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.

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.

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

This Autumn’s exhibition at the UCL Art Museum is directly relevant to students opting to take Historical Bibliography.

Entitled Word and Image: Early Modern Treasures at UCL, it highlights objects from the period 1450-1800 in UCL Art Collections and UCL Library Services Special Collections, including Durer’s Apocalypse series, which we will be studying in INSTG012.

There are several pop-up exhibitions planned for lunchtimes, the first of which is on 4 October – Word Minus Image. I’m selecting examples of images that started out as illustrations for texts – from Durer to the present day. Often important as works of art in their own right, they exist at the intersection of Art History and Historical Bibliography, challenging both disciplines to consider the nature of illustration, the primacy (or otherwise) of text and the role of visual art within the book.  A phenomenon of the early modern period, the removal and resale of prints continues to be a thriving trade today, and this pop-up reflects this.