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Sarah Hume Awarded SLA Early Career Conference Award

By Anne Welsh, on 2 April 2015

SarahHumeCongratulations to Sarah Hume on being awarded an Early Career Conference Award by the Special Libraries Association Europe.

Sarah is completing her MA LIS part-time while working as a Library Assistant at the Geological Society of London and the London Library, and is active in student life, at UCL, where she is helping to organise our upcoming employers fora, nationally, as Chair of Cilip’s Student Committee, and internationally, as a contributor to Hack Library School.

ECCA are highly sought-after, providing accommodation, travel and registration for the SLA annual conference. UCL’s last ECCA holder was Marie Cannon, who now works for a leading international law firm and is a well-respected conference speaker. Sarah’s award is the first to be co-sponsored by the Competitive Intelligence Division – an area of library practice that is of particular interest to Sarah – and she is looking forward to finding out more about it, and meeting practitioners from Europe and beyond.

Image: @sarahfhume

The Stationers’ Company Postgraduate Bursary by Charlotte Middleton

By Anne Welsh, on 12 November 2014

Stationers

Editorial note (Anne Welsh): UCL DIS is fortunate to benefit from the Stationers’ Company Postgraduate Bursary Scheme, with a member of the MA LIS cohort under 25 years old being selected each year for the generous financial and mentorship package. On 27 October, the bursary holder for 2013-14, Charlotte Middleton was made free of the Company, alongside Aislinn O’Connell, who holds an award from the Stationers for her PhD in Publishing. This year’s recipient, Tavian Hunter, also attended the ceremony to receive her bursary certificate and meet her mentor.

In this blog post, Charlotte describes the award and what joining the Stationers’ Company has meant to her as a new information professional:

Receiving one of the Stationers’ Bursaries has been fantastic. In addition to the bursary itself – which contributes considerably to the cost of the Masters’ fees – bursary recipients also receive guidance and support from a mentor, provided by the Stationers, in their studies, their work and in their interactions with the Company. My mentor, Sarah, was kind and friendly; she showed me around her work, encouraged me to attend Stationers’ events and introduced me to other members of the Company.

Recipients also receive the first three years of your membership of the Stationers’ Company for free which is, in my opinion, what sets this scholarship apart. Membership of one of the London Guilds is a rare honour, as well as being excellent fun.

Since receiving the bursary I have attended several new members’ evenings which are a great opportunity to meet other young and new Stationers, and there are always excellent wines and canapés. I have visited the Stationers’ Library and Archive on several occasions, attended the Printers’ Carols Service at Christmas and enjoyed several networking events.

I have also attended several excellent talks: the first about the digitisation of the Stationers’ Registers; the Annual Lecture about the printing of currencies and passports; and another about the history of private printing presses in Britain.

I also attended the Lord Mayor’s Show Luncheon after last year’s parade, and this year I have had the privilege of helping to organise the Stationers’ float and walk in the parade.

Being a member of the Stationers’ Company is a tremendous honour: to be granted the opportunity to be part of a Guild with such a prestigious six hundred year history in the book trade, to meet fascinating people and to drink excellent wine is by far the greatest aspect of this bursary.

I would encourage anyone who is thinking of applying to do so.

—–

Charlotte Middleton (@Middletonwest) was the Stationers’ Company Postgraduate Bursary recipient for UCL in 2013-14. Having completed her MA LIS, she is currently building a portfolio career in Special Collections, and is one of the panellists at the CPD25 event ‘Applying to Study Library and Information Science’ on Tuesday 18 November 2014.

Applicants for the MA LIS who are under 25 are encouraged to apply for the Stationers’ Company Postgraduate Bursary Scheme and will be contacted by the Department at the appropriate stage in the application process.

Note: the appearance of the byline on this post is auto-generated, indicating that it was posted by Anne Welsh. Charlotte Middleton is the sole author of this piece.

Linked Open Bibliographic Data: Creating an Open, Linked and Interactive Educational Resource for Bibliographic Data

By Anne Welsh, on 29 July 2014

Screen-shot-2014-07-25-at-14.18.34-150x150Antonis Bikakis, Anne Welsh, Simon Mahony and Charlie Inskip have been awarded funding from UCL ELE (Elearning Environments) to develop Linked Open Bibliographic Data. This will consist of a dataset of BIBFRAME records made available as an Open Educational Resource.

We are looking for a UCL DIS Masters student (academic year 2014-15) with an interest in library cataloguing and web technologies who will carry out this innovative 1-year project under the guidance of four academics from DIS: Antonis Bikakis, Anne Welsh, Simon Mahony and Charlie Inskip. The student will work for a total of 95 hours and will be involved in all stages of the project: design, development and evaluation. (S)he will gain useful work experience and develop important marketable skills in e-learning, web programming and Linked Data technologies.

If you are successful in being appointed, you will acquire the required skills through the following DIS modules: Cataloguing and Classification 1 & 2, XML, Knowledge Representation and Semantic Web Technologies.

