June
New Faculty Member Appointed
Dr. Kimiz Dalkir will be joining the School in July 2002 in the rank of tenure-track Assistant Professor. She holds a BSc in Biology and a MBA from McGill University, and a Ph.D. in Educational Technology from Concordia University.
Dr. Dalkir began her career as a knowledge engineer at the Centre for System Research, affiliated with Concordia University. It was there that she gained expertise in all areas of applied epistemology, especially in the encapsulation of knowledge in "executable" forms.
Later, she was Head of the Performance Support Systems research program at CITI (Centre for Information Technology Innovation), part of Industry Canada. There she developed almost a decade of experience as she carried out a number of mandates for diverse clients including those in the aerospace, training, and environment and manufacturing sectors.
Shortly after, Dr. Dalkir joined Microcell Labs, an applied R&D organization in the field of Personal Communication Systems (PCS). She was Director of the Centre for Strategic Knowledge, responsible for the initiation and coordination of a number of applied research and development activities for knowledge-based customer modeling.
Dr. Dalkir at her last position as Director of Knowledge Management Services at DMR Consulting was actively involved in the transfer of knowledge management and electronic performance support systems (EPSS) to clients in Europe, Japan and North America. She developed and delivered workshops to create client awareness and subsequent buy-in for initiatives in the financial, insurance and information technology sectors. She has played a senior consultant role in mandates ranging from intranet environments to communities of practice.
More recently, she has developed new consulting services in the areas of knowledge transfer for succession planning due to employee turnover, KM strategy roadmaps, KM maturity level assessments and KM intersections with CRM, Business Intelligence and Change Adoption.
May
Large and Beheshti Receive Largest SSHRC Grant
Andy Large and Jamshid Beheshti have obtained the largest SSHRC grant in the School's history. The three-year New Economy Initiative grant of $213,800 on Children as Designers of Web Portal Architecture is also the largest SSHRC grant for McGill University in 2002.
The research explores whether children can play a role in Web portal design, to what extent portals should be designed to meet the needs of specific ages and genders, the difference between a child's and an adult's design concept, and whether a design that children find attractive will also be as usable as that from a professional.
The research will help understand how children approach software design, as well as their specific opinions on portal design. It will elaborate portal design criteria from young users' perspectives, and enable future portals to be constructed based on the cognitive processes of their users.
Finally, it represents a further step in opening the information resources of the Web to students.
SSHRC Grant Awarded to Leide, Cole, Beheshti, and Large
John Leide, Charles Cole (Visiting Scholar), Jamshid Beheshti, and Andy Large successfully applied for a SSHRC grant on Integrating Classification Visualization Devices for Undergraduate Users.
The three-year $80,200 research will render the undergraduates experience of using an information retrieval system more effective, allowing them to produce higher quality term papers.
The specific problem addressed is the divergence of an undergraduate's mental model of a term paper topic and the objective structure of the topic represented by a subject index.
The research develops integrating devices that, once manipulated by the undergraduates, will enable them to understand the structure of the subject domain as well as its relationship to students' specific essay topics. By visualizing the subject domain related to their topics, and by using the devices to integrate the visualization, undergraduates can produce more effective term papers.
Peter McNally Awarded Grants
Professor Peter McNally and David Mcknight (Digital Collections Librarian, McGill Libraries, MLIS) have received a SSHRC grant on Digitization of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada.
Peter McNally also obtained a minor grant from Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History with Daniel Boyer (Wainwright Librarian, Law Library, MLIS) on the Legal Collection of Judge Robert Mackay: An Analytical Evaluation, and two minor grants with Lawrence Deck (Aleph Librarian, McGill Libraries, MLIS) from McGill Associates and Young Canada Works, in Heritage Institutions.
February
Peter McNally Named Recipient of the Distinguished Service Award
Peter McNally is this year's recipient of the Distinguished Service Awards granted by the McGill Alumni Association. His extensive service record to the McGill community includes: President of the Faculty Club, President and Executive Secretary of James McGill Historical Society, and Speaker, Council of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research.
Andy Large was also recognized for his contributions to McGill. He was the recipient of the David Johnston Award for serving as the Co-Chair, Faculty and Staff Fund Committee, and as a member of the Board of Directors, Atwater Library and Computer Centre.
January
Beheshti and Large Receive Research Contract from the National Library of Canada
Jamshid Beheshti, Andy Large, and Pat Riva (Database Specialist, McGill Libraries, MLIS ) received a $20,000 research contract from the National Library of Canada to investigate the Use of NLC MARC Records in Canadian Libraries: Phase I, University and Large Urban Public Libraries.
The short-term contract began in January 2002 and will be completed by March 31.
The objective of the project is to determine the dollar value of savings incurred by Canadian university and large urban public libraries as a result of using Canadiana printed monograph cataloguing records (including federal government documents) generated by the NLC rather than cataloguing these items themselves, and to propose a methodology by which this Phase I study can be extended to other Canadian libraries.