Faculty News from GSLIS at Illinois
October 1, 2012

Dr. Nicole Cooke
Assistant Professor Nicole Cooke presented her paper, “The information use behaviors of graduate students in an online learning community,” at ISIC 2012: The Information Behavior Conference in Japan at the beginning of September.

Dr. Miles Efron
Assistant Professor Miles Efron has been chosen by the Alumni Association Board of the School of Information and Library Science (SILS), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as their latest featured alumnus.

Dr. Jon Gant
Jon Gant, research associate professor and director of the proposed Center for Digital Inclusion at GSLIS, has been awarded a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grant for "Inclusive Gigabit Libraries: Learn, Discuss, and Brainstorm." With this IMLS support, Gant and GSLIS will hold a series of four continuing education forums to enhance understanding of how libraries can adopt and use next-generation Internet networks to address social inclusion through the initiative US Ignite.

Dr. Bonnie Mak
Assistant Professor Bonnie Mak’s book, How the Page Matters, published last year, is now available in paperback. In the book, Mak explains that the way in which text is presented in a book can tell a bigger story than what is inscribed on each page. Mak also begins a faculty fellowship this fall from the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for her project “Implications of the Digital Revolution.” Supported in part by a grant from Campus Research Board, Mak presented “A Librarian Makes a Box” with Julia Pollack at the Knowledge in a Box conference in Kavala, Greece, in July.

Dr. Allen Renear
This month, GSLIS Professor and Interim Dean Allen Renear delivered the opening keynote address at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Forum, “Tracking it Back to the Source: Managing and Citing Research Data," held in Denver, Colorado. The forum examined challenges posed by the exponential rise of data creation across nearly all scholarly disciplines. Renear’s talk, “The Many and the One: BCE Themes in 21st Century Data Curation,” focused on the fundamental issues facing data curation in the digital age and the practical measures, specifically those being developed by the GSLIS Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS), that can be used to address these challenges. 

Dr. Carol Tilley
Assistant Professor Carol Tilley presented a paper on nostalgia and superhero comics at a workshop in Reading, England, called “The Multiple Life Cycles of Children’s Media: Childhood Nostalgia in Contemporary Convergence Culture.” She also presented two papers in September at Protest on the Page: Print Culture History in Opposition to Almost Anything, a conference at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her papers are titled “‘Books of Fun and Adventure’: Children’s Librarians Protesting Comic Books, 1945-1952” and “Children and the Comics: Young Readers Take on the Critics.”

Dr. Terry Weech
Associate Professor Terry Weech traveled to the IFLA World Library and Information Congress held in Helsinki, Finland, this August. He participated in the program, “Libraries, Archives, Museums–exploring the changing landscape,” where he presented “Convergence of libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions in LIS schools in research and curriculum offerings.”