UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) faculty and staff know that our students are pretty great every day and have been awesome way more than 19 times this year, but here are 19 quick summaries of events where they shined or recognition they earned between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2019.

1. iConference 2019
   Along with SILS faculty members, SILS PhD candidate Shenmeng Xu and PhD student YuanYe Ma presented their research at the 2019 iConference in Washington, D.C.
2. Miana Breed and Betsy Ford receive scholarships to attend MER Conference
   MSLS student Miana Breed and MSIS student Betsy Ford were awarded scholarships to attend the 2019 Managing Electronic Records (MER) Conference in Chicago.
3. Jordan Wrigley awarded MLA scholarship
   MSLS student Jordan Wrigley received a $5,000 scholarship from the Medical Library Association (MLA). Wrigley also won the fall Elfreda Chatman Research Award from SILS for her research proposal, titled “A bibliometric analysis and mapping of maternal health publications associated with Millennium Development Goal 5.”
4. 2019 Project Fair
   Projects covered a variety of topics including open access initiatives at UNC, archivists’ roles in relation to Confederate monuments, mobile workers, and outcomes for U.S. animal shelters, presented as a visualization. Yukun Yang won Best Project Award; Caleece Nash won the People’s Choice Award; Rachel-Anne Spencer and Nadia Clifton won the Community Impact Award.
5. Symposium on Information for Social Good
   SILS graduate and undergraduate students addressed current ethical and social justice issues with poster presentations and panel discussions at the annual Symposium on Information for Social Good.
6. Students taking Systems Analysis at SILS contribute to campus printing upgrade
   Students in Lukasz Mazur’s INLS 582 Systems Analysis class this spring worked with UNC ITS Teaching and Learning to improve the Carolina Computing Initiative (CCI) printing process on campus.
7. Spring Commencement
   A special day celebrating all of our graduates, with special recognition for student speaker Sarah Beth Nelson (PhD ’19), Elfreda Chatman Award winner Meg Foster, Dean’s Award winners Kimberly J. Reisler and Jiaming Qu, Outstanding Service to the School Award winner Rachel~Anne Spencer, and the 10 recipients of the SILS Diversity Advocate Certificate.
8. Megan Threats and Kristen Bowen selected as i3 teaching fellows
   Megan Threats and Kristen Bowen were two of the four PhD students selected from a nationwide search to be teaching fellows for the 2019 iSchool Inclusion Institute (i3). See more on Megan Threats below.
9. Lynnee Argabright named SSP Student Fellow
   MSIS student Lynnee Argabright was selected as a 2019 Society for Scholarly Publishing Student Fellow. The program offers training, travel support, mentorship, and networking opportunities.
10. Fall orientation
    Returning grad students helped welcome their new classmates by participating in afternoon sessions. Second-year MSIS student Paul Khawaja and MSLS student Alexander Chisum received scholarships from Beta Phi Mu Epsilon Chapter for being the top performing students in the first year of their respective programs.
11. Elliott Hauser wins dissertation research and best paper awards
    PhD candidate Elliott Hauser received the 2019 Litwin Books Award for Ongoing Dissertation Research in the Philosophy of Information. He and a co-author also won the Best Paper Award at the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization conference (NASKO 2019).
12. 2019 Banned Books reading moves to Davis Courtyard
    SILS master’s students and special guests shared passages from books that have been challenged or banned in the United States at the annual Banned Books Reading.
13. Three information science majors awarded scholarships from SILS
    Jared Beavers, Shelby Poliachik, and Eshika Talukder received SILS scholarships for their high scholastic achievement and outstanding written application essays.
14. ALISE 2019
    PhD candidate Colin Post presented a poster, recent SILS doctoral graduate Nina Exner (PhD ’19) presented a poster and served on a panel, PhD student Kristen Bowen presented a poster with SILS Assistant Professor Amelia Gibson, and PhD candidate Megan Threats won the 2019 Jean Tague-Sutcliffe Doctoral Student Research Poster Competition.
15. SILS undergraduate Michael Doucette profiled by Endeavors
    SILS senior Michael Doucette was profiled by Endeavors, Carolina’s online research magazine. In the interview, he talks about his research on the ways digital technologies influence personal and social spaces.
16. PhD student Kelsey Urgo co-authored a paper with Associate Professors Jaime Arguello and Rob Capra. Urgo presented the paper, “Anderson and Krathwohl’s Two-Dimensional Taxonomy Applied to Task Creation and Learning Assessment,” at ICTIR 2019 in Santa Clara, Calif., on Oct. 4. doi: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3341981.3344226.
17. ASIS&T 2019
    SILS grad students shined at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Australia, including Yukun Yang, Megan Threats, Elliott Hauser, Yuanye Ma, Kristen Bowen, and Shenmeng Xu.
18. Storytelling with Tech-Infused Book
    Students from Assistant Professor Maggie Melo’s Information Professionals in the Makerspace course used laser cutting, 3D printing, augmented reality, circuitry, and other makerspace skills to transform old books into new, tech-infused stories. They showcased their creations on Oct. 16 in Wilson Library. Click here for photos.
19. PhD candidate Megan Threats receives multiple fellowships and awards for research
    Multiple national and international organizations recognized SILS doctoral candidate Megan Threats in 2019 for the quality and potential of her research. Her accolades include:
    Beta Phi Mu Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship
    International P.E.O. Scholar Award
    First place in the ALISE Jean Tague-Sutcliffe Doctoral Student Research Poster Competition for her poster, “The Influence of Sociotechnical Environments on the Information Behaviors of Black Gay Men.”
    First place in ASIS&T SIG HLTH student poster competition for her poster, “The Information Practices of HIV Positive Black Gay Men Post-Diagnosis.”
    2020 Horizon Award from the UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate School (announced in Dec. 2019)
    She was also accepted to the 2018/19 ASIS&T Doctoral Colloquium and 2019 iConference Doctoral Colloquium, and served on a 2019 Medical Library Association panel,  “Microaggressions and More: Continuing the Conversation on Implicit Bias.” In addition, she had papers published in AIDS Care and the Journal of Patient Experience.

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