LISDIS is almost 2 years old!
It’s strange to think that our conference started as a little germ of an idea at an NLPN event back in March 2015. Since then we’ve put on two ace conferences (in Huddersfield and London) and shared 16 masters dissertations with over 100 attendees. We’ve welcomed the always fantastic Emma Coonan to talk at both conferences and added the fab Claire Sewell to host a workshop at LISDIS 2016. Last year the wonderful Sarah Hume joined our committee, making us five. And we just agreed to have our website archived by the British Library! Not bad for being just two years old.
We met recently to discuss LISDIS and the first thing we agreed is that LISDIS will have a year out in 2017 – BUT we will be back in 2018 with a revamped version. Apologies (and thanks!) to everyone who’s expressed interest in attending or presenting, but we wanted to take some time out to reflect on where we want to take LISDIS next. The five of us organise the conference voluntarily, on top of our full time jobs and various professional and personal commitments, and we need to take a bit of a break.
The upside of this is that the break will give us time to think about the future of LISDIS. The second thing we agreed was that we’re all really passionate about bringing the research done for masters dissertations to the wider profession, and this won’t change. But perhaps the format, timing, location, marketing and other aspects could change (or not!), and these are all things we’ll be considering. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback about our event, so if you’d like to tell us your thoughts about LISDIS’s future, please leave a comment below, tweet us @LISDISConf or email us at lisdisconference@gmail.com
Finally, a huge thanks to everyone who has supported LISDIS so far. Whether it be by presenting, sponsoring, attending, or amplifying our event, we appreciate your contribution and your patience as we work to make LISDIS even more awesome for 2018!
LISDIS 