Each year, SIM awards up to two $500 prizes to current MLIS students to fund conference travel. The Alberta Letts Conference Travel award is named for past Provincial Librarian, and Past President of CLA (1957/1958), Alberta Letts. Ms. Letts was a strong supporter of the foundation of the School and was very engaged during its early years. After her untimely death in 1973, Dalhousie University established this award to recognize Ms Letts’ contribution.
Our most recent recipient is Scarlett Kelly. Read on to learn more about her conference experience:
Scarlett Kelly
I attended the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-51) at Big Island from January 3rd to 6th. HICSS is an international A-level conference and one of the four most long-lived, prominent, and creditable conferences in the field of information sciences in the world, so I feel very fortunate to be accepted. The conference included a full-day workshop and three days of presentations. The topics covered every possible aspect of information and system sciences, such as social media, text mining, e-government, health informatics, and collaboration in a cloud environment. I tried to attend at least one presentation in each topic. The workshops that I attended were “IT as the Driver of Innovation for Digital Transformation Across the Enterprise” and “Smart Data – A Pathway to the Future”. I learned a lot from both the workshops and the paper presentations.
My paper was about a communication strategy between data miners and domain users. In the time of big data, interesting findings in the eyes of data miners are sometimes not interesting in the eyes of domain users due to human subjectivity and miscommunication between data miners and domain users. Based on the successful reference services model in the library setting, my paper proposed to create a Data Liaison Specialist role that can potentially bridge the two fields of knowledge that do not speak the same language and increase the acceptance rate of interesting findings. My paper can be found in the conference proceeding at http://hdl.handle.net/10125/49913
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