Information School News

Last week, members of the Information School attended the 2017 iConference in Wuhan, China. One of our PhD students, Wasim Ahmed, gives his highlights below, along with some of his photos from the trip. --- My highlights from my trip included me presenting a poster on my pilot study from my PhD, and which received good interest from delegates, particularly concerning the methodology that was used. A number of very useful connections were made from across the world, and there was a lot of interest in the 2018 edition of the iConference which will take place in Sheffield  hosted in collaboration with Northumbria University.   I also enjoyed visiting the Yellow Crane Tower, Hubei Provincial Museum, the East Lake, Wuhan, and the Yangtze River. Wuhan is a beautiful city, and the people are very friendly. I read online that the people in Wuhan are unusually nice, and I have to say that this is very true and I felt very welcome in the city. I...

After the events of the iConference in Wuhan, China last week, the Information School held an alumni event on Saturday 25th March at Hyatt Regency Wuhan Optics Valley, attended by several of our past students who live in China. Information School staff Dr Andrew Cox and Dr Jorge Martins attended, as well as former staff member and MSc/PhD alumnus Dr Miguel Nunes. Our alumni travelled from Beijing, Shengzhen, Hainan and Guangzhou to Wuhan to attend the gathering and everyone had a very enjoyable time.

Last week, members of the Information School attended the 2017 iConference in Wuhan, China. One of our academic staff, senior lecturer Dr Andrew Cox, gives his highlights below, along with some of his photos from the trip. My highlights of the 2017 iConference included one of our PhD students, Piyapat Jarusawat, presenting her excellent paper "Community involvement in the Management of Palm Leaf Manuscripts as Lanna Cultural Material in Thailand" to a packed audience. The paper was shortlisted for the award for Most Interesting Preliminary Research Paper. Another of our PhD students, Shuyang Li, also gave an excellent research presentation. Our Head of School, Professor Peter Bath gave a presentation announcing Sheffield as the venue for the iConference in 2018. We are hosting this event in collaboration with Northumbria University. We held an informal social dinner with some of our Chinese alumni around the conference proceedings, which was lovely. I also bump...

Professor Stephen Pinfield has co-authored a major new report on the Open Access market, conducted on behalf of OpenAIRE and the European Commission in late 2016 and early 2017. This report could make important policy recommendations relating to the future of Open Access. The report can be read about on the LIBER blog here and read in full in the Zenodo repository here .

An article entitled "The Use of Technology in Group-Work: A Situational Analysis of Students' Reflective Writing", written by our lecturer Pam McKinney, has been chosen as a featured article for this month's Informed Librarian Online. Each monthly issue of Informed Librarian, in addition to linking directly to the latest tables of contents of over 320 journals, with links to full-text as available, selects a few journal articles to highlight for many thousands of readers. The Informed Librarian Online also offers our members access to ILOSearch, our database of over 341,000 journal articles and documents from the library journals we index. It is a fully-searchable sophisticated database which functions as an index to the library literature. Members can find the article at  http://www.informedlibrarian.com/ .

Our doctoral student Wasim Ahmed recently delivered a guest lecture at the School of Health and Related Research. Wasim’s talk centred on looking at some new technologies which can be used for disease surveillance.