Hi everybody! We are hoping to keep you up to date about events in the publishing world and big events happening in our programme. It’s not definitive but it is more than enough to fill your calendar…

Check the Publishing Blog every Sunday around 6pm and if you fancy a monthly format, look for the October Publishing Events Calendar in the sidebar. Happy Sunday!

This weeks events are listed here.

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Emily McCracken (@emilycracken) is a student on the MA Publishing programme.

Image: UCL Centre for Publishing.

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

Good Morning from the new blog team at UCL’s Centre for Publishing!

We’re really excited to be running the blog platform for our programme, and we hope you enjoy reading as much as we enjoy creating! So you know who we are if you ever have any questions, or want us to post anything for you, we’ve created little profiles for all 6 of us on the blog.

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Caroline Murphy (@carolinealice93) is a MA Publishing student, and one of the new team of editors for the UCL Centre for Publishing Blog.

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

In Induction Week, Professor Iain Stevenson set up a fiendish treasure hunt for the incoming cohort: this took them on a walk via some key publishing-related sights in London, and ended up, as all good publishing events should, at the pub. All students then submitted a blog about the experience, and these were shortlisted by tutors, who then submitted these to Naomi Barton, one of last year’s group who is an accomplished blogger herself. Naomi offered a limited edition of The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell for the winner, who today has been announced as Lucy Broughton!

Lucy’s blog is reproduced on the Centre for Publishing blog – well done, Lucy!

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Note: the appearance of the byline on this post is auto-generated, indicating that it was posted by Anne Welsh. Samantha Rayner, Director of the MA Publishing, is the sole author of this piece.

I’ve never actually been to a book club before. My reading career started, and continues to progress in armchairs, duvets, and trains. However, the UCL Centre for Publishing has been throwing new experiences at me left, right and centre since I began, and one happened to be my first book club … at the Bloomsbury Institute, no less!

Four other students and I were offered the opportunity to be hosted by Bloomsbury in their offices in Bedford Square for an evening of discussion with Esther Freud. Freud is the great granddaughter of the famous psychoanalyst, and her eighth novel, ‘Mr Mac and Me’, comes 22 years after her debut ‘Hideous Kinky’ in 1992. The evening promised to be a eye opening event and after a bite to eat, we set off for Bedford Square.

The great thing about the interior of the Bloomsbury building is that it isn’t the usual setting for an office. It’s a huge town house where the corridors twist and turn, and are separated by rooms with high ceilings and wide doors. We were directed from the foyer into a conservatory, beautifully decorated with white fairy lights. We were then offered complimentary wine, which has set the standard in my mind for all other publishing events! The buzz started to grow as more people shuffled in. After purchasing Freud’s novel, having our glasses topped up, and having a few snaps of our best ‘in-the-moment’ poses taken by the Bloomsbury photographer, we all took our seats.

Esther Freud is a trained actor: her diction is incredible, and much like her writing, she speaks with great fluidity, clarity and ease. In conversation with Bloomsbury’s Editor-in-Chief, Alexandra Pringle, she recounted the events that brought her to creating ‘Mr Mac and Me’, including her relocation to Suffolk, and the history she discovered in doing so.

The novel itself follows the tale of the Glaswegian artist and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, famous for his art deco designs such as the Glasgow School of Art and Hill House in Helensburgh. Having seen some of his works myself, I was intrigued to learn more. The novel follows his years in Suffolk, when his work was underappreciated and unaccredited, and his drinking habits were escalating.

Freud’s composition of this novel demonstrates that serendipity in writing exists: you often find something brilliant when you’re not looking for it. She set out to write a chilling ghost story, but continued in a direction she didn’t expect, and ended up with the detailed historical account that sits on my desk in hardback as I write this blog post.

After hearing a short excerpt from the novel, the evening drew to a close, and we queued for our signings, whilst gawping at the Platinum Book Awards earned by nearly all of the Harry Potter books. The evening was thoroughly enjoyable, with great advice from a great author, complimentary wine, and floor to ceiling bookshelves.

Thanks, Bloomsbury Institute and UCL Publishing!

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Caroline Murphy  (@carolinealice93) is studying for her MA in Publishing.

Image: Caroline Murphy on Twitter.

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

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.

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!

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 MA in Publishing student Sarah Blankfield (2010-11) has won first prize for her dissertation in the annual Association for Publishing Education dissertation competition. All UK universities offering publishing education degree programmes are invited to submit their best dissertation from under and post-graduate courses.

Sarah’s dissertation ”Towards a Digital Spine: What methods are UK and US publishers, and their representative bodies, using to tackle the growing challenge of e-book piracy’ addressed perhaps one of the greatest concerns of rightsholders today. The dissertation considered The Publishers Association Copyright Infringement Portal and Digital Rights Management in its various forms.

Sarah’s dissertation  has now been published in the journal Publishing Research Quarterly DOI 10.1007/s12109-012-9265-4.

Last week, the UCL Centre for Publishing welcomed Tom Weldon, chief executive of Penguin.

Speaking to an invited audience of UCL Publishing and English post grad students, we were treated to a fascinating discussion of the changing publishing landscape from the view of perhaps the most iconic publishing company in the world.

Tom talked about how digital technologies were allowing publishers to think beyond the format of a book and concentrate on content and user experiences instead. He discussed some apps Penguin had developed for their children’s lists, perhaps the most dynamic area of digital publishing at the moment.

Penguin also announced a new graduate training scheme for 2012.

Anne Thoring (MA Publishing 2009-10) has published her dissertation research. ‘Corporate Tweeting: Analysing the use of Twitter as a marketing tool by UK trade publishers’ appears in the latest issue of the Springer journal Publishing Research Quarterly.

The research found that just 42% of the sample of publishers had a Twitter account. Medium sized and larger publishers were most likely to Tweet, with the medium sized companies most active. The average publishers Tweeted during the working week and posts were mainly normal Tweets and not retweets or replies.

The majority of Tweets were about competitions, games or votes, followed by information about books and then authors. Most content was exclusive to Twitter and did not appear in the News section of the publisher’s website or other social media. The majority of Tweets contained hyperlinks.

The article is available to read through the UCL library e-journal service