sherif student prize winners
Previous Winners (up to 2014, prizes were given under the name of JIBS)
2023 Oona Ylinen: Her work uses qualitative interviews and content analysis to analyse the impact that the translation of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) guidelines have had on the international cataloguing community.
2022 Catherine Drewry: Catherine assessed the capacity of the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO) ontology as a gold standard for modelling biomedical information.
2021 Amelia Brookins: Her work examined the processes of costume rental houses from the perspective of information organizations such as libraries, archives and museums. Her research revealed how costume houses reflect the information organisation processes of supporting users, classification and cataloguing in databases. The research demonstrated how the implementation of more information organization processes could further the function of the businesses.
2020 Abigail Chapman: Abigail completed her Masters at University College London. Her work focused on emerging issues in cataloguing new media, specifically videogames. She explored the ways in which metadata schemas created especially for cataloguing videogames are challenging RDA by highlighting elements important to the medium and by creating stronger controlled vocabulary lists.
2019 Michael O'Connor: Michael O'Connor completed his Masters at Ulster University and produced a well written dissertation on understanding hidden collections in libraries and archives in the UK and Ireland and examining strategies to promote engagement with these collections. His work focused on the problem of hidden collections in the UK and Ireland – that is uncatalogued items, undercatalogued items, material hidden and buried in stores and content falling under the radar of users/staff – exploring possible strategies for dealing with this significant challenge.
2018 Morgan Bowstead Wilkinson: Morgan Bowstead Wilkinson completed her Masters at UCL and produced a well written dissertation investigating the adoption of linked open data in library, archive and museum contexts, focussing particularly on bibliographic data and how the SPARQL based queries interact with it.
2017 Alex Keane: the 2017 sherif Student Prize was awarded to Alex Keane for his Masters Dissertation "One step forward, or two steps back? Representing MARC in BIBFRAME 1 and BIBFRAME 2.0. Alex did his Masters at UCL and produced an interesting dissertation looking at the mapping between MARC and Bibframe 2 proposed by the Library of Congress (LC) and the conversion of MARC records to Bibframe as implemented by the LC’s conversion tool.
2014 John Taylor: in 2014, John Taylor was awarded the JIBS Student Prize for his Masters Dissertation "A survey of bibliometric tools and techniques and their applications for technology forecasting". John was a masters student at Aberystwyth University. It was quite a technical subject, and not one that any of judging panel knew much about, but they felt that it was very well written, with clear objectives and with an excellent literature review. It was an innovative and interesting way of using bibliometrics in an ultimately practical context.
2012 Rachel Hessey: the 2012 JIBS Student Prize was awarded to Rachel Hessey for her Masters Dissertation “The impact of knowledge exports from librarianship and information science: investigating cross-disciplinary citations”.
A student at the Information School, University of Sheffield, Rachel presented a complex piece of academic work that has very practical applications. Focussing on the influence and impact of citations from LIS literature her study revealed some interesting trends. The judging panel felt that the report and methodology was particularly relevant and has wider applications for the increasingly inter-disciplinary research landscape.
2011 Andrea Ennis: Andrea Ennis was awarded the 2011 JIBS Student Prize for her Masters Dissertation "Indicators of content: the role of word clouds in the creation of summaries". An MSc student in the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University, Andrea examined the potential use of word clouds as content indicators in summaries of academic papers. Despite the small scale of her study her area of research was particularly innovative and, we think, has great potential for future development and practical application.
2010 Nicky Ransom: the 2010 JIBS Student Prize was awarded to Nicky Ransom for her Undergraduate Dissertation “Facets of user-assigned tags and their effectiveness in image retrieval”. An undergraduate student of the University of Aberystwyth, the subject-matter of Nicky’s report is extremely topical and practical both in the HE/FE environment and universally as sharing and re-use of images becomes increasingly widespread. The judging panel were particularly impressed that such a complex piece of research had been undertaken by an undergraduate student.