DIS Staff Blog

Department of Information Studies, UCL, has an opening for a new member of staff, at Lecturer/Senior Lecturer level, to work primarily on the MA Library & Information Studies programme.  As well as supporting the core LIS curriculum, DIS hopes that the appointee will contribute to the Department’s activities by bringing in some new area of teaching or research.  Further details are available at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis/vacancies.

UCL Graduate Students Open Day Wednesday 21 November 2012

UCL Department of Information Studies (DIS) is a leading centre for research and professional education inlibrarianship, information science, archives and records management, publishing and the digital humanities.

Come along to our Faculty and Departmental Graduate Students Open Day: talk to teaching staff, visit the campus and library, hear from researchers and chat with current students. It takes place on Wednesday 21November 2012. From 11am in Wilkins South Cloisters, Gower Street, UCL (please register athttp://www.ucl.ac.uk/ah/grad-open-day/ )

And from 3pm – 7pm in DIS, Foster Court, Ground Floor, UCL (for details see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis ).

Students benefit from studying in the UK’s largest information school, at one of the world’s top 10 universities. We offer MA/MSc/Diploma programmes in Digital Humanities; Library and Information Studies; Archives and Records Management; Publishing; Electronic Communication & Publishing and Information Science.

Our teaching is built upon an international research reputation: the department hosts three research centres and two research groups: Centre for Publishing, Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH), Centre for Archives and Records Research (ICARUS), Applied Logic Group and Knowledge Organization Group. We welcome research students (MRes, MPhil and PhD) in all these areas.

Postgraduate Research Studentship: Department of Information Studies, University College London in association with the Stationers’ Foundation, the Charity of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers

The Department of Information Studies at University College London (UCLDIS) invites applications for a three year fully funded research studentship from suitably qualified candidates with a good upper-second or first class degrees in an appropriate discipline to conduct research into the near-market implications of copyright and intellectual property in the publishing industry in the digital age. The studentship will cover full UK and EU fees and pay a stipend of approximately £14, 000 per annum. Applications will normally be restricted to candidates from the UK and EU countries. The studentship is funded by the Stationers’ Foundation, a charitable body, and is made possible by donations from Pearson plc, the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) and Euromonitor plc. The research will be supervised by Professor Iain Stevenson of the UCLDIS Centre for Publishing with secondary supervision from appropriate colleagues within UCL including from the Institute of Brand and Innovation Law of the Faculty of Laws.

The successful candidate is likely to possess a background in publishing or intellectual property management and will have some experience of working in the creative industries. An academic background in law, communication, information management or business will be advantageous. The studentship is full-time but teaching opportunities may be available in UCLDIS during its tenure. The successful candidate will spend periods of the studentship working in the offices of the donor organisations and will be expected to provide regular seminars and research updates to the donors, as well as academic presentations. Initial registration will be for the degree of MPhil and the candidate will be expected to present a seminar during their second year which will allow the upgrade of registration to PhD.

Interested candidates are invited to apply for the studentship by submitting a full CV and a statement of proposed research (not exceeding 750 words), together with letters of recommendation from two referees by 21 November 2012. A short list of candidates will be invited for interview, the panel of which will include representatives of the Stationers’ Foundation. Once the studentship has been awarded, the successful candidate will be invited to apply formally for admission to the UCL research degree programme and they should ensure they meet all the requirements for admission (available from the UCL website) Further details and informal discussion of the project can be had by contacting Professor Stevenson (i.stevenson@ucl.ac.uk). It is expected that the studentship will commence on 1 January 2013 but if the candidate can commence earlier, it will be possible to do so.

The 4^th Annual Jenkinson lecture will be held at UCL, on the evening of Wednesday September 26^th at 6.00pm. The lecture will take place in the AV Hill Lecture Theatre and will be followed by a reception on the ground floor of the Foster Court Building.

The lecture entitled “The Day Parliament Burned Down and its impact on British recordkeeping” will be given by Caroline Shenton. Caroline is Clerk of the Records and Director of  the Parliamentary Archives in London. Educated at the University of St Andrews, Worcester College Oxford and University College London, she was previously a senior archivist at the National Archives where her interest in the fire of 1834 was first kindled. She has worked in and around collections relating to the old Palace of Westminster for over 20 years, and is a Fellow of both the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Historical Society. She is author of the acclaimed new book, ‘The Day Parliament Burned Down’ (for further details and reviews see http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199646708.do#.UEr4Uol5mc0)

Abstract: In the early evening of 16 October 1834, to the horror of bystanders, a huge ball of fire exploded through the roof of the Houses of Parliament, creating a blaze so enormous that it could be seen by the King and Queen at Windsor, and from stagecoaches on top of the South Downs. In front of hundreds of thousands of witnesses the great conflagration destroyed Parliament’s glorious old buildings and their contents. No one who witnessed the disaster would ever forget it – yet today this national catastrophe is a forgotten disaster. Find out about one of the most seminal events of 19th century London, which not only changed the face of the capital but also had a profound impact on recordkeeping in the UK.

There will be an opportunity to purchase signed copies of Caroline’s acclaimed new book, ‘The Day Parliament Burned Down’ at discounted rate after the lecture.

This should be a fascinating talk and if you can attend please do so and do encourage any new students to do so also.

