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.

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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.

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.

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.

Congratulations to Kaydene Duffus, who passed her Upgrade from MPhil to PhD status today.

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!

The Day of Archaeology 2012 is a crowd-sourced archaeological blogging project, designed to show the world what archaeologists really do.  This year the project will be running on June 29th, and full details about the project can be found through the links on the poster below:

Day of Archaeology Publicity Poster

Four students have recently passed their upgrades from MPhil to PhD.

Congratulations to Paul Gooding, Elaine Penn, Alicia Ramirez Gonzales and Claire Ross

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.

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.

Anyone who follows UCL news cannot have failed to read about the Grant Museum‘s spectacular win at this year’s Museums and Heritage Awards. At the heart of the QRator team who devised the iPad-based initiative is PhD student Claire Ross, pictured here with supervisor and QRator team member Dr Melissa Terras.

Claire has blogged about the night on the UCLDH Blog and her own blog, the appropriately-named Digital Nerdosaurus. You can also read perspectives from Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith (UCL CASA and QRator Co-Principal Investigator); Dr Melissa Terras; and, of course, the Grant Museum itself. If it’s pictures you are after, UCL News has posted a set on its flickr account.