Information School News

Manchester bound LILAC, the Information Literacy conference, took part in Manchester this year and I was fortunate enough to attend because of a generous bursary I won from Sheffield's Information School. The iSchool is where I am currently studying for the part-time, long-distance MA in Library and Information Services Management (LISM). So yes, this was the first time I had the chance to meet fellow students and my lecturers in person; at my first librarianship conference. LILAC is a unique experience and with more than 60 parallel sessions to choose from this year, the diversity of cutting-edge information literacy research and practice was well represented. One of the panels I attended (and more on that a bit further down) discussed whether and in what way information literacy is its own discipline of Library Science and - to put if flippantly - one look at the  programme  bears much of the answer. There is a certain nervousness that comes with attending your first b...

As I collected my lanyard and notebook at the start of the LILAC information literacy conference, I noticed a bee theme. From a display of origami bees crafted by delegates to the logo on the cover of our conference notebooks, bees reflected this year’s Manchester setting. They also reminded me of the value of library conferences. Like bees working together, the conference allowed library and information professionals from around the world to gather and share ideas around information literacy. The sessions that addressed library teaching with diverse learners stood out to me, as one of the reasons I wanted to attend LILAC was to keep working on the inclusivity of my teaching skills. One of these was a session on ‘Dyslexia, creativity and information-seeking: how can academic librarians acknowledge neurodiversity in their information literacy teaching practice?’ by Lynne Beveridge. This session helped us to understand some of the barriers undergraduates with dyslexia encounter in thei...

92 per cent of research and its real-world impact at the University of Sheffield has been rated as world-leading or internationally excellent 91 per cent of the Information School's research is rated world-leading or internationally excellent Our impact submission was rated 7th nationally The REF results are used to inform the allocation of around £2 billion per year of public funding for research The University of Sheffield’s submission to the REF included 3,684 outputs, 114 impact case studies and 1,690 staff The framework assesses the quality of our research, as well as the impact of that research beyond academia, measuring the benefits of innovative collaboration with business, industry, the public sector and civil society organisations which help to translate groundbreaking ideas into real-world solutions The University of Sheffield is today (12 May 2022) celebrating its pioneering research which is addressing some of the biggest global challenges and making a real-world impac...