A map of our external partners

As a department, we engage a lot with a variety of external partners, including guest speakers on a variety of modules in our various programs, and work placement hosts for our students.  Placements are, we hope, mutually beneficial for both the student and the organisation.

Over the last few weeks, one of our students has been doing a placement inside the department, working with a couple of staff members to collate listings of exactly where our students do their placements, and to produce a map of these locations.  For Holly, the student, it was a good example of a real world example of data collation – the various Masters programs have kept information about placement hosts and guest speakers in a number of different ways: in spreadsheets, in email, on paper and so on.  These all had to be integrated and checked, and have a common structure imposed. Like many data collation tasks, it is something that sounds simple, but takes time and effort.

Having assembled the data, the next task was to map them. In order to do so, each host location (or speaker’s organisation) had to have their address checked, and have a latitude and longitude determined, so that we could plot each one. Fortunately, a variety of web resources now make this fairly each to do; again, a task which is easy in theory, but time consuming in practice.  The data were then mapped using the Google Maps API, and the resulting map can be seen as:

• UCL DIS Outreach to industry map

It is pleasing to see visually how busy we are in terms all these contacts, and the early response from our placement hosts has also been very positive.  We’ll go on updating the map with future host locations, and also look towards ways of conveying additional information about what we do – for example, colour coding according to different Masters programs.

On Wednesday this week we hosted what we hope will be an annual reception for our guest speakers and placement hosts; it was good to meet them, and many of the people we spoke to were generous in their praise of the work that our students have done.

We are also currently soliciting information about the whereabouts of our alumni – some of whom are now work placement hosts! – and look forward to mapping this information as well.

Facet's book table, shortly before the guests arrived

Thanks to the colleagues, friends and former and current students who attended last night’s drinks party to celebrate the publication by Facet Publishing of two books from lecturers in the department.

Collection Development in the Digital Age edited by Maggie Fieldhouse (UCL) and Audrey Marshall (Brighton) speaks to the many changes that have taken place in collection management in recent years. It suggests ways in which practitioners can take an active role in influencing strategy and includes numerous case studies. Parts cover the concept and practice of collection development, trends in the development of e-resources, trends in library supply, and making and keeping your collections active. Individual chapters have been written by David Ball, David Brown, Josh Brown, Terry Bucknell, Sheila Corrall, Bradley Daigle, Diana Edmonds, Jil Fairclough, Jane Harvell, David House, Tracy Mitrano & Karrie Peterson, Martin Palmer, Wendy Shaw, Ruth Stubbings, and the editors themselves. As the author names suggest, the book covers all library sectors and is both useful for practitioners and essential for LIS students learning how to manage libraries and information centres.

Practical Cataloguing: AACR, RDA and MARC 21 by Anne Welsh (UCL) and Sue Batley (London Metropolitan) introduces the general principles that underpin library cataloguing, the history of the international standards and a closer look at the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 2nd edition (AACR2) and the dominant library encoding format MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloguing). The book advocates that understanding general principles will allow cataloguers to move from AACR2 to new international standard Resource Description and Access (RDA) without having to relearn everything from scratch. Two chapters deal in depth with RDA (as far as we can deal in depth with a standard that is just being introduced), and another discusses Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), one of RDA’s main theoretical underpinnings. Two brief chapters discuss the current state of play in the introduction of RDA and the predicted change from MARC to a new encoding format. These, and the preface, have been written to be useful to cataloguers and managers alike. There are ten full examples at the end of the book, and countless records throughout the book. From September, Practical Cataloguing will be the core textbook for the cataloguing component of MA LIS core module INSTG004 Cataloguing and Classification.

Thanks to Facet for their support; the Department for hosting (in the Wilkins Terrace) and Dr Melissa Terras, Reader in Electronic Communication and Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, for her official welcome to UCL. Mostly thanks to everyone who came along and celebrated with us.

Every year students on the Department’s archives and records management programmes spend two weeks on work placement undertaking cataloguing projects in a variety of archival institutions. These institutions tend to be based within London and the South East, but this year two students, Sharon Messenger and Ego Ahaiwe, have taken the bold step of travelling much further afield. Sharon, for example, has just spent two weeks in the Orkney Library & Archive in Kirkwall and you can read more about her experience there on the Orkney Archive blog. Then again, Ego has travelled across the Atlantic to the Immigration History Research Center based in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, where she became headline news.

We therefore welcome back Ego, Sharon, and all our students from their travels and send a huge thank you to all those institutions who have kindly hosted a placement this year!

On Wednesday 28 March the UCL Centre for Publishing was delighted to welcome Anthony Forbes Watson the  Managing Director of Pan Macmillan to Foster Court.

The occasion was to hand the annual Macmillan prize to our former students Jennifer Kerslake (2010-11) and Liz Donell (2009-10). Each received a  a cheque for £750 in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the MA in Publishing programme. Both are forging careers in the publishing industry with Jennifer working in trade publishing at Orion Book while Liz is working in editorial at Elsevier in Oxford.

Jennifer and Liz receive their cheques from Pan Macmillan MD Anthony Forbes Watson

UCL Faculties of Arts and Humanities and Social and Historical Sciences are advertising three new Research Associate posts in interdisciplinary research in Arts and Humanities. You can read more about them on the DH blog. UCLDH is just one of the research groups in DIS who are interested in hearing from suitable applicants: you can find out more about them on our Research page. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us about interdiscplinary research ideas.