The 2020 Information Seeking in Context (ISIC) conference is hosted this week by our colleagues at the Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Had circumstances been different, several members of the Centre for Social Informatics would be in South Africa now. The PhD students would be joining today’s doctoral workshop in person, and everyone preparing to present their papers and posters face-to-face over the course of the main conference from Tuesday to Thursday this week (as has been the case at past ISIC conferences, e.g. 2018 in Kraków, Poland, 2016 in Zadar, Croatia, 2014 in Leeds) .

Instead, we are participating at the event remotely. We still plan to deliver our presentations ‘live’. However, should there be any technical problems, in the past couple of weeks we have submitted to the conference organisers recordings of narrated versions of our PowerPoint slides.

While you will need to be registered for the conference to access all the content associated with our accepted submissions, and the full text documents will not be published in Information Research until after the conference, some associated files are already publicly available.

• Information literacy as a joint competence shaped by everyday life and workplace roles amongst Scottish community councillors – paper by Peter Cruickshank, Dr Hazel Hall and Dr Bruce Ryan – abstract and slides available.

• Investigating the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’: current research priorities on the influence of culture on new-comer populations’ use of public libraries – paper by Rachel Salzano co-authored with her PhD supervisors Dr Hazel Hall and Dr Gemma Webster – abstract and slides available.

• Assisting information practice: information intermediary to social proxy – poster co-authored by Peter Cruickshank, Dr Gemma Webster and Dr Frances Ryan – abstract and slides available.

• The relationship between culture and public library use: non-Western students in Scotland – poster by Rachel Salzano co-authored with her PhD supervisors Dr Hazel Hall and Dr Gemma Webster – abstract and slides available.

• Towards a definition of metaskills – poster by Katherine Stephen co-authored with her PhD supervisors Dr Laura Muir & Dr Hazel Hall – abstract available.

Follow ISIC2020 on Twitter at @isic2020, and the hashtag #isic2020.