Information School News

Dr Stephen Pinfield ,and other members of the European University Association’s Expert Group on Science 2.0/Open Science are developing a road map to assist European universities in the transition to Open Access (OA). The roadmap will be launched in early 2016.and the initiative will take forward the   EUA’s April 2015 Antwerp Declaration that underlines the importance for universities of pursuing and further developing the opportunities offered by rapid technological change for new ways of working based on the principles of scholarly sharing and academic collaboration. The focus will be on the following main areas: Promoting access and use of research publications and research data); Addressing the related intellectual property rights and copyright policies; Fostering structured dialogue among all relevant stakeholders – including universities, university associations, National Rectors’ Conferences, research funders, libraries, scientific publishers, national...

On 3 November Dr Alex Peng will chair an Action Tank session on Smart Cities at the Business and Innovation Network event in Porto, Portugal. Although the smart city concept is driven by advanced technologies, its success is highly dependent on the engagement of citizens. Historically, such engagement has been problematic, especially considering individual differences in terms of age, education, skills, income levels, and family composition. A lack of citizen engagement is increasingly recognised as a global issue affecting successful deployment and usage of smart technologies worldwide. This session will address the issue of citizen engagement with new smart technologies and will discuss ways to overcome this lack of engagement. This session will focus on the new promising technologies and possible industrial application of flexible electronic.

On 4 November 2015 Dr Briony Birdi , will be a panel member at the Engaged Learning Sheffield event, which will encourage discussion around themes including building and sustaining relationships with the community and co-producing knowledge. The event is connected to Briony’s 2014-15 funded Engaged Curriculum project ‘ Supporting Isolated Adults via the Six Book Challenge’ . All staff are invited to this event which will take place 2:30-4:00pm, Afred Denny Conference Room. Sign up for your place here.

Join us for an afternoon of networking and to learn about your School’s successes, current activities and student projects. Date:  27 November 2015 Time:  3:00pm Location:  ispace,  Information School , The University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street, Sheffield, S1 4DP Dress code:  Smart Casual Registration and refreshments are at 3:00pm and the event includes:  3:15pm Welcome address 3:45pm Current student projects 4:00pm Refreshments and networking 4:30pm Facilities tour 5:30pm Close There is also a further networking opportunity with staff and alumni at  Inox Dine  at 5:45pm. Please contact Teresa Smith, t.j.smith @sheffield.ac.uk   by  30 October 2015 if you would like to attend the event.  

As part of the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences , Professor Peter Bath has organised the 'Building Trust & Sharing Health Information Online' event. The event will discuss how people with life-threatening illnesses share information online and how people trust others. Trust is very important among people with serious illnesses who share personal details online, how do people know who to trust and who not? Further information on the project can be found here . Date: Thursday 12 November 2015 Time : 6:30-8:30pm (with refreshments served afterwards) Venue: Crucible Theatre, 55 Norfolk Street, Sheffield Registration: This free event is open to all, book your place here .

Dr Paul Reilly, Senior Lecturer at the Information School has been recognised by Jisc as one of the 50 most influential HE professionals using social media .

Dr Farida Vis , Director, Visual Social Medial Lab , Research Fellow at the Information School and Pia Mancini, Director, Net Democracy are working on a WEF project which examines algorithmic accountability and governance. Farida and Pia both sit on the Global Agenda Council on Social Media 2014-2016 and f urther information on the project can be found here . The WEF Summit on the Global Agenda 2015 , is   currently being held in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Dr Paul Reilly of the Information School is the UK Principal Researcher and Work Package Leader on the ‘ CascEff: Modelling of dependencies and cascading effects for emergency management in crisis situations’ project. The Sheffield team, consisting of Dr Reilly and Dr Dimitrinka Atanasova, aims to identify examples of good practice for public communication during both natural and human-made crises. They will focus on how citizen and professional journalists have contributed to the information flows that emerge during such incidents. This EU PF7 funded project began in March 2014 and the Sheffield team are responsible for conducting interviews with key agencies involved in incident management; framing and content analysis of news media coverage and analysis of social media content. A copy of the deliverable, ‘A strategy for communication between key agencies and members of the public during crisis situations,” can be found here.

