LIS Students in 2021/2022 – by Dr. Alison Hicks

Congratulations to current and recently graduated LIS students who have been contributing to our field in so many ways this year! It is testament to their passion, curiosity, and drive that we can celebrate so many fantastic achievements.

Firstly, congratulations to our prize winners, including Amelia Brookins (MA, 2021), who was awarded the 2021 Sherif Prize for her dissertation work examining costume rental houses through the lens of knowledge organisation. Her research revealed “how costume houses reflect the information organisation processes of supporting users, classification and cataloguing in databases” and was presented at the 2022 Sherif AGM. Congratulations also to current student, Sae Matsuno, who was awarded an ARLIS award for research into the use of volunteers in specialist libraries, a project that builds on her INST0021 Managing Information Organisations coursework. Current students Hozefa Ramgadwala, Huzefa Ghadiali and Naomi Hart were also selected to receive an ARLIS conference bursary.

We are additionally pleased to celebrate publications from current and recently graduated students this year, which speaks to the quality of their work as well as the importance of their ideas. It’s also great to see how this work contributes to the advancement of knowledge in a range of sectors and professional contexts. In the field of cataloguing and metadata, Abi Chapman (MA, 2020), who was awarded the 2021 Sherif Prize, published her dissertation research on video game cataloguing in the Journal of Library Metadata, while Gaby Reyes’ (MA, 2020) work on social tagging appeared as a chapter in the Handbook of Research on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Librarianship. Most recently, Frankie Marsh (MA, 2020) and Eve Lacey (MA, 2017) co-authored a chapter on critical decolonising work at the University of Cambridge in the recent Facet title, Narrative Expansions, while Frankie also found time to publish her dissertation research on the decolonisation of information literacy in the June 2022 issue of the Journal of Information Literacy. Congratulations also to Hozefa Ramgadwala, a current student, who published a book review in the same issue of the Journal of Information Literacy.

LIS students have also been active at professional conferences and events, including Sae Matsuno, a current student, who presented at the ARLIS Taking the Plunge professional event and Huzefa Ghadiali, another current student, who spoke about the historical bibliography of an English translated Qur’an at the first Al-Mahdi Institute Graduate Islamic Studies Conference. Sae Matsuno also co-organised and presented the initial stages of her dissertation research at the recent UCL-sponsored Unlocking narratives: The roots of decolonising work in UK libraries and archives online event. We were additionally privileged enough to hear from two recent graduates at the 2021 UNESCO Media and Information Literacy week event; Maud Cooper (MA, 2021) presented on emerging artist information literacy practices while Antony Njuguna (MA, 2021) spoke about teaching strategies for international student information literacy instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most recently, current students Melanie Brown, Alice Bertolini, Arfa Choudhury and Beth Saward presented the digital libraries they created as part of their coursework for INST0024: Using Technology in Information Organisations during the first inaugural online event, Celebrating Students’ Achievement and Work on ED&I: A View from UCL-DIS Digital Collections.

Lastly, LIS students have been contributing to committees and groups: David Smith (MA, 2021) and Frankie Marsh (MA, 2020) have been appointed as inaugural members of the New Professionals Committee on the Information Literacy Group. It is also great to see Jake Hearn (MA, 2019) featured in the CILIP Information Professional Magazine.

Chapman, A. (2022). Trials of Metadata: Emerging Schemas for Videogame Cataloguing. Journal of Library Metadata, 21(3-4), 63-103.

Lacey, E., Skinner, J., Panozzo Zénere, C., Greenberg, C., & Marsh, F. (2021). Cataloguing, classification, and critical librarianship at Cambridge University. In Crilly, J. & Everitt, R. (eds). Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries. Facet Publishing.

Marsh, F. (2022). Unsettling information literacy: Exploring critical approaches with academic researchers for decolonising the university. Journal of Information Literacy 16(1), 4-29.

Reyes, G. P. (2022). Social Tagging and Secondary School Libraries: Insights from the AO3 Framework. In Handbook of Research on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Librarianship (pp. 201-231). IGI Global.