Public Lectures: SIM Search Candidates (Nov 23rd & 24th)
You’re invited to attend public lectures by two candidates for the position of Lecturer, Assistant Professor or Associate Professor in the School of Information Management. Full details below. No RSVP required. These lectures will not be live-streamed or recorded. Please feel free to share!
- November 23: 10:45 – 11:45, Room 3089, 3rd floor, Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building (6100 University Ave)
- Candidate – Nadia Conroy
- Title – Group Management and Affective Dialogue in Collaborative Work
- Abstract – Research and design of information systems in LIS has endeavoured to investigate human group tasks and the role of creativity. The current study builds on the premise behind Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), which is a design field aimed to facilitate group work through the application of computer technologies, driven by ever-changing contextual and environmental constraints. Using field observation, and a systematic quantification of the content of group conversation, the study formulates a description of the creative work of musicians, and the use of group management and affective dialogue during collaboration, with the goal of informing design. Results of the quantitative findings are presented with implications for future research.
- November 24: 10:45 – 11:45, Room 3089, 3rd floor, Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building (6100 University Ave)
- Candidate – Sepideh Ebrahimi
- Title – Demographic Transparency to Combat Data Analytics Discriminatory Recommendations
- Abstract – Data Analytics (DA) has been blamed for contributing to discriminatory managerial decisions in organizations. To date, most studies have focused on the technical antecedents of such discriminations. As a result, little is known about how to ameliorate the problem by focusing on the human aspects of decision making when using DA in organizational settings. This study represents an effort to address this gap. Drawing on the cognitive elaboration model of ethical decision-making, construal level theory, and the literature on moral intensity, this study investigates how the availability and the design of demographic transparency (a form of decisional guidance) can lower DA users’ likelihood of agreement with discriminatory recommendations of DA tools. In addition, this study examines the role of user’s mindfulness and organizational ethical culture on this process. This paper outlines the experimental methodology employed to empirically validate the proposed model and hypotheses and delineates contributions to theory and practice.
Attn Alumni in Toronto/Ontario: You’re Invited to a Reception on Dec 12th
We hope you can join us! Please share and spread the word! This event is part of the MLIS Career Discovery Tour (by Management Career Services). It is a great opportunity for current MLIS students to connect with professionals, so the support is greatly appreciated.
Expanding the Classroom Beyond the Lecture (Vivian Howard)
SIM Associate Professor, alumna (MLIS ’95) and Associate Dean-Academic for the Faculty of Management, Dr. Vivian Howard, was profiled today in Dal News. She was awarded the Alumni Association Award of Excellence for Teaching earlier this year, which is one of Dal’s top teaching accolades. In fact, SIM professors won three of the eight awards! We are very proud of our faculty here at SIM.
Sample from Dal News (read the full story here):
Fresh out of her master’s degree, Vivian Howard took on a job teaching a required undergraduate English course at a Canadian university on the west coast. She describes it as the kind of class that nobody liked but everybody had to take. Although aimed at helping students in various programs develop their writing skills via Shakespeare classics and modernist literature, the course instead often just left students feeling frustrated. Some had to take it several times just to pass and get their degree. In short, it was a challenging course for a new teacher to take on.
“The experience teaching that course and having to engage students who were there almost against their will was actually good trial by fire,” says Dr. Howard, now an associate professor in Dal’s School of Information Management. “It made me think about ways to make the material relevant to the students.”
Success through a mix of approaches
All these years later, keeping students engaged remains one of Dr. Howard’s chief priorities in the classroom. Although she mostly teaches graduate students now, she says she still relies on strategies she developed teaching undergraduates. She was honoured earlier this year for her work with students, receiving the Alumni Association Award of Excellence for Teaching — Dal’s top teaching accolade.
While traditional lecture-style classes will always have a place in universities, she says using a mix of approaches has vastly improved learning outcomes in her own courses. Simulations, role playing, learning stations, field trips, free writes and debates are just a handful of techniques she uses in her meticulously planned classes to create an engaging environment that stimulates students and encourages them to apply concepts in real-world scenarios.
“I think of it almost as a choreography,” she says of her classes. “I have a certain amount of time where I’ll be talking, but then I’ll very quickly go into something that’s student centred, where they are working with the ideas and applying them.”
My Conference Experience: International Association of Aquatic & Marine Science Librarians & Info Centers
By Diana Castillo (MLIS ’18)
At the end of October, I was lucky enough to attend the annual International Association of Aquatic and Marine Science Libraries and Information Centers (IAMSLIC) conference held in Honolulu. I was there to present some preliminary findings from my thesis project (Meeting Information Needs through Innovation: A Case Study of the Use of the International Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts Database – see abstract below) examining the use of the Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts database.
