Thing 17
This week’s Thing is on Sharing Your Work.
Thing 17 provides a distinctive (and perhaps unique) challenge for me: since I'm not working or studying in Library or Information Services yet (I'm hoping to apply in the next couple of weeks) I don't have any presentations or papers to share and I don't know enough about the area to know what conferences I would like to present at in the future. Because of this I struggled to come up with something I could write for this Thing, however, I remembered that when I was I doing my library work experience at the end of last year I went to a couple of seminars; and so I will be writing on them instead as they were my first introduction to seminars in the LIS area.
The first seminar was ‘Next Generation Learning Spaces Seminar.’ This was a very interesting seminar for me not only because of the specific content of the seminar but because of the general topic. The idea of learning spaces was something new to me. As a student I had spend many hours in the library reading and writing for all my various assignments during my BA and MA, however, in all that time I had never actually considered the space that I was in. This seminar was eye-opening not only because I was suddenly looking at and considering the space around me but also because of gaining the understanding of how important that space is for learning. The development of new learning spaces and the upgrade of existing ones was an entirely new concept for me and I found it fascinating; how these spaces affect how people learn, how well they learn and encouraging them to learn and to return back to learning. While I don’t think this would be an area that I would work in it is definitely something that I would like to keep an eye on as a personal interest.
The second seminar was ‘Beyond the text: aspects of the manuscript and the printed book in Ireland and Europe.’ This was a very intriguing seminar as it was my first look at studying manuscripts, however, because of my lack of knowledge there were some of the more nuanced aspects of the seminar I did not quite understand but I still grasped the general ideas. During the seminar I learned and became aware of the different parts of the manuscripts, the challenges to looking at and conserving manuscripts, the different methods of binding, the small clues that can be garnered from the smallest detail to inform the manuscripts history, and the complexity of how to digitise these manuscripts, and libraries’ and intuitions’ collections. What I found particularly fascinating was the talk on ‘Preliminary report on the analysis of inks in Irish manuscripts’ by Daniela Iacopino and Professor Pádraig Ó Macháin, who used x-ray florescence to identify the ink pigments of a number of velum and paper manuscripts. Again, while not an area that I would work in, this seminar was my first look at studying manuscripts and very useful because of that.
The seminars I went to during my work experience have given me a great foundation and introduction to the different types of cross-disciplinary conferences that exist within the LIS area; and while I am not in a position to publish any work at the moment it is definitely something I would like to investigate in the future.Â
