Students in our Master of Information program can apply for the Alberta Letts Conference Travel Award (more details here) to help fund travel to professional conferences. Here are some recaps from recent events our students have attended:
Kelsey Morgan (MI student):
- In October, I had the privilege of attending the 2024 Archival Education Research Institute (AERI) Conference to present a lightening talk on my thesis project, Reconstructing Narratives: Investigating Cultural Imperialism in Subject Headings, and participate in a panel, titled From Epistemic Violence to Knowledge Justice, with my supervisor Dr. Jamila Ghaddar. This year’s AERI Conference was particularly exciting because it was the first year that it was held outside of Europe or North America. As my thesis project focuses on representations of Palestine in library catalogues, I was excited to have the opportunity to meet and engage with information professionals working in the Middle East. One of the biggest lessons I ended up walking away with, after this conference, was the challenges that come with trying to open space to talk about Palestine. Our panel committee, which was also Palestine focused, had a total of four members who were unfortunately not able to attend in person, two of whom were not even able to attend online, directly caused by our current political reality. The obstacles that we encountered leading up to the day of our panel was a big learning opportunity for me in terms of the reality of pursuing this kind of work. Thankfully, I was fortunate to be a part of an incredible team with experience and wisdom on how to navigate such constraints. Our panel was ultimately a success, and I am forever grateful to my fellow panelists for allowing me to be a part of it.
Summer Wilson (MI student):
- BRIC (Bibliometrics and Research Impact Community) 2025 was an exceptional conference with presentations and posters on cutting-edge meta-research. The keynote speaker was Vincent Larivière, a prolific researcher from the university of Montreal, who spoke on multilingualism in scholarly publishing and the dominance of English in academic spaces. Many of the presentations touched on the uptake and use of LLMs by academia. One talk that particularly stood out was Jeff Domaine’s research on Linked Literature Analysis and LLMs. I helped professor Mongeon present a poster with research we have been working on identifying differences in the metadata collected by WoS and OpenAlex. Geoff Krause, a PhD student from Dalhousie who also studies bibliometrics, presented a lightning talk on the changing research coverage of the CAIS conference over the last few decades. Researchers came from all over the world. For example, a speaker from Taiwan who discussed the current research trends in Taiwan and a researcher from Slovenia who presented on a python code template for doing bibliometric work. At the reception I was able to talk to researchers both in academia and in industry about their work. The University of Montreal, with its uber-modern labyrinth style architecture was a great setting for the conference, and the food was excellent.