You must have a good first degree and previous experience of working in a library or information service, and must be able to demonstrate: abilities to learn quickly and to work collaboratively as part of a team, reliability, and high-level of organisation. Any previous experience in XML or web programming is desirable.

To register an interest and find out how to apply, please contact Antonis Bikakis and Anne Welsh.

Image: E-Learning Development Grants page, UCL ELE.

Profiles in Law Librarianship

By Anne Welsh, on 2 December 2012

At our recent open day, we were pleased to meet prospective students from a range of sectors including academic, health, business and law.

Perhaps because we teach a traditional MA LIS, with core modules in Cataloguing and Classification, Collection Management, Information Sources, Management and PCIT, or perhaps because so many of our alumni have gone on to prominent positions within RLUK and other academic libraries, one of the frequently asked questions was how many of our students go on to careers in the commercial sector.

We are honestly able to say that an increasing number of our graduates go into commercial roles, both within traditional information services and in new media positions. It’s a happy co-incidence that one such recent graduate has just been featured on the Special Libraries Association Legal Division’s ‘Profiles in Law Librarianship’. 

Marie Cannon was a member of last year’s cohort of students. Arriving with a background in the legal sector, she took advantage of opportunities within the MA to try out different areas before deciding to target law firms in pursuit of her first professional post. She was one of the first in her year to obtain a post, and one of many students to combine finishing her dissertation with starting a new role. She also received a scholarship to attend the SLA conference in Chicago last summer, and is now a board member for SLA Europe, for whom she runs the SLA Europe Blog. Social media was a developing professional passion for Marie during her time at UCL, when, as well as starting her own blog, she authored two entries during her work placement at Senate House – ‘Rare Books Revealed‘ and ‘Rare Books Revealed 2‘.

Information professionals are a friendly group of people, and Marie is no exception to this. I’m sure if you have questions about her route into law librarianship, her time studying at UCL, or, indeed, her love of baking and decorating beautiful cakes, she will be happy to be found on twitter @mariegcannon.

Read Marie’s interview on the SLA Legal Division website.

Image: Marie Grace Cannon’s Blog

DIS Research Student Awarded Cross Disciplinary Training Scholarship

By Alexandra Eveleigh, on 20 April 2012

UCL DIS research student Alexandra Eveleigh has been awarded a one-year graduate research scholarship for cross disciplinary training and will spend a year from October 2012 at the UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC).  The scheme encourages PhD students from any discipline right across UCL to apply to study for an additional year in another UCL department, thus acquiring new research skills and knowledge which can be applied back into their normal area of research.  Up to four students are awarded scholarships each year.

Alexandra’s research focuses on the impact and implications of user collaboration initiatives for archival theory and practice.  She is particularly interested in online user participation or ‘crowdsourcing’ – in what motivates people to take part in projects such as UCL’s Transcribe Bentham or the Old Weather project, and in the interactions that occur on such sites between participants, professionals and the research users of these kinds of collaboratively constructed resources.  UCLIC is a leading UK centre of excellence in Human-Computer Interaction teaching and research, studying the interactions between people and technology.

LIS Research Coalition’s ‘Developing Research Excellence and Methods’ project

By Sara E Wingate Gray, on 3 February 2012

The LIS Research Coalition recently held the second of their DREaM (Developing Research Excellence and Methods) project workshops, here in London at the British Library’s conference centre. Myself and fellow UCL DIS research student Paul Gooding were lucky enough to be awarded travel bursaries last year, which enabled us to attend the first DREaM workshop up in Edinburgh, so this time it was a rather more pleasant later-morning start for us to participate!

The project itself started in January 2011 and runs until August 2012, with a purpose of developing “a formal UK-wide network of Library and Information Science (LIS) researchers” and to “explore the scope of LIS and related research, and the range of methods appropriate to research in the domain” which, as recent DIS student discussions on methods training have similarly found, is a wide and wide-ranging need.

Thus, this second workshop offered another plunge into the plethora of research methodologies for library and information professionals, this time covering Webometrics, Historical Analysis, User Involvement, and Research and Policy. Overall the day was another fantastic mix of speakers and methods presentations, as well as providing another chance for attendees to network with each other. This latter aspect of the project is actually crucial in several senses, in that both LIS practitioners and researchers can often be isolated from the wider world of their colleagues through limitations of time and geography, while artificial barriers of discipline and praxis can sometimes preclude obvious collaborations or resource and research sharing. Therefore, just being given the opportunity to take time out from the daily grind, and to meet other individuals, whose work spans the range of school, academic, public, health, and national library practices and research is, in fact, absolutely key to the fruitful development of inter-library-relations and library research and development overall. Not only this, but kindling such networks enables people to establish individual personal and practical relationships, guided by common research or professional interests: such interactions often provide the seedbed in which great new ideas, research and library projects can most easily germinate.