Last week there was a strong showing from the Sheffield iSchool at the European Conference on Information Literacy held in Tallinn, Estonia. Sheila Webber led a workshop on Supporting Information Literacy in MOOC Learning , and was co-presenter (with Bill Johnston, Strathclyde University) of Information Literacy and the Scottish Independence Referendum (2014): An Autoethnographic Exploration of Political Decision-making . She had also been asked to be raporteur for the conference and presented her summing up as part of the closing session. In the doctoral seminar, Jess Elmore presented on Exploring the Information Literacy Experiences of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) Learners: A Discussion of Methods and Evi Tramantza on Electronic Engineering Student Information Literacy Needs: A Pilot Study at the University of Surrey . Jess Elmore also presented a paper based on her Masters research: How Do Home Educating Families’ Experiences of Information Literacy Relate ...

Dr Barbara Sen  has been awarded one of the Faculty's 2015 Teaching Excellence in Social Sciences (TESS) awards for outstanding learning and teaching. Congratulations to Barbara.

The Postgraduate Advantage  scheme provides internship bursaries for taught postgraduate students in the Faculty of Social Sciences. The internships can fit around your studies and support will be provided to you through the scheme. Successful applicants will receive a £1000 bursary from the University to undertake a 100 hour internship through this scheme. This can be used as payment for undertaking the Internship, travel or living expenses.  This is an opportunity for you to: -        apply skills you are gaining within your degree to the workplace -        further enhance your CV -        gain an insight into a particular career or industry -        build your network of professional contacts   You have the opportunity to approach an organisation of your choice or apply for one of the roles which we have al...

Join us for an afternoon of networking and to learn about your School’s successes, current activities and student projects. Date:  27 November 2015 Time:  3:00pm Location:  ispace,  Information School , The University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street, Sheffield, S1 4DP Dress code:  Smart Casual Registration and refreshments are at 3:00pm and the event includes:  3:15pm Welcome address 3:45pm Current student projects 4:00pm Refreshments and networking 4:30pm Facilities tour 5:30pm Close There is also a further networking opportunity with staff and alumni at  Inox Dine  at 5:45pm. Please contact Teresa Smith, t.j.smith @sheffield.ac.uk   by  30 October 2015 if you would like to attend the event.       

As part of the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences ,  Professor Peter Bath  has organised the 'Building Trust & Sharing Health Information Online' event. The event will discuss how people with life-threatening illnesses share information online and how people trust others. Trust is very important among people with serious illnesses who share personal details online, how do people know who to trust and who not? Further information on the project can be found here . Date: Thursday 12 November 2015 Time : 6:30-8:30pm (with refreshments served afterwards) Venue: Crucible Theatre, 55 Norfolk Street, Sheffield Registration: This free event is open to all, book your place here .

Whilst innovation is frequently associated with disruptive activities of entrepreneurs and firms, in the last few years we have seen a growing interest in how innovation can be ‘inclusive’, with a particular focus on innovations in developing countries. We’re beginning to build a picture about ‘inclusive innovation’, but what we don’t know much about is the policy that supports this ‘inclusive innovation’. What can governments do to encourage the emergence and growth of inclusive innovation? In a new working paper published by Dr Christopher Foster (iSchool) and Richard Heeks (University of Manchester) we look to answer this question. The paper is inspired by earlier work on the mobile phone sector in Kenya, which revealed that policy was integral in successfully pushing expansion to low income groups. In this paper we analyse inclusive innovation in a wider set of sectors to build more general advice for policy makers. A short summary of paper can be found here and t...

Sheila Webber was the acting chair of the inaugural interim board meeting for the new European Chapter of the Global Alliance for Partnerships on Media and Information Literacy (GAPMIL), the UNESCO-supported initiative on Media and Information Literacy. The meeting took place at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris last week.

Professor Peter Bath will give a talk entitled ‘eHealth and mHealth - future perspectives’ at the 35 th Wireless World Research Forum meeting in Copenhagen on 16 October 2015. The meeting will focus on the development and deployment of 5G and features speakers from industry, academia and public institutions to discuss implementation elements of 5G.

PhD student and LIRG student dissertation prize paper winner Jessica Elmore has been published in Library and Information Research . Her paper An exploration of the information literacy experiences of home educating families (8-28) was co-written with Dr Peter Stordy

Dr Briony Birdi will present at the Interpreting Communities – Minority Writing in European Literary Fields conference in London on 30 October 2015. The conference is hosted by the University of Cambridge and the Institute of Modern Languages Research. Dr Birdi will present her paper ‘Not just for ethnics’ which explores the impact of a black fiction intervention on public library users.

