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Library School Day in the Life

By Anne Welsh, on 1 March 2013

Information lecture notesNext week students from various library schools will be taking part in Library Student Day in the Life, an initiative from the Hack Library School team based on Bobbi Newman’s Library Day in the Life project, which came to an end in 2012.

Several students from UCL’s MA LIS programme are planning to blog their experiences here, with links through to their own personal blogs (when they have one). So if you are wondering what the course is actually like, next week should give you a brief flavour.

In the meantime, you might be interested in last year’s cohort’s entries for Library Day in the Life or, indeed, in current student Laura Newman’s blog post on her first term full-time at UCL.

Other, earlier sources of information on studying here include Helen Doyle’s ‘My Week’ column in Library & Information Update, February 2011 (close-up of cutting here) and Sarah Maule’s blogging for libday6 (week commencing 24 January 2011) and  libday7 (July 2011).

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Image: Information Sources lecture notes – historical examples of bibliographic control by James Curtis, #libday8 – Friday, 3 February 2012

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

Graduate Open Day

By Anne Welsh, on 29 October 2012

UCL Graduate Students Open Day Wednesday 21 November 2012

 

UCL Department of Information Studies (DIS) is a leading centre for research and professional education inlibrarianshipinformation sciencearchives and records managementpublishing 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 2012From 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 PublishingCentre 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.

 

 

Zine Workshop

By Anne Welsh, on 17 October 2012

Yesterday part-time MA LIS student Siobhan Britton gave an introduction to zine-making at a workshop in UCL’s temporary exhibition Strindberg’s Red Room – the location of PhD student Sara Wingate Gray’s talk on the poetics of the library at the beginning of the month, and of The Itinerant Poetry Librarian’s appearance on National Poetry Day.

Red Room events continue all week before the exhibition closes on 21 October.

Learning Classification

By Anne Welsh, on 17 October 2012

Part-time MA LIS student Amanda Riddick has an article in the issue of Catalogue & Index published online today. Members of Cilip Cataloguing and Indexing Group can click through this link and sign in to gain full access, and a copy will be available via UCL Libraries as soon as subsciber issues are made available.

Seeking SLAIS and DIS Alumni

By Holly B Kosmin, on 12 June 2012

UCL graduation

image by mansikka

UCL DIS (Department of Information Studies) is gathering information about its alumni, including former students of SLAIS (School of Library, Archives, and Information Studies – we changed our name in January 2009).

If you’re one of our alumni then we’d like to know what you’re up to now. Please can you tell us if you’re working, volunteering, studying or doing something else? What organisation are you at? What do you do? Where in the world are you?

You can comment on this post if you like, with your name, email address and details, or if you’d prefer to send us an email please do at:  l.keshav@ucl.ac.uk.

Don’t worry, we’re not going to share this information with anyone without your permission, and if we use it to produce data on UCL DIS/SLAIS alumni it will not be linked to you as an individual. We may contact you again to ask if we can use you as a case study for our website but we will not do so unless you have expressly agreed to this.

Please help us spread the word and reach as many alumni as possible by passing this on to other alumni you’re in touch with, and sharing the link on Facebook and Twitter.

Many thanks!

Contribute to the Blog

By Anne Welsh, on 21 May 2012

 

If you are a current student or one of our alumni (dating back to our time as the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies) and have professional news to share, we’d love to hear from you. Find out how to contribute on our “About” page.

 

 

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Image: elod beregszaszi, copyright commons, some rights reserved.

UCL DIS at CIG 2012

By Anne Welsh, on 21 May 2012

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.

 

#libday8- Sunday

By Minerva K De La Garza Gil, on 5 February 2012

As usual, I woke up rather early. I enjoy the early hours of the day … how quiet they are, especially when it has been snowing, it is in these hours when I get a lot of work done. Being a part time student, and working full time hours during the rest of the week, every single pocket of ‘available’ time is of precious value.

This morning was spent in the company of D.F. McKenzie and Joao & Bebel Gilberto, whilst giving the finishing touches to an assignment due next week. I am now at the point of wrapping up my taught lectures (I am currently in my second year) for the MA LIS and have just planned the skeleton for the two remaining written assignments. Somehow I feel partially ‘free’ to continue my work on the dissertation. I am already looking forward to many hours of research and typing in this rather small space (my secretaire desk), but surrounded by music, and films; how big it feels then!

