage PAID Permit No. 75 Champaign, IL University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 501 East Daniel Street, MC-493 Champaign, IL 61820-6211

Your gift makes a difference in the educational experience of our students.

When you support iSchool students, you can change the course of someone’s life. Every gift, large or small, matters.

Student support provides valuable financial assistance and maintains the excellence of our top-ranked academic programs. Here are just a few ways your gift can make an impact.

Annual Fund

Supports a wide range of activities that supplement academic studies and promote the professional development of our students.

iSchool Student Emergency Fund Provides emergency financial assistance for students enrolled in the iSchool.

School of Information Sciences Scholarship/ Fellowship/Assistantship Fund Provides scholarship assistance to students in the iSchool.

For more information about giving to the iSchool, or to make a gift, visit go.ischool.illinois.edu/give.