Dr Briony Birdi will attend the Youth Libraries conference in Damuir, Glasgow on 22 and 23 October 2015. Dr Birdi will run two workshops on '[Youth] Library services for BME communities'.

On 21 October Dr Briony Birdi will be hosting a visit from Dr. Leanne Bowler , Associate Professor from the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. Dr Bowler specialises in the area of 'youth interaction with information, data and technology and will be discussing possible research collaborations with Dr Birdi and Professor Nigel Ford. Dr Bowler will also attend an offsite session with the MA Librarianship students at Sheffield Schools Library Services at Stadia Technology Park.

A paper recently published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology which reports on an analysis of library and information science (LIS) departments worldwide compared the number of articles published in selected top LIS journals. Using this metric the Sheffield iSchool is ranked first in the UK and second in Europe.

Ahead of Open Access Week, which starts 19 October 2015, Dr Stephen Pinfield has published research exploring the key challenges of how to make OA work.   The research suggests that the current challenges now focus on how OA can be made to work in practice, having moved away from the discussion of whether it should happen at all. Following large scale analysis of OA discourse from the last five years Stephen identified key issues, particularly in relation to major strands of OA development including repositories and journals. You can read more on Stephen’s recent post on the LSE Impact Blog.

Congratulations to Sheila Webber , Senior Lecturer in the Information School, on being announced the prestigious UKeiG’s 2015 Jason Farradane winner .  The award is in recognition of Sheila’s excellence in education and teaching in information science, and for raising the profile of the information profession.  Her nomination included her deep insight into the library world and understanding of the pressures of a modern information workplace which together make her a fantastic supervisor and mentor who always supports her students, even those who are not on campus. Further information on Sheila’s award can be found here . Many congratulations to Sheila.

Dr Jorge Martins will participate in the OPEN DAYS Master Class at the 13 th European Week of Regions and Cities event in Brussels, 12-15 October 2015. Jorge will discuss his paper on ‘Firms’ Relational Capabilities in the Context of Old Industrial Regions’. The event is co-hosted by the European Commission and the Committee of the Regions where 6,000 EU, national, regional and local leaders, fund’s managers, researchers and final beneficiaries will discuss the challenges and opportunities of mobilising EU Cohesion Policy funding for bottom-up growth projects.

Dr Stephen Pinfield presents at La Science Ouverte en M arche conference in Paris on 13 October 2015. The conference focuses on the impact of open science on research and publishing. Open access publishing, open data and scientific collaborative working are key items on the agenda. Stephen’s talk is entitled ‘The Cost of Gold Open Access: A Cast Study of the UK’ and explains work carried out with Sheffield colleagues, Professor Peter Bath and PhD student Jennifer Salter . This follows work recently completed for Universities UK and a copy of the UUK report can be found here .

Dimitrinka Atanasova of the Information School will talk about representations of obesity in online newspapers and their implications for personal health and policy support. The talk, hosted by SAPPHIRE ( Social Science APPlied to Healthcare Improvement REsearch ), will take place on 19 October 2015, shortly after the World Obesity Federation’s first World Obesity Day on 11 October, with the aim of bringing the issue into the media spotlight and raise awareness.  

A blog post written by PhD student Wasim Ahmed , with the help of a Masters student Alexandra Boutopoulou , both whom study at the Information School, was tweeted out by Paul Mason Economics Editor at Channel 4 News. The post analysed the #ThisIsACoup hashtag, and highlighted important users whom helped drive the hashtag to become viral. The blog post was a collaborative effort with help from John Swain , head of Data Science at Yang Brothers, Visibrain Focus whom provided the data via Twitter’s Firehose API. Find out more here .

Congratulations to Dr Stephen Pinfield and Professor Peter Willet , both of the Information School, who have secured funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for the project “Open -access mega-journals and the future of scholarly communications". The project will be led by Dr Pinfield as Principal Investigator. Professor Willet, along with Claire Creaser and Jenny Fry of Loughborough University, will be Co-Investigators. The project will commence in November 2015 and run to October 2017. Find out more about the project here.