Information School News

CILIP's Career Development Group (CDG) Annual New Professionals Conference 2010 entitled "Proving your worth in challenging times" is taking place in Sheffield, on the 5th July, in collaboration with the Department.

Peter Stordy promoting the department's undergraduate degrees at the 'Next Steps Conference' (Doncaster College - see above) 28th June 2010

Sheila Webber has had a busy couple of weeks: last week she presented a poster on Second Life and Inquiry Based Learning at the CILASS Summer Festival , a further poster on Developing diverse learners' conceptions of information literacy through different tools and spaces at the Enquiry, Autonomy and Graduate conference held at Sheffield Hallam Conference, and (in the virtual world, Second Life) chaired the final event in the ESRC Research Seminar series on Children's and young people's digital literacies in virtual online spaces . On Monday Sheila gave a talk, Why use Second Life , at the AULIC (Avon Libraries in Cooperation) Tech Day in Bath, and at the moment she is at the COLIS7 conference in London, where she has presented a seminar paper on information literacy.

Rachel Bickley (MA Librarianship) and Simon Wakeling (MSc Electronic & Digital Library Management) were invited panel members representing next-generation professionals at a lively session on the future of academic libraries at the SCONUL Conference in Leeds on 17 June. Rachel highlighted the need for sophisticated space management and growth in the teaching work of librarians, while Simon argued that although the future landscape may look quite different, key professional values will persist. Read more about the Libraries of the Future project at www.futurelibraries.info/content/.

Wafaa Al Motawah (PhD Student) and Prof Sheila Corrall travelled to the picturesque University of Exeter campus on 21 June to lead a workshop on 'Using rich pictures to investigate issues and solve problems in university and college libraries'. The workshop was part of the 5th Joint Conference of the Colleges of Further & Higher Education and University, College & Research Groups of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) and was inspired by Wafaa's use of the technique in investigating the role of university libraries in supporting the research of graduate students.

Professor Sheila Corrall , Barbara Sen and PhD student Liz Brewster all attended the 12 th European Conference of Medical and Health Libraries in Estoril , near Lisbon in Portugal. Barbara gave a Continuing Education Course on using group reflection to evaluate projects, which was very well received and enjoyed by participants. Liz gave her first plenary, entitled "'Read this, it's good for you!': using qualitative methodologies to explore user needs and strategic aims". Feedback from the audience was highly positive, with one person commenting that it was the clearest explanation and rationale for using qualitative methods that he had heard. Liz was able to attend the conference thanks to the generosity of EAHIL and CILIP's Health Libraries Group Career Development group. Sheila also gave a plenary, providing a framework for development based on positioning the health librarian as a blended professional. This was also well received by the audience, who both ...

To sign the end of the Memoir EU project, the Department is hosting a multidisciplinary and international workshop. Humanists, designers and technologists will jointly explore how autobiographical memories can be captured by innovative digital devices and preserved for generations. Participants are as diverse as: philosophers, psychologists, historians, industrial designers, poets, sociologists, electronic engineers, computer and information scientists. Guest institutions are: Free University of Berlin, Technical University of Eindhoven - the Netherlands, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Microsoft Research Cambridge, Nokia, General Electrics Digital Energy, Natural Interaction, University of Portsmouth, Manchester Metropolitan University and Sheffield Hallam University.

Congratulations to Wei Meng Lee, one of our Librarianship students from last year. Wei Meng Lee is a co-author on a full paper in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology; the leading international journal in our discipline. The paper was based on his dissertation work where he analysed a web query log provided by Microsoft Research. Wei Meng was one of our distinction students from last year.

What do IM graduates go on to do? How do they experience the transition to working life? What parts of their course prove most useful? These are some of the questions that a Departmental project, funded by CILASS, has set out to answer. The project on early career stories of IM graduates will be interviewing former students of the Department. The interviews are being conducted by two current second year students, Mohammed Al-Daoud and Stephanie Rudd, and the project manager is Andrew Cox. More information is available @ http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/research/projects/earlycareerstories.html

Congratulations to Rebecca Austin of the School of Education, who has won the Department of Information Studies' 2010 Photo Competition with her image "Science and Nature". 2010 Photo Competition winner

Andrew Cox will be key note speaker at the 34th European Library Automation Group conference in Helsinki on the 9th June.

Sheila Webber was an invited speaker at two conferences recently: the Oiras a ler conference in Lisbon, Portugal on 20th May, and the INFORMA 2010 conference held in Prague, on 25th May. In both cases she was speaking about Information Literacy for the 21st Century : her presentations are here (Lisbon) and here (Prague)