This is the first in a series of posts by DIS students for the Library Day in the Life Project.

I’m Annie, a full time student on the MA Library and Information Studies course. Full time LIS students have just got back from a two week work placement, and we’ve just handed in all of last term’s coursework, and started a new set of modules. This term for me consists of Information Sources and Retrieval, Management, Publishing Today and Cataloguing and Classification II (which follows on from the introductory module last term).

I don’t live in London so my day started with a train journey in from Hertfordshire. It’s not a bad commute, and I usually while away the time quite happily reading or checking emails etc.  Today I came into UCL an hour before my first lecture in order to get some books out from the Science Library and make a start reading for an essay on legal issues facing libraries.

Our department is on the left, and the Science Library over on the right.

I had two lectures today. This morning’s was with Lyn Robinson from City University on the history of information retrieval tools, from ancient Mesopotamia to the present day. The people on our course come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and those with previous degrees in archaeology, history, and English literature were all at times called upon to add to the discussion. Alas, my music degree didn’t do me much good in this situation!

After lunch I had one of my optional modules this term, Cat & Class II.

At the moment we are doing the classification part of the course with Vanda Broughton, looking at thesaurus construction and controlled vocabulary. I’m finding this quite interesting and after today’s lecture I think I might do one of my assignments for this module on this topic.

And that was the end of my #libday8, time to get on the train again and go home. Other DIS students will be taking turns to blog each day this week, so watch this space!

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.

MA LIS student Jennifer Howard has had an article published in the latest issue of Catalogue & Index, the main practitioner journal for cataloguing in the UK:

Jennifer Howard. ‘Learning to catalogue in 2010-11’. Catalogue & Index 163: 10-11.

Given the topic, it may be of interest to students enrolling for this year’s MA LIS, alongside Genny Grim’s and Sarah Maule’s accounts in Catalogue & Index 162.

SLAIS alumnus Lorraine Mariner also has an article in the current issue:

Lorraine Mariner. ‘RDA and the small, specialist library’. Catalogue & Index 163: 12-13.

The current year’s issues of Catalogue & Index can be accessed online by members of Cilip’s Cataloguing and Indexing Group. (Previous years are open access). UCL subscribes to Catalogue & Index, and registered users can access issues from 1998 to date via the UCL ejournals service.

Image: Cataloguing and Indexing Group

Sarah Anderson (MA LIS 2010) has been appointed as a Metadata Librarian at Warwick University, where she will be working mainly on the institutional repository. She will be relocating from Cambridge, where she worked while studying for her Masters part-time.

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

Image: UCL Graduate School. Graduation Ceremonies 2007.

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

left to right:

Katharine Schopflin, Mei Yau Kan, Jennie-Claire Perry, Elly O’Brien

Each year the MA LIS programme organises a career day for students due to complete their studies. The morning session consists of formal presentations from Michael Martin (CILIP Qualifications) and one of the recruitment agencies. This year Nicola Franklin of Fabric Recruitment shared her experience and offered advice, which she has summarised on the Fabric blog.

In the afternoon we invite practitioners to talk about various aspects of working in the information sector. This year, Elly O’Brien (Bazian) talked about health libraries, Mei Yau Kan (ICAEW) about the commercial sector, Jenni-Claire Perry (University of the Arts) about academic libraries and cataloguing, and Katharine Schopflin (Houses of Parliament) about library management and working across different sectors. (more…)

Five students from the MA LIS programme are volunteering as interns at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. They are Inga Jones, Eunhae Jung, May Warren and Francine Wood.

Full details on the UCLDH blog.

Current MA LIS student Amelia Grounds has accepted a part-time postision as a freelance preservation assistant at UCL Special Collections. She is working to pack and move the collections and is coordinating a team of volunteers also working towards this end.

* If you are a current or former UCL DIS student with news to share about a new professional appointment, please do get in touch.

Image: UCL Special Collections twitterfeed, where you can keep up to date not only with the upcoming move but with other announcements from the Special Collections team.

MA LIS student Inga Jones has been involved in the creation of a new digital resource for historians.

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. 

The public launch of the project’s Dissenting Academies Online will take place in June. Attendance is free, but places are limited, so it is necessary to register in advance. Full details on the Dr Williams Centre website.

Image: University of Sussex profile page