On Monday 9^th May a group of actors, teachers and researchers joined us for the first Playing the Margins workshop. We gathered in the tranquil setting of the Petrie Museum to discuss annotation practices, past and present. The participants had brought along examples of texts or scripts they had annotated, and described their habits and preferences (or, in some cases, their habit of not writing in books) to the group. This discussion gave us valuable insights into the codes of behaviour governing their annotation practices. These codes varied considerably from one participant to another but were internally consistent and strongly related to the context and purpose of annotation and the ownership of the books or scripts. (more…)

Two MA LIS students have articles in the latest issue of Catalogue & Index, the main practitioner journal for cataloguing in the UK:

Genny Grim. ‘A new professional’. Catalogue & Index 162: 15-16.

Sarah Maule. ‘Cataloguing: a view from a new professional’. Catalogue & Index 162: 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

There’s another chance to take part in a Playing the Margins workshop towards the end of the month. From the project’s tumblog:

Are you involved in the performing arts?

Do you ever find yourself doodling in the margins of scripts?

Do you mark up your prompt books?

If so, please come to an informal, experimental workshop exploring how actors, directors, theatre critics and other readers annotate texts in the past and present.

Explore how earlier readers engaged with play-texts, prompt-books and other texts by taking part in this workshop using texts from UCL Special Collections.

Full details, booking information, and some lovely illustrations of marginalia, available on the tumblog.

Playing the Margins was conceived by MA LIS students Paris O’Donnell and Sian Prosser; is funded by UCL’s Train and Engage Scheme; and makes use of materials from UCL LIbrary Services Special Collections.

Image: Auntie P, copyright commons: some rights reserved

MA LIS student Inga Jones will give a public seminar at the University of Southampton History Department on 17 May. Entitled ‘Holy Wars?: Religion, Ethnicity and Massacre during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1641-53,’ in her paper Inga will share some of her PhD research undertaken at Selwyn College Cambridge.

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.

Image: University of Sussex profile page

This month’s Library + Information Update includes an article by Katie Birkwood (MA LIS 2008) about the Hoyle Project at St John’s College, Cambridge :

Katie Birkwood. ‘Big Bang.’ Library + Information Update, April 2011: 40-42.

CILIP members can access the journal online. It is available in hardcopy in UCL Science Library.

Katie blogs about her activities on Girl in the Moon.

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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.

Registration is now open for a free workshop run by MA LIS students Paris O’Donnell and Sian Prosser as part of their public engagement project, Playing the Margins.

If you are a drama student or an actor, you can sign up to take part. Full details on the Playing the Margins tumblog.

Image: Playing the Margins

18 March 2011 was the third annual Day of Digital Humanities, on which self-declared Digital Humanists share their diaries by blogging. From the project website:

A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a community publication project that will bring together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, March 18th. The goal of the project is to create a web site that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, “Just what do computing humanists really do?” Participants will document their day through photographs and commentary in a blog-like journal. The collection of these journals with links, tags, and comments will make up the final work which will be published online. (Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities 2011)

Several UCL DIS students took part (programme of study in brackets):

• Alejandro Giacometti (Affiliated to UCLDH: PhD candidate in UCL Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering)
• Claire Ross (MPhil / PhD)
• Ernesto Priego (PhD)
• Lorna Richardson (MPhil / PhD)
• Paris O’Donnell (MA LIS)
• Paul Gooding (MPhil / PhD)
• Sian Prosser (MA LIS)
• Susan Greenberg (PhD)

Slideshow of images and comments by students who attended last week’s visit to the Bibliography Room.

This was an optional field trip for the MA LIS, MA ARM and MA RAMI students who took Historical Bibliography (INSTG012) this year. From September 2011, it will be an option for the new MA Digital Humanities.

There is a full, reflective post on the UCLDH blog.

A typical week on the MA in Library & Information Studies is described by current student Helen Doyle in this month’s CILIP Update including classes in Personal Computing and Information Technology, Cataloguing & Classification, Collection Management & Preservation and optional module Historical Bibliography.

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