Department of Information Studies - University of Zululand

The DIS Annual Conferences have been going on for the last 11 years and celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2010. Looking back, we can say without any doubt that our annual conferences are unique, that they have grown, and that we have been able to achieve the purpose of the conferences by popularizing LIS research among students, particularly among those coming from participating institutions from South Africa. Over the past years, we have also been very fortunate to host magnificent and prominent guests and speakers at these annual conferences, such as Prof. Andrew Kaniki (NRF), Prof. Gary Mersham (New Zealand), Prof. Myrtle Hooper (UZ), Prof. Patrick Sibaya (UZ), Prof. Christine Stilwell (UKZN), Prof. Jaya Raju (DUT), Prof. Stephen Mutula (UB), Prof. Johannes Britz (UWM), Prof. Archie Dick (UP), Prof. Patrick Ngulube (UNISA), Dr. Naresh Sentoo (DUT), Prof. Mabel Minishi-Majanja (UNISA) and Prof. Eldon Wait(UZ).

The purpose of the DIS conference has not changed. Above all, we aim to popularize LIS research and knowledge sharing among students and staff through research capacity building, research presentations, discourse and publications. Our annual conferences have been drawing papers largely from leading research reports produced by both our undergraduate and postgraduate students and those produced by our faculty/staff. 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). We believe that researchers studying LIS in Africa will always encounter publications originating from this conference in the proceedings or in popular LIS scholarly journals.                    

The current 2011 conference is expected to be more diversified by attracting papers both from within and outside South Africa.
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 areas:

• Research concepts and application
• Information and knowledge management
• Informetrics
• Social/community informatics and ICT for development
• Information seeking and user studies
• LIS education and training
• Information Ethics
• Indigenous knowledge
• Institutional Repositories
• Open Access
• Scholarly publishing
• Digitization
• e-records management

Theme
• Exploring current tends in LIS Research

Click here to launch the 2011 IS Conference Site