I don’t remember a lot of first year Orientation week, but I do remember DJIM. I was really surprised and impressed that SIM had a real live peer reviewed journal run by students, and I wanted to work on it from the very first day.

Now as we prepare to launch the first issue of our 7th Volume, I’m relieved that the work is over but at the same time, I’m already sad to be leaving. To me, DJIM  represents all the best parts of Dal’s MLIS program: students coming together to volunteer their time, labour, knowledge, and expertise, to produce a project that shares the Faculty of Management with the world and leaves us the volunteers with some of the most valuable skills that could never be taught in the classroom.

Most of you may be aware to some degree about all the changes made to DJIM the past year. We’ve improved our website, and we’re starting to appear in more places, expanding our readership. We’ve also gone more interdisciplinary this year, redoubling our efforts to improve collegiality with the other schools. If you haven’t heard about all you’ve done by now, then you’ll hear about it at CLA, because we’ll be there as well!

A lot of effort went into the publication process this year; Laura Killian and Laura Landon were kind enough to lead peer reviewing and copyediting workshops respectively, and all the student and faculty volunteers really gave their best effort; without all this volunteer labour, we would not have a journal to put out today.

So if you can make it, come down to our launch at 12:30pm in the Executive Suite (Rowe 3087/89). We’re going to have cake, and we will be publishing the issue right at the launch. If you were an author, a peer reviewer or a copyeditor then we’d definitely love to see you there. But, even if you didn’t participate this year, if you support what we’re about and are interested in what we’re doing, then we’d love to see you there.

Thank you to all the volunteers, and of course, please check out the new issue later today at http://djim.management.dal.ca