A key theme of the conference was rethinking how we approach problems and how best to communicate our stories. The idea was to encourage attendees to re-conceptualize how they approach problems, work to articulate goals and how to achieve them, and become more effective advocates for libraries. The conference encouraged attendees to tap into their creative sides, with sessions on puppet making and storytelling, which was a fun way to think outside the box. The keynote speakers also encouraged attendees to rethink certain assumptions they might have, specifically focusing on gender and cultural competency.
The conference finished by hosting a round-table discussion about the future of marine science librarians. While I wasn’t initially on the panel, I was roped in as the only student in attendance. It was interesting to hear what the other panelists viewed as the future of the profession (data management was mentioned a lot), and to listen to what they found to be the most valuable experiences while in school.
Overall, I found the conference to be a fantastic experience. The community was incredibly welcoming and helped me gain a sense of what my future may hold if I decide to go into this field. For other students, if you see a chance to attend a conference in a field you’re interested in, I highly recommend you take it.
Abstract (Diana’s thesis project):
A significant hallmark of today’s society is the large quantity of scientific information about oceans available to researchers and decision-makers in a wide diversity of formats. Although much information is easily accessible, sizeable volumes may be unknown or limited in access despite benefiting stakeholder communities. The ASFA database is an access point for a large amount of grey literature. Due to the rapidly changing information landscape, the future of ASFA in its present form is being reconsidered. This paper will report on research, pursued in collaboration with FAO, to determine how ASFA is currently accessed and used. The initial results from the research will be presented, along with preliminary discussion of how the service might evolve in the changing information landscape.
What is it that Information Managers do?
Re-blogged from CFAME Connection. By Louise Spiteri (SIM Associate Professor) – check out her regular column on the CFAME blog, where she explores IM news and research.
An interesting aspect of working in the information management field is the difficulty in explaining clearly and concisely the nature of the field. Many professions have a reasonably clear public profile, such as medical doctors, nurses, accountants, lawyers, and so forth. Information managers, on the other hand, often find themselves in the position of having to explain what they do. The same is true also for those of us who teach and conduct research in this area.
There is no standard definition of what constitutes information management (IM). The Government of Canada defines it as a discipline that directs and supports effective and efficient management of information in an organization, from planning and systems development to disposal and/or long-term preservation.
Wikipedia defines IM as [the] cycle of organizational activity: the acquisition of information from one or more sources, the custodianship and the distribution of that information to those who need it, and its ultimate disposition through archiving or deletion.
At the School of Information (SIM), we define information management as a people-centred approach to discovering, organizing, analyzing, representing, and accessing data, information, and knowledge. Effective IM gets the right information to the right people at the right time. I am undoubtedly biased, of course, but I think SIM’s definition captures the main functional areas of IM very well. We propose also the following areas of competencies for IM professionals:
- Information management leadership
- Enterprise architecture
- Risk management
- Information security
The Government of Australia has a very well-crafted information management standard that could be applied to any organization, either public or private. The standard outlines eight principles for the management of business information:
- Business information is systematically governed
- Necessary business information is created
- Business information is adequately described
- Business information is suitably stored and preserved
- How long business information should be kept is known
- Business information is accountably destroyed or transferred
- Business information is saved in systems where it can be appropriately managed
- Business information is available for use and reuse
The graphic below, from K.L. Scott & Associates, provides a good summary of IM processes:
This graphic shows the business value of IM to an organization:
Dr. John Willinsky on the Future of Open Access (IM Public Lecture)
By Lidia Elsdon:
To kick off International Open Access Week, Dalhousie hosted a public lecture by Dr. John Willinksy on Monday, October 23, 2017, The Future of Open Access to Research and Scholarship: Lessons from the Medieval to the Early Modern Era. Dr. Willinsky, a Dalhousie alumnus, is the director of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) which develops open source scholarly publishing material. Learn more about PKP here.
A video recording of the lecture can be viewed here.
What is open access?
Open access is the movement to make knowledge accessible to all. It is not about making musical albums, novels, or art free. At its core, its objective is to defend education. Dr. Willinksy’s goal is to make research freely accessible. “Access is a right that is endemic to the nature of learning,” he said during Monday’s lecture. According to Willinksky, roughly 45% of all scholarly literature that has been published in the last five years is openly accessible.
The issue of open access is inherently linked to copyright, intellectual property law, and trademark. Dr. Willinksy’s talk also explored relevant, modern day issues of open access such as the lawsuit against Sci-Hub, a website that pirated scientific journals, for copyright and trademark infringement.
