Please join us at our upcoming information sessions in Toronto to learn more about how our Master of Information Management program can help advance your careers.
The role of information professionals in data curation
This post by Pip Christie discusses the growing amount of information that is generated daily: Google receives over 4,000,000 search queries, and email users send 204,000,000 messages. To say that we are living in an age of information overload where we are bombarded by white noise is, quite frankly, an understatement – but I’m sure you’ve heard all that before. What we’re more concerned about here is the evolution of content curation to enable Librarians to rise above this sea of information.
Christie defines data curation as the act of individuals chartered with the responsibility to find, contextualise, and organise information, providing a reliable context and architecture for the content they discover and organise. Information professionals must effectively source worthwhile information on a range of topics through research, then filter through and verify this information to assess its significance and relevance to their organisation and end users, categorise the data into different topics and subject groups before presenting it in a digestible and easily understandable manner.
This article provides a good overview of the typical tasks entailed in data curation, and provide a link to show how Public Health England managed data curation.
Dalhousie Celebrates Pride Week
Dal will celebrate Pride Week on all campuses, July 15 – 23. Events will include Flag Raising Ceremonies on both the Studley and Agricultural Campus, Film Screenings, and Art events. Members of the Dalhousie community will be marching in the Truro Parade on July 16 and the Halifax Parade on July 23rd.
All alumni, students, faculty and friends in Halifax and Truro are welcome to join in the festivities!
The full calendar of Dalhousie events can be found here and the full Halifax Pride guide can be viewed here.
Dal Libraries Launches Refreshed Website w. MLIS Student Assistance
On July 5th, Dalhousie Libraries launched a revamped website, featuring a more streamlined look, and added several navigation widgets and features to help improve user experience. MLIS graduates Emily Colford and Charlotte MacKeigan assisted with usability research, redesign/layout and many other tasks related to this site revamp.
We applaud Dalhousie Libraries and our MLIS students for their hard work on this initiative. User experience is an extremely important consideration when designing (or redesigning) any information system, and we are sure this will help the Dalhousie community navigate their library services much more quickly and easily.
Read the full synopsis of the website project here and visit the revised site here.
SIM Welcomes Ryan Whalen
We are excited to announce that Ryan Whalen has joined the School of Information Management in a limited term position as of June 1st, 2016. At the end of June, Ryan successfully defended his PhD dissertation entitled Knowledge Recombination, Diffusion, and Research Team Composition: Understanding 21st Century Innovation at Northwestern University, where he concurrently completed his JD degree. Congratulations to the soon-to-be Dr. Whalen on this great achievement.
Ryan’s research takes a computational social science perspective on information & innovation policy, intellectual property, and empirical legal studies. His work bridges information science, computer science, and social science to generate novel methods, and provide insight into the generation of new ideas, and evolution of information systems. Ryan will be teaching in our MIM and MLIS programs.
We welcome Ryan to SIM and look forward to adding to our capacity to deliver innovative programs in data, analytics and information policy. Ryan can be contacted at ryan@dal.ca.