Congratulations to Sarah Hume on being awarded an Early Career Conference Award by the Special Libraries Association Europe.

Sarah is completing her MA LIS part-time while working as a Library Assistant at the Geological Society of London and the London Library, and is active in student life, at UCL, where she is helping to organise our upcoming employers fora, nationally, as Chair of Cilip’s Student Committee, and internationally, as a contributor to Hack Library School.

ECCA are highly sought-after, providing accommodation, travel and registration for the SLA annual conference. UCL’s last ECCA holder was Marie Cannon, who now works for a leading international law firm and is a well-respected conference speaker. Sarah’s award is the first to be co-sponsored by the Competitive Intelligence Division – an area of library practice that is of particular interest to Sarah – and she is looking forward to finding out more about it, and meeting practitioners from Europe and beyond.

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Image: @sarahfhume

Image by Luis Alejandro Bernal Romero
CC BY-SA 2.0

The whirl of studies and jobs stopped me from cross-posting my last blog post for Hack Library School on juggling your responsibilities and expectations, so it’s a two for one today with my latest post on dissertations – Slaying the dissertation dragon part 1.  Inspired by the departmental dissertation boot camp this week, I was surprised to learn that the majority of library schools in America don’t require students to undertake a dissertation, so many of them won’t do an extended research project until they reach PhD level.

This is the first in a series of posts taking advantage of our excellent research skills teaching on the MA LIS here, in which I hope to make research seem a bit less daunting.

My name is Sarah, I’m a part time student on the LIS course and this year I’m one of Hack Library School’s contributing writers.  I’m the first Brit to write for the blog so I’ll be exploring the differences between UK and US library culture and I’ll try to give the US audience a taste of how we do things here! I’ll be linking my posts here when they’re out in the world, roughly once a month.

My first post, Networking for Introverts, went up yesterday. I’m particularly interested in hearing other peoples’ experiences so please do leave a comment if you’ve got any tips!

Image: Used under Creative Commons Licence, (c) ashraful kadir, untitled