Two students have had papers accepted at the main UK conference for cataloguing and indexing, CIG 2012: the Value of Cataloguing, which takes place in Sheffield, 10-11 September.

William Earp will give a lightning talk entitled ‘Connecting the dots: the birth of RDA, the death of MARC and the library semantic web’, based on his current MA LIS dissertation research.

Kate Whaite (MPhil / PhD) will speak on ‘Finding value in History: gaining knowledge by examining historical practices’, which draws on her experience in the impact of historical methods within cataloguing practice gained in her MA LIS and PhD studies. Kate is also second author on a full paper at the conference, in which she and Anne Welsh (Lecturer in LIS) elucidate ‘Our hybrid history and its action points for today’. Following the conference’s keynote address, this will open the first session in the conference theme ‘Working with New Standards’.

From a glance at the draft programme (pdf) it seems that other lightning round papers are practitioner-authored, so it is good to see UCL DIS flying the flag for the academic study of cataloguing.

Thanks to Sue Hill Recruitment for pointing out that Katie Birkwood (MA LIS 2008) and Naomi Herbert won the prize for best paper at this year’s New Professionals Conference.

The slides for paper, ‘Teaching old books new tricks: how special collections outreach can help you, your career, and your library’ are available from Katie’s blog. Naomi Herbert has also posted them, along with the interesting observation that “Despite a marked emphasis on Twitter throughout the conference, the presentations that got the audience vote were those that put emphasis on engaging people face to face or building a network outside of your usual ‘followers.'”

If you are an alumnus of one of our courses and have news to share, please send an email, including your course and year of graduation to the address on our ‘About’ page.

Photo: Biddy Fisher presenting Katie and Naomi with their award, by Sarah Ison.

Tomorrow MA LIS student Sian Prosser is presenting a paper at the Early Book Society and York Manuscripts Conference Out of Bounds: Mobility, Movement and Use of Manuscripts and Printed Books, 1350-1550. Sian’s paper is entitled ‘Used treasure: manuscript waste in the bindings of Ripon Cathedral Library, including a newly-discovered fragment of Brunetto Latini’s Livres dou tresor‘. She is continuing her research into the Ripon Cathedral binding fragments this summer for her Masters dissertation.

Image: from the Playing the Margins tumblog.

Research students Alexandra Eveleigh and Claire Ross are speaking at the Fifth Bloomsbury Conference on e-Publishing and e-Publications at UCL this week.

Alexandra is speaking today in the session on the role of intermediaries’ role(s) in the research process, while tomorrow Claire will be presenting how Humanities scholars use social media.

Images: Alexandra: @ammeveleigh ; Claire: by Dr Melissa Terras for UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.

Thomas Meehan (MA LIS, 2000) is one of the speakers at CILIP’s Executive
Briefing on new cataloguing standard RDA in Manchester.

Thomas studied at the then School of Library, Archive and Information
Studies (now Department of Information Studies) while working full-time for UCL Library Services. He now heads up the current cataloguing team
there, and gives occasional guest lectures to students on the MA LIS
core module Cataloguing and Classification.

MA LIS student Inga Jones will give a public seminar at the University of Southampton History Department on 17 May. Entitled ‘Holy Wars?: Religion, Ethnicity and Massacre during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1641-53,’ in her paper Inga will share some of her PhD research undertaken at Selwyn College Cambridge.

Inga is studying part-time at DIS while also working as Leverhulme funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dissenting Academies Project, Dr Williams Centre for Dissenting Studies.

Image: University of Sussex profile page

Next month, Ernesto Priego (UCLDH) and Ernesto Priani (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico) will present a paper at the International Conference on Latin American Cybercultural Studies.

From the conference abstracts posted in January:

Re-mapping the Total Library: An End-User Comparative Critique of the Biblioteca Digital Mexicana and the World Digital Library // Ernesto Priani (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico) and Ernesto Priego (University College London, UK)

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the newly-launched Biblioteca Digital Mexicana (Mexican Digital Library or BDMex, http://bdmx.mx/; made public on 23 November 2010) and the World Digital Library (WDL, http://www.wdl.org/) from the perspective of the academic end-user.

The Mexican Digital Library is the result of the collaboration between four major Mexican memory institutions and the World Digital Library, sponsored by UNESCO. The BDMex has digitized and made freely available online documents of historical, artistic and literary value dating from 500BC to 1949, presumably with the technical and financial help of the WDL, but this is not made explicit or even apparent from the comparison
of both sites as they currently exist.

The appearance of the BDMex seems belated for at least a decade in comparison to other similar institutional initiatives (Amis, 2000), and the authors present a series of hypotheses based on the end-user experience of its interface in order to interrogate its technical, cultural, financial and political implications.

This paper presents the results of user-testing carried out by the two authors in different contexts, including teaching and research in Mexico and Britain, and presents a series of suggestions for the projects’ improvement, including questions of markup, text analysis, transcription, classification, ontologies, datamining, data curation, searching capabilities, visualisation and user-interface interaction.

Beyond the strictly technical critique, the authors provide practical examples of how both web sites are not precisely “digital libraries” per se (Smith, Dongqing, McAulay, et al 2007) but can nevertheless be used as interesting case studies for textual, cultural and political analyses. Both the BDMex and the WDL raise interesting issues about institutional digital constructions of national identity, and give illuminating insight into the role of digitization as an act of interpretation (Terras 2006; Tarte 2010).

Ernesto is in the final stages of his PhD in the department, and is one of UCL’s HASTAC Scholars.

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