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Robert Munsch Award

The Guelph Public Library and the Friends of the Guelph Public Library are pleased to announce the Robert Munsch Award. Robert Munsch is an enormously successful children’s writer and Canada’s best-selling author. He has published more than 50 individual titles, and his books have sold many millions of copies in more than a dozen languages.

Robert Munsch makes his home in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. He is arguably Guelph’s most famous living citizen and much loved. In his honour, the Guelph Public Library has launched The Robert Munsch Discovery Portal and in partnership with the Friends of the Guelph Public Library will offer The Robert Munsch Award, a $1000 Cdn award for the best short essay or position paper discussing the place or the impact of the writings of Robert Munsch in English Language Children’s Literature.

As part of this celebration of all things Munsch, the Guelph Public Library, in partnership with the Friends of the Guelph Public Library, will offer The Robert Munsch Award, a $1000 award for the best short essay or position paper discussing the place or the impact of the writings of Robert Munsch in English Language Children’s Literature.

Eligibility:

Submissions are invited from undergraduate and graduate level university students in Library and Information Science, Children’s Literature, Early Childhood Education and related areas of study. Eligible submissions should be between 1000 and 2500 words in length, must include a short letter of support from a university faculty member in an appropriate subject area and must not have been published previously.

Eligible submissions must be received no later than April 15, 2014.

Applicants will retain copyright of their submissions but must agree to give the Guelph Public Library permission to exhibit selected papers in the Library and on its website. All submissions will become part of the GPL Archives.

To submit:
Papers, together with a short note of faculty support, should be submitted to: munschaward@library.guelph.on.ca. Please include “Munsch Award” and the name and location of the applicant in the subject line.

For further information, please contact: munschaward@library.guelph.on.ca.

MLIS Student Published in Journal of Cleaner Production

News_Maggie Neilson (200w)Maggie Neilson, 2nd year MLIS student, co-authored an article with Kathleen Kevany (Faculty of Agriculture, Dalhousie University) which was published in the Journal of Cleaner Production. The article, titled: “Water and women project: notes from the field,” discusses technical approaches to solving global water-access struggles, and the organizations dedicated to cultivating these innovations .You can read Maggie’s article online. Visit SIM’s blog to leave a comment about the article.

Request for interest for a potential MLIS reading course: Development of a SIM taxonomy

The collections of theses and reading courses taken by students in the Master of Library and Information Studies and Master of Information Management programs are organized according to the following taxonomy of research areas. This taxonomy was developed originally by the Association of Library and Information Science Education a number of years ago. While this taxonomy is valid in its own right, it may not fully reflect the areas of interest of the two SIM programs. The goal of this reading course is to develop a SIM taxonomy by which to organize the School’s collection of reading courses and theses. The student will:

  • Conduct a literature review on existing taxonomies or vocabularies that reflect the information management field
  • Conduct an analysis of the titles and abstracts of the collection of SIM reading courses and theses to extract key concepts and areas of study
  • Analyse the existing taxonomy in light of steps (a) and (b) above
  • Interview SIM faculty and staff about concepts to be included in the taxonomy
  • Create a final taxonomy to be reviewed by SIM for official use.

This reading course will contribute to student learning and experience related to:

  • Literature search skills
  • Structure and development of taxonomies and controlled vocabularies
  • Client engagement

Term: Winter, 2014

Interested students should contact Dr. Louise Spiteri


SIM Social Media Lab Summer Talks

Please join us on Tuesday, July 23, 1-2pm at the Social Media Lab (Faculty of Management, ROWE, Suite 2010, Room 2021) for two great talks at Dal this week. The speakers are Dr, Nesrine Zemirli from King Saud University (Saudi Arabia) and Elizabeth Dubois from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford (UK). Both scholars are in Halifax this summer as guests of the Social Media Lab at the School of Information Management.

  • Dr. Nesrine Zemirli is an Assistant Professor at the Information Systems Department at King Saud University (Saudi Arabia). Her talk will focus on Personalized Big Data (PBD) and application-driven approaches to personalized recommendation system (P-RecoSys).

Dr. Zemirli holds a PhD in Computer Science from IRIT at Paul Sabatier University Toulouse III, France, specializing in the personalization of information access. She worked as a Lecturer and Researcher at various French Universities (ISEP, Paul Sabatier University Toulouse III, School of Engineering the INSA of Toulouse, Sciences Socials University Toulouse I and the University Center for Training and Research Jean-François Champollion of Albi, France). She also worked as a Research Engineer and project web manager in a French and international business company (Amadeus SAS, Auditek SAS, Solimobile, Milestone SAS).

  • Elizabeth Dubois is a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford (UK), a member of Balliol College and a current Clarendon Scholar. Her talk will focus on the role of Internet enabled citizens in governance, and more specifically on the ways in which digitally enabled individuals are using personal influence to transmit political messages in a hybrid media environment.

Before joining the OII in 2011 as an MSc student, she completed a BA, Hons. Specialization in Communication at the University of Ottawa, Canada. As a Killam Fellow through the Fulbright Foundation (Canada) in 2010 she studied at American University in Washington, DC. In September, Ms. Dubois will also be presenting her paper (with Devin Gaffney) entitled “Identifying the opinion leader: Influence, Twitter, and Canadian Politics” at the 2013 Social Media & Society Conference.

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