Information School News

The iSchool will have a strong presence at LILAC 2019 , the UK’s annual information literacy conference, held this year 24-26 April in Nottingham, UK. We are a conference sponsor, and are looking forward to meeting up with current students, alumni and other visitors on our exhibition stand. During conference breaks Dr Pam McKinney and current students Elle Codling and Danielle Czerkaszyn will be happy to chat with you about our courses and research. We would love to catch up with any Information School students or alumni who are at the conference so do come and introduce yourselves! We are also leading two conference sessions. On Thursday 25th, Sheila Webber and Pam McKinney  (pictured) are running a workshop:  What's my approach? Deciding on the approach to use for your research . Sheila said “There’s increasing interest from practitioners in carrying out research in the workplace, to improve practice and inform decisions. Before starting the project it’s a good idea t...

Later today, Sheila Webber will be contributing to a compass point session,  Nonprofit Commons past reflections, future directions, at the 12th Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference , taking place 4-6 April 2019 in the 3D virtual world, Second Life. She was invited onto the panel as Leader of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable , a weekly educators discussion forum that has been running for 10 years. The other panellists are Dr. Cynthia Calongne (Professor with Colorado Technical University); Joyce Bettencourt (co-founder of AvaCon, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the growth and development of 3D immersive spaces, and Creative Director of The Vesuvius Group); Renne Emiko Brock, Multimedia Communications Program Coordinator at Peninsula College, teacher and artist;  and Buffy Beale, retired educational technology expert, and representing Bridges for Women, a Canadian nonprofit. The session takes place 6pm to 7pm UK time, at https://maps.second...

In formation Scho ol Research Associate Dr Eli s a Serafinelli will present a t the I ntern ational Di s aster Risk Management Conference , Davos, Switzerland on 31st August 2016. The title of Dr Serafinelli's presentation is: “SPEAK: Social media and crisis communication during cascading disasters”. Her talk will present the findings discussed in the final report of the research project CascEff and outlines the best practices for communication between key agencies and the public during disasters.

Dr Paul Reilly from the Information School will be presenting two papers at the IAMRC conference , Leicester, 27-31 July 2016. On 30 July 2016 Paul will present Participatory Media and Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland: Lessons from the 2014 Ardoyne parade dispute in Belfast Memory, Commemoration and Communication: Looking Back, Looking Forward, International Association of Media and Communication Research, Leicester, UK, 27-31 July.  On 31 July 2016 he will present Affective publics and the 2015 Channel Tunnel Fire. Atanasova, D and Reilly, P. (2016). Affective publics and the 2015 Channel Tunnel Fire, Memory, Commemoration and Communication: Looking Back, Looking Forward. International Association of Media and Communication Research, Leicester, UK, 27-31 July.

In association with the Chemical Structure Association Trust and the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society, the School hosted the Seventh Joint Sheffield Conference on Chemoinformatics from the 4 to the 6 July 2016.   This triennial conference is now firmly established in the chemoinformatics calendar, and attracted 116 delegates from around the world.   The ten sessions included 37 poster and 28 oral presentations, with the conference dinner being held in the splendid surroundings of Sheffield Cathedral.

Information School PhD student Syeda Hina Shahid attended the CoLIS 9 confererence, Uppsala, Sweden, 27-29 June 2016. Syeda Hina Shahid presenting at CoLIS conference Syeda presented a paper: "Conceptions of school libraries and the role of school librarians: findings from case studies of primary schools in Lahore".

On 2nd June Pamela McKinney presented a paper, coauthored with Sheila Webber , at the 8th Creating Knowledge conference , which took place  in Reykjavík, Iceland. It is embedded below. Teaching the next generation of Information Literacy educators: pedagogy and learning from Sheila Webber

Last week at the International Qualitative and Quantitative methods in Libraries Conference held in London, Sheila Webber gave an invited plenary talk: Trends and Challenges to Future Libraries: Exploring Research Approaches , which is embedded below. In it she presented the challenging future of (academic) libraries, described examples of phenomenographic, ethnograpic, autoethnographic, case study and action research, and finally explained how qualitative research can develop librarians and libraries and enable them to meet future challenges. Trends and Challenges to Future Libraries: Exploring Research Approaches from Sheila Webber

Wasim Ahmed , second year PhD student in the Health Informatics Research group, presented a paper co-authored with Professor Peter Bath and Dr Gianluca Demartin i on the Ethical Issues of Researching Twitter at the Social Media and Research Ethics conference on 22 March 2016.   Organised by the Research Ethics Group of the Academy of Social Sciences and the NSMNSS network, the one-day conference aimed to further develop and explore the ethics of social science research using social media. The slides for the presentation can be found here .

The 2018 iConference will be hosted by the University of Sheffield Information School and the University of Northumbria Department of Mathematics and Information Science. The conference will be hosted in Sheffield from 25-28 March, 2018. Further information on the conference can be found on the iSchools website here .

The Research Ethics Group of the Academy of Social Sciences and the New Social Media New Social Science (NSMNSS) network are hosting a one day conference that aims to further develop and explore the ethics of social science research using social media. The purpose of the conference is to move the debate forward and provide examples of good practice. PhD student Wasim Ahmed will present a paper at the con fe rence, co-authored with Dr Gianluca Demartini and Prof Peter Bath in the Ethical Practicalities Parallel Session A on Using Twitter as a data source: An overview of ethical challenges. Conference Registration on eventbrite can be found here . Twitter hashtag for the conference is: #SoMeEthics . The full programme can be found here or here [pdf] and the abstract booklet is here [pdf] . The Twitter hashtag for the conference is: #SoMeEthics

On 3 December 2015 Dr Stephen Pinfield will speak at the Baeredygtig Open Access Conference, Copenghagen. Stephen will present research carried out with Professor Peter Bath and Jennifer Salter on their work on open access for both a UUK report and other research

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.

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'.

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 .

Four iSchool members presented at the i3 conference in Aberdeen, Scotland in June 2015. Sheila Webber gave a paper on Self-identified Information Behaviour of learners in the FutureLearn “Play” MOOC . Three of her PhD students also presented on their research: Joseph Essel ( Conceptions of the Information literate teacher by teacher trainees at a Ghanaian University ), Syeda Shahid ( