Category: Teaching

Six things to expect from the MSc in Information Management

Author Paul Matthews | Posted on

Whether you are just curious, thinking of applying, or are planning to join us already, here are six things we think you should know

1. You need to invest the time to reap the dividends

The MSc IM programme will make demands on your time. You will need to attend the university on one day a week (Part time) or two days a week (Full time). Independent study of on average at least a further one day (PT) or two days (FT) a week is needed for research, reading and completing assignments

To be fair to yourself and maintain a healthy body and mind, we recommend that students don’t commit to too much on top of their studies.

2. You will be doing science

Information studies cuts across the arts and sciences. That said, LIS is increasingly evidence-based, whether that is building evidence for the impact of your own programmes or professionally gathering and assessing evidence for others. You will need to become adept at critically reading published research and will ultimately design and conduct your own research in the dissertation at the end of the programme.

If the thought of science leaves you panic-stricken fear not! Many of our very successful graduates have a background and first degree in the arts and humanities. Combining the two gives you new superpowers.

3. Previous relevant work experience is not absolutely necessary, but it will help

You will progress and learn if you can contextualise the curriculum content to your own experience and share and discuss issues relating to the weekly topics. While many areas of work are useful, the following kinds of experience are especially helpful:

  • In a library, museum, gallery or archive
  • In a customer focussed service – public or private sector
  • In publishing
  • In records management or information governance
  • In client focussed IT support or web content management
  • In business intelligence or knowledge management

Some students gain internships, voluntary or part time work during their studies.

4. We love libraries but there is more

We aim to prepare students for roles in the wider world of information where there may be opportunities that they have not previously considered aiming at. While libraries remain important to our teaching and learning, some areas of the library sector are shrinking and roles are transforming into things strange and new!

In addition to information and library fundamentals, you will be able to learn about: Organising knowledge; Information and Digital Literacy; Knowledge Management; Web science and Social Media; Analytics; Big Data; Managing Data; Designing the User Experience; Linked data, Open Data and the Internet of things

5. You will get technical!

You might not see yourself as a technical person, but the capacity to work with systems and technical specialists is vital. With information and services increasingly being “digitalised” it is important that you engage with data and digital information formats. Furthermore, the ability to bridge the worlds of code and customer needs is invaluable and this is where information people can shine!

For technical topics, we will provide basic introductions and we have a range of resources to support learning. That said, it will certainly benefit you to come armed with knowledge of the principles of HTML/CSS, spreadsheets and the basics of simple databases (such as Microsoft Access).

6. You will meet and work with great people

Our students tend to form strong bonds and really help each other out with study challenges. Our staff and the outside specialists we bring in all care deeply about the subject and enjoy working with postgraduate students in our different learning spaces.

Image: Takashi .M

Teaching using Copyright the Card Game

Author Paul Matthews | Posted on

This article by David Moger first appeared at https://copyrightliteracy.org/2017/10/31/teaching-using-copyright-the-card-game/

I first came across Copyright the Card Game when looking for information on Open Educational Resources for a lecture I was due to give to Information Management students at the University of the West of England, Bristol. I am an Associate Lecturer at UWE and my main work is on the Information Contexts module, which covers a range of subjects and is designed as a general introduction to Information Management. I inherited teaching copyright and was looking for ways to make the subject more interesting.

I had attended the CILIP copyright briefing in 2015 so had some ideas on changes to content. I was also doing a module of a teaching qualification at the time, which meant I had to plan and run a teaching session for a colleague and be observed. I was asked to do a session on OERs and that’s when I found the game, just at the right time. I experimented with the game for a while, incorporating it into my existing copyright session but not really giving it enough time, and on reflection I was trying to cram too much in to the two hour session.

I saw that CILIP Wales were hosting Jane to talk about the game in Cardiff in October 2017 so signed myself up. With Jane running us through playing the game in about 2½ hours I decided the best way to incorporate the game was just to run it for the students, and a week later that is what I did.

David’s card, not using the correct colour palette!

I made three sets of cards using a very dodgy photocopier that printed the cards in several different shades of the colours they were supposed to be. Also the two sides did not quite match up so cutting the cards up was interesting! I added a few introductory slides to the game presentation, incorporating some ideas from presentations I saw at the CILIP Copyright conference in 2017, and off we went.

I started by getting the students to write on a post-it note one thing they already knew about copyright. Some of the replies were –

“Copyright belongs to the creator unless sold/inherited”

“Copyright theft is a crime”

“You get copyright without asking for it”

“You can only digitize one chapter or 10% or the CLA will eat you”

“©”

And several mentioned length of copyright.

The introductory slides were all on the theme that Copyright is hard and there are (probably) no easy answers, plus none of this session is legal advice so don’t sue me! I then ran the game much as Jane had in Cardiff. The students seemed to pick up the idea quite quickly so we managed to get through about half of the scenarios in each of rounds two, three and four in the two hour session. They were inclined to over think the situations presented to them, and read too much into them, with the result that they often had too many cards for the situation. (by the way, if you have not played the game some of this may not make a lot of sense!)

David’s students discussing copyright

For the first round the students were given a set of objects including an Xbox game of Guitar Hero, a CD of Let it Be by the Beatles and a copy of Ethel Bilborough’s Diary, and they had to decide which form of Works each was and which copyright applied. These were not as straightforward as they seemed. The Beatles CD allowed me to talk about Paul McCartney’s attempts to buy back the copyright of the songs he wrote for the Beatles, and Ethel Bilborough’s diary could be the subject of a session on its own. (If you are not aware of the problems involved in tracing the copyright of the diary see Naomi Korn’s blog post from 28th June 2017).

Three of the students worked in the UWE library and had some experience of digitisation projects and were very good at coming up with questions I had trouble answering! Also they made a good case for some additional cards in some instances. For example, question one in round four is about digitising a chapter of a book for uploading to a VLE. The UWE practice is that the book has to be issued to a digitisation library ticket, so they could argue that a valid usage was Rental or Lending. But was this “trumped” by not applying to a public performance?

Overall the two hours went well with the students engaged throughout. There were a number of learning points for me.

  1. I need to know more about copyright to run it better in the future, to allow me to answer queries and to offer explanations of why certain cards do not apply.
  2. Work out a good scoring system. I felt I was too much swayed by arguments from the students about why cards should be included (and see no. 1.)
  3. I need better sets of cards.
David’s students playing Copyright the Card Game

As a first run through the game I thought it went pretty well. One thing I intended to do but forgot, was to ask the students for one thing they learned during the session, to mirror the question I asked at the start. This would have rounded off the session well, I think.

The game has certainly made the teaching of copyright more interesting for me, and also learning more interesting for the students. There were no glazed expressions and no nodding heads as people struggled to stay awake as there was when I first taught a copyright session several years ago. Several scenarios in the game are based on academic libraries, so I’m trying to think up a few public library inspired situations, and also other situations to reflect the wider expectations of students on an Information Management course.

Knowledge, skills and reskilling – where does the MSc fit in?

Author judithstewart | Posted on

On July 1st, ALISS (Association of Librarians and Information professionals in the Social Sciences) organised a day conference in Cardiff on developments and innovations in staff development. I was pleased to contribute a presentation/workshop about the place of an MSc LIS qualification in the spectrum of professional development, and how the programme at UWE has been responding to current challenges in skills and knowledge required and desired by the profession.
What follows here are some of my thoughts on this, and of course they are my personal thoughts, not ‘official’ UWE thoughts.

One of the big, and ongoing, debates in Higher Education is whether the outcomes or purpose of your study for a degree is to become educated, or to be trained, and what the balance is or should be between the extremes of these two perspectives.

Is the purpose of a degree course to develop your knowledge and understanding of a subject and its relationship to the wider world, or to be trained in a set of skills: for a profession, or a particular role, or just for ‘the workplace’.

Some employers refer to ‘job ready graduates’ – to my mind a complete misnomer, and misunderstanding of what study in higher education is about – whether at first degree level, or at M level as we have in the various Msc or MA programmes in the LIS sector.

So how do we engage with this debate in LIS? Programmes need to enable students to develop
Subject knowledge Professional skills Personal or key or transferable skills Is the desired outcome to equip you for your first professional role? OR more as a basis for the rest of your career?

Yes you will need to acquire a body of subject or professional knowledge – about the organisation of knowledge, the theoretical underpinning of digital and information literacies, information architecture, records management, legal context . . .  the range of topics is broad and evolving.

To an increasing extent, it is not possible to predict, beyond a certain point, what skills or knowledge will be needed in a professional life. Nor is it possible to predict the directions a career might take. So the other qualities and skills that need to be developed are the generic attributes that are recognised in most degree courses: the ability to evaluate, question and challenge, to be critical, to analyse and synthesise and present information, to be a successful team member (and that covers a multitude of skills), and other so called soft skills.

 How is the MSc Programme at UWE responding to these challenges?

All LIS courses are accredited by CILIP – the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals – http://www.cilip.org.uk/  as well as being validated by their host universities. UWE went through this process during June 2014 (as recorded elsewhere in this blog).

We have to map the content and learning outcomes of the programme against CILIP’s PKSB, – the Professional Knowledge and Skills Base. – and demonstrate that we meet the requirements of each section.

This is a much more direct link to requirements as delineated by the LIS professional body than we have had before. If you haven’t already looked at the PKSB, I would thoroughly recommend it.

Drilling down into the segments of the skills base reveals a whole host of skills and attributes. Under communication are the simple words – written and presentation [skills]. At UWE we emphasise the development of presentation skills – almost every job interview, and every professional role will demand this. In addition, each year recent graduates present their dissertation research to colleagues from the four universities in Bristol and Bath.

And we encourage our students to write up and publish their work with the support of a member of the teaching team.

At UWE, we have dropped the word Library from the title of  the MSc programme  in recognition of the different contexts in which information professionals  work. We now have students from diverse work environments – public and academic libraries, Records Management, digital publishing, and data management among them.

This has raised awareness of, and interest in all sectors among the student group – and among the teaching team, and we therefore encourage participants to look at the related professional organisations such as theBritish Computer Society,    and theInformation and Records Management Society

The Programme team at UWE has regular discussions with Information employers in the region, where we find out what they want to see in information professionals joining their organisations. The outcomes of the latest of these forums is also reported on in this blog. Employers say they want people who can apply knowledge to a work situation, and be ready to undertake:

Project management Bid writing for funds Knowledge management policyRecords managementInformation architecture   Academic and public library colleagues focused on:

Advocacy Partnership workingDigital literaciesResearch support and data management Library environment – physical and digital Flexibility
We can see here the importance of taking the information service out into the wider parent organisation, and of developing more traditional areas of academic library expertise into the digital environment. Of most value however is the attitude and mind-set of the individual to be able to adapt and grow as technologies, and the social and economic environments change.

This applies just as much between sectors; it is vital that new professionals are flexible and can make connections; that they can transfer their knowledge and skills into different environments, and see their relevance to different projects.

At the workshop in Cardiff, participants worked in groups to discuss the skills and knowledge they thought to be relevant in different information environments, both now and in the future. Each group came to a similar conclusion: that the skills and knowledge required for working in any sector of the information profession are consistent across the board – transferable and interchangeable– although there may be a difference in the interpretation and expression of those skills.

The thing is – you never stop learning, so undertaking an LIS Masters programme is just the beginning.  . . .

The process of developing innovative, visionary and successful library and information professionals is not the sole responsibility of the LIS educator but must be viewed as a career long process that involves the individual, universities, training providers, employers and professional associations.

Hallam (2007) Education for library and information service. IN S. Ferguson, ed. Libraries in the Twenty-First Century: Charting New Directions in Information Services. Wagga Wagga. Charles Sturt University.