Information School News

Blog: My Year as a Librarianship Student By Fernando Bravo  Fernando studied Librianship in 2019/20 Hello everyone, I am writing this text for prospective students interested in the University of Sheffield Information School. I’m a mature and international student who planned to study the MA Librarianship a long time ago after working some years in University, Public and National Libraries. The time here has been challenging, the overall course is one of the best in the world and with a very good reputation between the librarian community, certified for one of the most important professional associations in the world. U.K library information association: CILIP . During the course I have had the opportunity to assist activities related to my field, for instance, a Reference Training Session in the British Library in London, a session in Manchester with new professionals , also in Sheffield I visited the headquarters of the Children Library Service and the children book award , as w...

Blog: My Year as an Information Systems Student Ying Ji Ying Ji at the BBC I am an MSc Information System student this academic year, and also a Student Ambassador for the Information School. The year of living and studying in the iSchool has given me a very deep and beautiful memory. The Information School provides a variety of courses for student learning. In the two semesters, I have learned the knowledge related to information system modelling, planning and organization management, taken programming (JAVA), database design and business intelligence as my optional modules. In addition, I learned about the legal and ethical issues of computing and information systems in society, which expanded my background knowledge.  At University, we have lots of different learning methods such as lectures, seminars, lab classes and group meetings. In my opinion, most of these courses are based on the case of the enterprise work, so that students can be familiar with future real work tasks and...

Loneliness and Covid-19: Social Distancing Versus Social Isolation Professor of Health Informatics, Peter Bath, was asked to write a piece for Inside Government, on loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article draws on research Professor Bath has undertaken for the Space for Sharing project  on online sharing for people in extreme circumstances, a portion of which was on loneliness amongst older people. You can read the full blog post here:  https://blog.insidegovernment.co.uk/loneliness-covid-19-pandemic-social-distancing-versus-social-isolation

Professor Stephen Pinfield, Dr Simon Wakeling and Professor Peter Willet have had a blog published on the major global publisher blog 'Scholarly Kitchen', summaring a recent article published from the Open-Access Mega-Journals project . You can read the blog post here. The blog discusses article commenting and community reviewing in the context of OAMJs. Scholarly Kitchen, established by the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), is a moderated and independent blog helping to fulfil SSP's mission to 'advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking.'

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly and Research Associate Dr. Ioanna Tantanasi have published an article entitled ‘Social media’s not all bad- it’s saving lives in disaster zones ‘ for the Conversation UK last week. The piece draws on their  CascEff and IMPROVER work on social media and crisis communication. Thanks to Stephen Harris for his editorial support and the invitation to comment on this issue.

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly has published a piece for Democratic Audit UK on the role of social media in the Kingsmill bread video row, which culminated in the resignation of Sinn Fein MP Barry McElduff last week. Dr Reilly argues that this incident illustrates how hybrid media logics operate in Northern Ireland, with professional journalists increasingly using social media such as Twitter not only to source stories, but also to hold politicians to account for what they post online. The post can be found here

In 2017 the London School of Economics and Political Sciences Impact Blog received a total of 1,412,929 page views. PhD student Wasim Ahmed built on his 2015 post, which was also ranked among the top read, with a follow up post in 2017. The post was titled: Using Twitter as a data source: an overview of social media research tools (updated for 2017) . The post was ranked amongst most viewed in 2017 as well as being featured in the round up of top posts about communicating research with social media . In 2017 Wasim Ahmed represented the Information School at an expert panel at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) on the importance of promoting research beyond academia. Wasim Ahmed noted that engaging with blog led to increased page views, citations, and interest inside and outside academia related to Wasim’s PhD.

Information School lecturer Chris Foster recently published a new post on the SPERI comment blog entitled " The balancing act of Brexit and digital trade " As the UK leaves the EU it risks a potential ‘digital cliff-edge’. How it navigates its way through global tensions around digital trade rules will orientate the shape of the economy for years to come. This post is part of his ongoing research looking at cross-border data flows and the political economy of digital trade.

The ‘Assessing the Value of Blogs and Social Media to Research Communication and Impact’ panel was held at LSE on Wednesday 14 June at 5.00pm. The panel featured doctoral student Wasim Ahmed , from the Information School. The event was very well attended with over 70 delegates. Wasim noted that engaging with social media and blogs has the potential to generate more interest in academic work. Picture as the panel was underway. Credit: Carlos Arrébola Other panellists for the sessions included Kieran Booluck (Editor, LSE Impact blog); Chris Gilson (Editor, LSEUSAPP blog); Kathy Christian (Altmetric); Professor Daniel Miller (UCL ‘Why We Post’); Cheryl Brumley (The Economist); and Sierra Williams (Peer J). The panel was chaired by Amy Mollett (LSE Social Media Manager).

Extract taken from the LSE Impact blog: Following his initial post on this topic in 2015, Wasim Ahmed has updated and expanded his rundown of the tools available to social scientists looking to analyse social media data. A number of new applications have been released in the intervening period, with the increasing complexity of certain research questions also having prompted some tools to increase their data retrieval functionalities. Although platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp have more active users, Twitter’s unique infrastructure and the near-total availability of its data have ensured its popularity among researchers remains high. You can read the full post here .