It is here, in this small cabinet, where I look for and process information, where I organize notes, schedules and action plans. Speaking of which: I have known for some time now, that I work in 1-hour-rhythms … as I am now planning my MA research, I am taking this bit of information into account. I even informally trialled it this past week by setting an alarm in my computer as I was starting a task (I set the alarms slightly over an hour each time, when starting a job) this past week was continuous cataloguing and copy editing (at work), and reading one single topic (at home and reading rooms) I am absolutely convinced this will help both my spirit and my productivity.  Even better! At work it means, that I can consciously intertwine some project planning –or just plain pause from computer work- whilst going through my normal workflows.

Later on the day I organized a forthcoming trip to Cambridge to attend the conference “Incunabula on the move” organized by the Cambridge University Library Incunabula Cataloguing Project and the EIRI Project of Keio University, Japan. I am extremely excited about this event and cannot wait to hear Paul Needham ‘live’ for the first time! I was also surprised (and daunted, of course) to discover I am writing about a topic that he has been thinking about as well. This came as a boost of energy after having to cancel going to another -very interesting- conference in Munich a week and a half from now: “Eine Experimentiertphase im frühen Buchdruck: Blockbücher des 15. Jahrhunderts”

And now I will sit down, pour a glass of ‘freshly bought’ Kölsch, and enjoy the rest of the Sunday in the company of my husband, either continuing reading Homero Aridjis’ “La zona del silencio” … or maybe watching “The fearless vampire killers”.

We haven’t decided yet. (I might have to persuade him with regard to the latter…)

#libday8 – Saturday

By Francine C Wood, on 5 February 2012

This blog entry is written by Francine, as part of a series of posts by DIS students for the Library Day in the Life Project.

Having completed the modules for the Postgraduate Diploma as a full-time student last year, I am currently working on my dissertation to complete the full MA.  As a (nearly) librarian with a History and English undergraduate degree, I am fascinated by the increasingly digital research methodologies being adopted in the Arts and Humanities and Heritage sectors.  I’m particularly curious about the ways in which the Library and Information profession is (or needs to be) responding to digital developments, and the changes in research and information representation. My dissertation aims to highlight the needs and concerns of researchers engaging with Digital Humanities, and consider the implications for the academic library supporting humanities research.  This is, of course, a massive topic for an MA dissertation and I have much work to do.

I structure my study time around work and personal commitments; this week I took leave on Monday to spend the day on my dissertation, and have been trying to blog and tweet for libday8 as much as I can on my personal blog:

This Saturday starts fairly typically for me: I started working as a Senior Information Assistant for the University of Westminster in February 2011 while I was studying full time.  Balancing work and study is quite common for LIS students, and I found this position suited me very well.  I supervise the circulation and enquiries counter at the library, working with two excellent and committed Information Assistants.  As my situation has now changed, I have decided to leave the post in order to dedicate more time to my studies; sadly today is  my last day at Regent Library.

Knowing it would be difficult to blog much, I tweeted much of my day for #libday8 to share some highlights with you here. You can imagine me munching chocolates between tweets:

  • @_cine 4th Feb 2012 We are open! First tasks normally to check email from weekday team, allocate tasks, organise lunches and print requests lists… #libday8
  • @_cine 4th Feb 2012 However- IT services maintenance so systems at risk- spent morning preparing for off-line circulation… #libday8
  • @_cine 4th Feb 2012  All still seems to be working…as far as we can tell. To go off-line or stay live as long as possible; that is the question. #libday8
  • @_cine 4th Feb 2012  Lunch time! If I’m not shopping I take the opportunity to use the library resources. Have 2return bks I borrowed4 diss research… #libday8 https://twitter.com/#!/_cine/status/165774363466018816
  • @_cine 4th Feb 2012 Sometimes I read PDFs of articles on my kindle, today have set up laptop in back office2 make final notes from bks b4 rtning them #libday8
  • @_cine 4th Feb 2012  Am on standby while colleagues serve at the desk in case outage starts. Am maintaining full service levels as long as possible… #libday8
  • @_cine 4th Feb 2012  Readers can request items from the shelves so we share the request list +grapple with Dewey shelf marks to find items 2put on hold #libday8
  • @_cine 4th Feb 2012 And met new line manager for the first time… #libday8 (The timing was unfortunate, but we wanted to carry out a probation meeting for one of the Information Assistants before I left.)

 

My day finished with a quick glass of wine to say farewell to colleagues who I have enjoyed working with immensely, and a joyful but freezing trudge home as the first flakes of last night’s snow fell in London. Thank you to everyone who has been patient with me blogging and tweeting since last weekend.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of posts and have had a happy and successful week!