Where did the concept of open access come from?
Dr. Willinksy’s lecture took us back to the early medieval period to delve into the history of open access and its inadvertent origins in the Benedictine Monasteries. The Benedictine Rule, created by Saint Benedict in 480 CE, created a type of learning that had nothing to do with ownership; the value of a work was in its use. Willinksky even holds that they had a working theory of intellectual property in these monasteries.
Dr. Willinksy’s upcoming book, The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke will be available January 2018.
In Memoriam – Patricia Healey, MLIS ’89
SIM is sad to announce the passing of alumna Patricia Healey (MLIS ’89). Below is a copy of her obituary, which can also be found here.
Patti Healey passed away on September 23, 2017, in the Palliative Care Unit at Victoria General Hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia, after a courageous battle with cancer.
Born on February 27, 1951, in Newton to Priscilla (Nagle) and Paul V. Healey, Patti grew up in Canton and went to Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, to study philosophy and education. There she met and married Tim Trask, her adoring husband of 43 years. Teaching school was her vocation, which she pursued in Chetwynd, British Columbia, and Sambro, Nova Scotia, but libraries were her passion. She earned her master’s in library science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, concluding her career as the teacher/librarian at Prince Andrew High School in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
NSLA Conference Celebrates Nova Scotia’s Literary & Social Heritage
By Angela Reynolds, NSLA Promotions and Public Relations Convener
SIM alums, Faye MacDougall & Cindy Lelliott
The 2017 joint Nova Scotia Library Association and Library Boards Association of Nova Scotia Conference – “Libraries 150: a celebration”– was hosted by the Annapolis Valley Regional Library and held September 29th-October 1st. Library staff and board members from across the province participated in professional development workshops and networking that inspired us to move forward, do better, and keep learning. Workshop subjects ranged from Library Advocacy to Puppet Storytime, Treaty Education to Coding, Summer Reading to Publishing Diverse Books, and everything in between.
Thanks to Libraries 150 funding from Communities, Culture, and Heritage, a public component was part of the conference. Readings and presentations by authors Ami McKay, Wade White, Jon Tattrie, and Lance Woolaver, as well as the One Book Nova Scotia winner Gloria Ann Wesley were open to the public by pre-registration. The Friday night reception with Ami McKay was bewitching to say the least, and the Saturday night screening of the movie Maudie (also open to the public) in the ABCC theatre was a highlight.
The conference offered 22 sessions with over 40 guest presenters to over 160 registrants. The 10 exhibitors, and our many conference sponsors helped make this an excellent professional development event. If you’d like to see some of the conference in action, visit our online photo gallery.
SIM alum, Doug Vaisey, receives his award
We were honoured to have Leo Glavine, Minister of Communities, Culture and Heritage as guest speaker at the Saturday evening banquet. Awards were given to deserving recipients.
Faye MacDougall, Chief Librarian of Cape Breton Regional Library, received the Norman Horrocks award for library leadership; and Doug Vaisey (MLIS ’71), formerly a Trustee of the Halifax Regional Library Board, received the Library Boards Association of Nova Scotia Trustee Award.
IM Public Lecture: John Willinsky (Stanford University)
Co-sponsored by Dalhousie Libraries, the School of Information Management and the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. Part of International Open Access Week.
The Future of Open Access to Research and Scholarship: Lessons from the Medieval to the Early Modern Era
Dr. John Willinsky
Stanford University
Lecture Details
Monday, October 23rd, 2017
4:00pm *embedded in the class INFO 6840: Content Management Systems
Great Hall, University Club, 6259 Alumni Crescent (just off South Street)
Abstract: This talk will set the current state of open access in scholarly publishing within a larger history of access to learning that reaches back to the medieval period in the West. It will consider the role of the intellectual properties of learning played in the rise of both the university and modern copyright law. This history suggests a number of principles that might be kept in mind when considering today’s various initiatives for pursuing universal open access to research and scholarship, now that such access is being increasingly accepted as the longterm goal for scholarly publishing.
Biography: John Willinsky holds a PhD from Dalhousie University and is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, as well as Professor (Part-Time) of Publishing Studies at Simon Fraser University. He directs the Public Knowledge Project, which develops open source scholarly publishing software and his forthcoming book is entitled The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke (University of Chicago Press).
The Information Management Public Lectures give attention to exciting advances in research and professional practice. The topics are diverse reflecting the importance and global extent of Information Management in today’s society. The lectures are open to all members of the Dalhousie campus and surrounding community. Click here for the full schedule. At this point, the plan is to record the lecture – details TBD.