Information School News

The library and information association, CILIP, have recently launched a new publication for members of their organisation, entitled 'Information Professional'. Information School lecturers Dr Jo Bates and Paula Goodale and PhD student Penny Andrews are featured in the publication in an article about their research project 'The Secret Life of a Weather Datum'. The project aimed to pilot a new approach for better understanding and communicating how values and practice influence the transformation of weather data on its journey from production through various contexts of big data reuse. You can read the article here.

CILIP Conference (5-6 July, Manchester) is a highlight of the professional calendar for library and information professionals in the UK, and this year the Information School is delighted to award bursaries for six postgraduate students to attend the conference and share their experiences. Our bursary award-winners are: Hannah Beckitt – MA Library and Information Services Management Erica Brown – MA Digital Library Management Jaimee McRoberts – MA Library and Information Services Management Itzelle Medina – PhD (and previous MA Librarianship student) Lucy Sinclair – MA Librarianship Louise Wasson – MA Library and Information Services Management All are looking forward to making the most of the conference programme , including excellent keynotes by Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, and Luciano Floridi of the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Your Career track, which is sponsored by the Information School. Watch out for tweets and blog posts from our students about thei...

Professor Stephen Pinfield, Dr Briony Birdi, Dr Sheila Webber, Pam McKinney, Peter Holdridge and Paula Goodale have been awarded a Teaching Excellence in Social Sciences Award for Outstanding Practice in Learning and Teaching' by the Faculty of Social Sciences. The award recognises the team's delivery of our innovative distance learning programme, MA Library & Information Services Management. The award will be presented at the TESS End of Year Celebration event later this month.

Paul Clough and Paula Goodale were co-organisers of, and contributors to, a half day workshop on Accessing Cultural Heritage at Scale on June 22. This was part of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2016: Big Libraries, Big Data, Big Innovation , held at Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA. Professor Clough also presented a paper coauthored with Daniel Grech: Investigating Cluster Stability when Analyzing Transaction Logs.

Information School staff Paula Goodale and Paul Clough are participating in the nationwide Pint of Science public engagement event next week. Pint of Science aims to bring the latest research to members of the public in an accessible format and friendly venue. A celebration of academic research, Pint of Science began in 2012 and has since grown to include universities across the UK, including Sheffield for the first time in 2016. Each event includes 2-3 talks, with plenty of time for Q&A with the researchers. Come along and find out what our iSchool researchers have been up to, and enjoy a pint, and some science. Paula will be talking about the Secret Life of a Weather Datum , as part of the ‘Earth, Wind and Sun: The Power of Weather’ event on Tuesday May 24 th at the Doctor’s Orders pub, 412 Glossop Road. Building on work done as part of a research project by the same name, Paula will explain how weather data collected right here in Sheffield contributes to global climate...

A workshop on Accessing Cultural Heritage at Scale is being organised by Professor Paul Clough and Paula Goodale of the Information School, along with colleagues Maristella Agosti (University of Padua, Italy) and Seamus Lawless (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland). Focusing on information access issues in large-scale digital libraries and online collections in the cultural heritage domain, the workshop aims to bring together academics and practitioners from the fields of digital libraries, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, and other related areas. The workshop aims to investigate current work, state-of-the-art solutions and future research needs that enhance discovery, exploration and serendipity within these valuable digital resources. A call for papers is available via the workshop web site http://achs.group.shef.ac.uk/ , inviting full papers, short papers and posters, and the deadline for submissions is 18th April...

March 2015 saw the launch of the lifeofdata.org.uk website by Jo Bates and Paula Goodale as part of the AHRC funded Secret Life of a Weather Datum project. The project, which has been running over the last 15 months, aimed to pilot a new approach for better understanding and communicating how socio-cultural values and practices interact with the transformation of weather data on its journey from initial production at Sheffield’s Weston Park weather station through to re-use in climate science and financial markets. The project also explored the contribution of citizen science generated weather data to this data infrastructure. The team worked with a variety of organisations and projects including Sheffield’s Weston Park Museum, the Met Office, the Old Weather project and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The lifeofdata.org.uk website that was developed as part of the project aims to present some of the initial findings of the project in an innova...