It currently feels like we have reached the peak of the autumn conference season. An array of events of interest to those of us working in Social Informatics and related areas are taking place this week. These include:

• ASIST20 ‘in’ the US, with sessions running until next Sunday 1st November – with three contributions from the Centre for Social Informatics
• Two sessions ‘in’ London organised by the Forum on Information Literacy (FOIL) to mark Global Media and Information Literacy week – a couple of members of the Centre for Social Informatics have registered for this event.
  • a panel session on the UK narrative on information literacy on Wednesday 28th October
  • a series of presentations on recent media and information literacy research at Masters level on Thursday 29th October
• The 2020 CILIPS conference ‘here’ in Scotland – also with members of my research group as participants

At the same time, we are keeping an eye on deadlines for our submissions to present at conferences next year. These include the iConference 2021 with the poster and doctoral colloquium deadline due to close just before midday UK time today (23:59 IDLW).

Given that all these events are hosted virtually, it’s possible to ‘travel’ between them over the course of the day/night, while also keeping up with work at base. For example, one member of my research group – PhD student Rachel Salzano – was registered for both ASIST20 and the CILIPS conference yesterday.

At the latter, Rachel presented on her doctoral study on new comer populations and public library use. First she spoke about the pilot study for her PhD, the focus of which has been international students as a particular newcomer population. Then she drew attention to the forthcoming main empirical stage of her research. Specifically Rachel made a call to those working in public library services to contact her if they are able to help facilitate access to another newcomer population – forced migrants – who would be interested in contributing to this study. Do please feel free to contact Rachel by email if you are able to assist: r.salzano@napier.ac.uk.

Meanwhile our colleague Dr Bruce Ryan, who is also ‘at’ the CILIPS conference, has been extending its reach by tweeting the sessions. This allows those of us not ‘there’ at the event a chance to engage with the conference activities by following the #cilips20 hashtag on Twitter. Thank you Bruce!