2000 Years of Professional Experience for Free

Overview of the RETAP program

We Need to Talk About How We Compensate School Staff

Most of public school operational budgets are dedicated to compensating staff, and school staff are important for schools and students. Yet discussions about teacher shortages and teacher quality have tended to ignore many important aspects of school staff compensation beyond broad generalizations about average teacher salary levels. Consequently, these discussions are often muddled. In this essay, I highlight five important choices about school staff compensation faced by school district boards and other policymakers that are commonly neglected: the choices (1) to hire more staff rather than to pay staff more; (2) to replace salary with benefits; (3) to backload rather than frontload compensation; (4) to make compensation contingent on education; and (5) to compensate staff uniformly rather than to strategically differentiate compensation. How school systems navigate these choices, and their trade-offs, has implications for their ability to recruit and retain high quality staff. Rather than taking for granted the decisions of stakeholders in the past - which has tended to obscure potential solutions to staff recruitment and retention problems – school leaders and policymakers should make these choices actively and explicitly on an ongoing basis. Additionally, researchers should do more to inform their decisions

Miranda's Quest

Searching is basic to all work with books. Often routine and obvious, it can also be laborious, problematical, time-consuming, and dependent on special skills, expertise, and insights. It requires a knowledge of bibliographical sources, often uncommon, idiosyncratic, and unusual in their citation practices. Above all, especially when it is difficult, it can be a learning experience.Copyright 2023 University of Illinois Board of TrusteesEmbargoe

Tracing the interdisciplinarity and the evolution of information science through a study of the Journal of the Association of Information Science and Technology (JASIS&T) and iConference proceedings

Interdisciplinary academic fields are challenging to understand and manage due to their complexity and dynamic nature. The composition of academic programs, curricula, and faculty in these fields varies significantly across institutions and within academic and research communities. Text analysis of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIS&T) and the iConference Proceedings over a sixteen-year period provides evidence of shifting topics and communities within information science. Understanding these changes in an interdisciplinary field helps clarify its identity, which, in turn, supports knowledge production and the administration of academic programs and research

Public Libraries, Digital Equity Coalitions, and the Public Good

In this presentation to the American Library Association Digital Inclusion Working Group, I present findings from my recent journal article, with the same title, published in Public Library Quarterly. The research seeks to address a gap in the literature on the role of public libraries in digital equity coalitions

AEMS News and Reviews: Summer 2009 (Issue: #32)

This issue explores themes of conflict, reconciliation, education, and cultural identity across Asia and beyond. "Making Peace with Vietnam" reflects on the lingering consequences of the Vietnam War and the desire for reconciliation between Vietnamese and Americans, focusing on human suffering caused by the war. "Two Million Minutes" examines educational pressures and systems in China, India, and the U.S., highlighting global academic competition and comparing student priorities. North Korea’s repressive regime and profound humanitarian challenges are exposed through two powerful documentaries: "Seoul Train", focused on the escape routes of defectors, and "Children of the Secret State", portraying life under totalitarian control and the devastating famine. "Sumo East and West" investigates Japan’s traditional sport as it intersects with global influences, especially American culture from Hawai‘i. A featured website review introduces "About Japan: A Teacher’s Resource", a valuable platform for K-12 educators integrating Japanese studies into the classroom.Center for East Asian and Pacific Studie

2024 ACCESS Student Training and Engagement Program (STEP-2) Final Student Report

This paper summarizes Jae Yoon Chong's internship experience with the ACCESS Operations Student Training and Engagement Program working with the Cybersecurity team.NSF OAC #213830

2024 ACCESS Student Training and Engagement Program (STEP-2) Final Student Report

This paper summarizes Kaila Dowd's ACCESS STEP internship with the ACCESS cybersecurity team.NSF OAC #213830

What is Underrepresentation and Why Does it Matter for the University of Illinois Archives

In recent years, archives have increasingly created positions focused entirely or partially on filling in the record gaps of underrepresented groups. The University of Illinois Archives has shown some commitment to filling in these gaps since its founding in the 1960s and has recently made more intentional decisions to diversify the collections while following a careful and ethical collection development process. To ensure an ethical approach, it is critical to understand what the archival gaps are, why they exist, and what lessons can be learned from the underrepresented communities that have enriched the University of Illinois campus but have been previously excluded from the archives. For this reason, I devised an interview study with the University of Illinois archivists to learn about the ways underrepresented groups are defined and comprehend the ways each archivist intentionally pursues initiatives to help fill in the gaps.

Now what? Lessons Learned from a Diversity Audit

Diversity audits are frequently used as an assessment method to measure the diversity of a library collection. Yet, there is not frequent research on the aftermath of diversity audits, especially in the context of comparing data from several audits to assess the difference in the makeup of a library collection. In this article, the author discusses the changes a small academic library made in response to a diversity audit conducted several years before, as well as the results of a new, smaller audit to confirm that the initial audit had an impact. This article shares the results of the new audit and reflects on the lessons learned during the process