Information School News

Mark Sanderson is a keynote speaker at the 1st Information Retrieval Facility Conference, held in Vienna, May 2010. Mark's talk is called "Is this document relevant? Errr it’ll do".

Dr Andrew Cox has won a University of Sheffield Senate Award for Excellence in Learning & Teaching in the Rising Star category. This is a University-wide scheme that rewards teaching that is judged to be innovative, engaging, inspiring, motivational and supportive. Only a few awards are made in each category annually.

Jonathan Foster has been awarded a grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their "Beyond Text" programme to investigate the archiving of a performance work by British Artists Blast Theory. The project is called "Riders Have Spoken: Designing and Evaluating an Archive for Replaying Interactive Performances". The project is in collaboration with the Universities of Nottingham and Exeter, and will run from July 2009 to March 2010. Further information is available at: http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/sg-jonathan-foster/index.php

Daniela Petrelli has been awarded a EPSRC studentship for a PhD on "Exploring the design, making and use of information appliances for the home" The PhD is a cross-faculty initiative and is shared with the department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. Interested students can get in touch, but they must have a background in Computer Science or Engineering and must be UK or EU. The research is in line with Daniela's most recent research. Have a look at the Family Memory Radio video http://dagda.shef.ac.uk/daniela/Daniela_Petrelli/Research.html (papers available at http://dagda.shef.ac.uk/daniela/Daniela_Petrelli/Publications.html)

Last week were visited by Karin de Jager and Mary Nassimbeni, from the Centre for Information Literacy / Department of Information Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. We discussed library and information curricula and our work in information literacy. Our visitors talked about their own work in Information Literacy and libraries, including work with public libraries, school libraries and academic libraries. They met with with staff (including Sheila Webber, Sheila Corrall and Pam McKinney) and students in the Department.

Nashrawan Taha reflects on participating in the 7th International conference on Network Learning [ http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/ ] "The conference was held in a small city in Denmark, Aalborg. It was a very good experience for me to participate in such a prestigious conference and to have had the chance to meet the leaders of the field, such as Caroline Haythornthwaite and also Etienne Wenger, who was the keynote speaker. My presentation was in the first session of the conference and I was the first one to present! I was really glad that Caroline Haythornthwaite, on whose work mine is based, was presenting her paper at the same session as me. I was overwhelmed to have the chance to meet her and discuss with her my research and get her comments and suggestions on my work. On the second day of the conference, I met Wenger and discussed with him few things about his theory (communities of pratice). It was a great honour for me to talk with these famous people in t...

Current students on the MSc in Electronic and Digital Library Management are featured in CILIP update this month (May 2010), in their article imagining 10 years into the future.

Congratulations to Peter who is winner of the Patterson-Crane Award for 2010. The Patterson-Crane Award is a biennial award administered by the Dayton and Columbus sections of the American Chemical Society. The award acknowledges outstanding contributions to the field of chemical information, including the design, development, production, or management of chemical information systems or services; electronic access and retrieval of chemical information; critically evaluated data compilations; information technology applications in chemistry; or other significant chemical documentation. More details of the award are available at this link.

Peter Bath recently participated in a video debate on Health Informatics for the British Computer Society (BCS) / Chartered Institute for IT. The video debate was made to coincide with the annual Healthcare Computing 2010 Conference . During the debate the panel of experts discussed potential career structures in Health Informatics and the NHS National Programme for IT The video can be viewed on the web site of the British Computer Society .

Prof Sheila Corrall travels to Portugal this week to advise the Universidade Nova de Lisboa on the development of its Information Literacy Strategy. During her visit she will also be giving a public lecture entitled 'From Librarianship to the iField: the Development of the Information Discipline'.