Information School News

Prof. Peter Willett will be giving two talks on the work of the Chemoinformatics Research Group in the next two weeks: on Wednesday 31st October he will speak at the Horsham Research Centre of Novartis on "Recent studies of ligand-based virtual screening", and then on Thursday 8th November he will speak at the IRF Symposium 2007 in Vienna on "Representation and searching of molecules in chemical patents".

The Department is delighted to announce that recent PhD graduate Dr Fenio Annansingh has been appointed Lecturer in Knowledge and Information Management at the Business School of University of Plymouth. We her every success in her new career.

The 7 partner EU project, Treble-CLEF will start Jan, 2008. It will promote & investigate evaluation of digital libraries that search across languages.

Reza Rabiei National Programme for IT (NPfIT): clinicians’ and managers’ perceptions of, and satisfaction with, the Choose and Book Service Friday 26th October 13.00-14.00 RC204 Choose and Book is a new service being implemented under the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in the UK National Health Service. It aims to provide an online service for patients and GPs to book hospital appointments at a convenient date, time and place. This longitudinal qualitative research aims to achieve an in-depth understanding of the views and experiences of people in primary and secondary care settings towards the Choose and Book Service. The main aim of this research is to examine clinicians’ (GPs and hospital consultants) and managers’ (GP managers and hospital departmental managers) perceptions of, and satisfaction with Choose and Book. Little research has examined the Choose and Book Service or, at least, published information in this area is scarce. Therefore, it is important to investigate the vi...

Dr Peter Bath is a winner in the Trinity House 2008 Calendar Competition . His image of Trwyn Du lighthouse, below, was selected by a panel of judges, chaired by comedian and presenter Griff Rhys Jones, to appear in the 2008 Trinity House Calendar. "Trwyn Du" - © Peter A Bath 2007

Research seminar by Shahram Sedghi Thursday 18th October13.00-14.00 Digital medical imaging has become a vital component of a large number of applications within the current clinical settings. Additionally, the aim of information retrieval is to find as many relevant documents as possible. Thus, the concept of relevance, relevance judgment process, and research relevance criteria are the topics of many researches in information science. Medical images contain useful information and these collections serve a variety of clientele with different levels of ‎subject knowledge in medical schools and departments, and health care professionals seek medical images expecting to find relevant items to satisfy their ‎needs. However, to my knowledge, no previous study among the large body of user-oriented relevance studies focuses on how health care professionals perform real medical image seeking with real information needs and how health care professionals choose medical images that they need. Th...

On 18-19 October, Sheila Corrall will be in London for the Ark Group Conference on Demonstrating the Value of Knowledge Management, where she is presenting a paper on Knowledge management strategies in theory and practice: a higher education case study .

Yvonne Brindley, the Department’s Clerical Assistant, died on 26th September, aged 54. Yvonne was one of the longest-serving members of the Department, having joined us in November 1990. During her time here, she was responsible for office supplies, student inquiries, all of our dissertations and other publications, and - most importantly - was a friendly, welcoming face in Reception, the Department’s interface to members of other departments, visitors to the University, and to literally hundreds of students over the years. She was a lovely person on whom one could always depend for a smile or for support when times were hard: it’s perhaps not surprising that no less than 22 of her colleagues, both past and present, attended the funeral at Grenoside Crematorium on 5th October. We shall miss her greatly.

Research seminar Thursday 11th October 12.00-13.00 RC204 Simon Burtoft A great deal of the current research into Adult Basic Skills Education has focussed on two areas which are the need to encourage adults to improve their literacy skills, particularly by accessing good resources to help them improve their reading skills and also the need to increase technology skills in adult education. Whereas these issues are often studied in isolation, the aim of my research is to combine these two important elements, that is to encourage and help adults with low literacy skills to improve their reading skills through the production of guidance for improved and more accessible Internet resources which should encourage them to use the Internet as a learning resource to practice their reading and improve their technology skills.An important element of my research will be to design a prototype website that aims to overcome the current problems with Internet resources, or indeed the lack of such onlin...

An obituary for Professor Wilfred Saunders from the Times Online can be read here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article2616811.ece

There is a further series of discussion in the Centre for Information Literacy office in the virtual world, Second Life . The dates are: Thursday 4th October. -14-15.00 SL time (20.00 UK time) "Information Literacy and Media Literacy: what's the difference?" Thursday 18th October 2007. 08.00 SL time (4pm UK time) Discussion based on an IL article (to be selected in advance - suggestions welcome!) Thursday 25 October, 08.00 SL time (4pm UK time) "What is important for librarians to learn about Second Life and what role should they be taking?" Thursday 1 November14-15.00 SL time (20.00 UK time) "Inquiry-based learning in SL" All events are held in world in Second Life: Eduserv Island 200, 240, 43

Dr Miguel Nunes is in Vila Real, Portugal chairing the WWW/Internet 2007 Conference ( http://www.internet-conf.org/ )