The Information Studies Conference at the University of Zululand has been held under different names since 2000. The conference has grown from a Departmental project into a regular and recognised conference in South Africa and regionally in Africa. Looking back, we can say that this conference has been able to achieve its purpose that is popularizing LIS research largely among postgraduate students and LIS educators/faculty, particularly within South Africa. Over the past years, we have been fortunate to host prominent guests and speakers at our annual conferences from Botswana (UB), Kenya (Moi University and Kenya Polytechnic University College), New Zealand, South Africa (DUT, NRF, UKZN, UP, UNISA, UZ,), Uganda (Makarere University) and USA (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee), which have significantly improved the quality and visibility of the conference.
The purpose of the Information Studies conference has not changed. Above all, we aim to popularize LIS research and knowledge sharing among students and staff/faculty through research capacity building, research presentations, discourse and publications. As a result, we have published our conference proceedings both in print and electronic format for open access on our website (http://www.lis.uzulu.ac.za). Most of the conference papers have also been published as articles in scholarly journals and as chapters in books. We believe that researchers studying LIS in Africa will find the research publications relevant and worthwhile for LIS education and research.
The current 2012 conference is expected to be equally diversified by attracting papers both from within and outside South Africa.
The conference theme is “Empowering and Inspiring Current Information Studies Worldwide”. Contributions are invited that address current research issues related to the LIS field. Themes and sub themes that may be addressed are wide and open, but an advanced academic level of discourse is required in the following or related areas:
• Research concepts and application
• Information and knowledge management
• Bibliometrics and Informetrics
• Social/community informatics and ICT4D
• Information seeking and user studies
• Information Retrieval
• Information Ethics
• Indigenous knowledge
• Institutional Repositories
• Open Access
• Scholarly publishing
• Digitization
• e-records management, e-learning and e-government
• LIS education and training
The Conference Program is based on accepted participants’ paper proposals and special invitations issued by the Organizing Committee to selected experts in the Conference topics.
Call for Papers
The Conference Organizing Committee accepts original research and application-oriented papers, not previously presented elsewhere, which make new contributions to the Conference topics.
You are invited to submit an abstract of your proposed paper in the electronic
form (as an attachment to email) according to the following guidelines:
1. The extended abstract should be between 300 -500 words in length.
2. The heading should include the title of your paper, followed by names, affiliations, Email of the author(s).
3. The deadline for submitting abstracts is 15th May 2012 (extended to the 15th June).
4. Notification of acceptance/non acceptance of paper proposals will be mailed to authors on the 30th May.
5. Full text should be between 4000 – 6000 words in length.
6. The deadline for submitting full text is 30th July, 2012.
7. Proposals/abstracts for papers should be sent to
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or
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8. Full texts of accepted papers will be published in the conference website before the conference commences and in the conference proceedings within one month after the conference.
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