These elements may sound obvious, but as a matter of fact can often be overlooked, with workshops and conferences that provide jam-packed itineraries removing this crucial time for people to meet and converse. Additionally, such meetings do not necessarily find it easy to escape artificially-induced auras of camaraderie: requiring faux associations due to the fact that individuals happen to be temporarily located together. Thankfully, the DREaM project successfully navigates such concerns, not only providing time for participants to talk, but also encouraging individuals to meet each other on their own terms, enabling conversations which bridge, rather than create, gaps of practice, research and experience. It was, in fact, great to talk and brainstorm with others (that means you @MichaelStead!) who share my personal interests in the field of public libraries research and practice, as well as to receive greetings from my USA-based rad-librarian ALA posse via the human telegram that accidentally happened to be LIS researcher @joeyanne who’d just returned from ALA’s midwinter conference (Waves back from across the pond to USA librarians @pcsweeney and @detailmatters!)

Notwithstanding the awesomeness of LIS banter, biscuits and tea, once again DREaM’s medley of research methodology presentations drove the day, with an intriguing first session led by Professor Beresford from Brunel University, who introduced participants to User Involvement in Research. Professor Beresford’s session provided a useful overview of this type of research, which has “change-making as its purpose” and retains an emphasis on experiential knowledge: all arguably important facets directly correlated to specific fields within LIS. In fact, such correlation meant that more specific information on implementing such a methodology was in need, rather just the macro-view of the topic that was provided here by Professor Beresford, although useful web URLS and pointers were provided to further in-depth material during the presentation (and you can find the presentation by clicking the links above in this post). Following on from this, both Dr Haigh’s “Techniques from History” and Professor Thelwall’s “Introduction to Webometrics” were superb talks which included methodology overviews and detailed implementation tips and advice, in particular information on the appropriate software used in webometric analysis was a welcome pointer. Both these presentations were precise, informative, detailed and wide-ranging, and provided the perfect mix of information for researchers to gauge each methodology’s usefulness for disparate research needs, thus enabling tentative steps towards implementation.

The final presentation from Professor Moore focused on Research and Policy, and it was particularly interesting to hear not only how to be aware of (and hopefully clear) the hurdles of influence and agenda which can stand in the way of research implementation and impact, but also the detrimental impact of being “too far ahead” of the research and vision/strategy curve. There were, of course, no clear methods of extracting oneself or one’s research from such a visionary approach, except perhaps for a level of self-reflexivity – which enables a recognition of ‘what is possible now’ versus what is ‘just’ possible altogether, and as such was a point well considered and well made.

All in all the day was a fruitful, and helpful, day of conversing, reflecting and interacting, with LIS research at the heart of it all, so thanks must be showered upon Professor Hall as organiser-in-chief, and who introduced the day itself, alongside cheers for Professor Oppenheim, Christine Irving and others who all contributed to the day’s smooth continuation.

The final workshop in this series takes place this April, back in Edinburgh, followed by a concluding conference in July back here in London,  to which it would be great to see some more UCL DIS faces, and in the meantime, you can keep track of all that is happening via the project’s website, or by stopping in on the member forum where presentation info, pictures and videos are all available too.

 

 

Canadian Scholarship

By Anne Welsh, on 4 July 2011

Amy De’Ath (MA Publishing 2009) is about to leave her role as Junior Digital Editor at Andersen Press to study for a PhD at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where she has won a 4-year scholarship. She will be researching contemporary feminist poetry and philosophy. Amy’s first collection of poetry, Erec & Enide was published by Salt Publishing last year (cover image left).

 

If you are a DIS or SLAIS alumnus with professional news to share, do get in touch.

 

Image: Amy DeAth. Erec & Enide (Salt, 2010).

 

 

SLA Conference 2011

By Anne Welsh, on 12 June 2011

This weekend sees the start of the Special Libraries Association Conference in Philadelphia. This year two of the four Early Career Conference Awards have been presented to UCL Alumni, Chris Cooper and Natalia Madjarevic (both MA LIS 2009). You can find out more about the awards and their winners on the SLA Europe blog. Natalia will also be blogging and tweeting about the conference.

If you are a DIS or SLAIS alumnus, with professional news to share, do get in touch.

Images: SLA Europe blog

Playing the Margins

By Anne Welsh, on 11 February 2011

MA LIS students Paris O’Donnell and Sian Prosser have been awarded funding through UCL’s public engagement scheme for postgraduate students, Train and Engage.

Working with UCL Library Services Special Collections, Sian and Paris will invite actors and drama students to explore and experiment in annotation practice, sharing their own play collections and annotating digital images of selected plays from UCL’s holdings.

Find out more about the project from its tumblog.

Image: Auntie P, copyright commons: some rights reserved

Health Libraries Group Bursary

By Anne Welsh, on 27 August 2010

MA LIS student Fiona Cranfield was one of four health information professionals to be awarded a bursary to attend the Health Libraries Group Conference in Manchester on 19-20 July.

 

(This item was originally posted to the UCL DIS News & Events page by D.J. Clarke)

Image: 2010 CILIP Health Libraries Group Conference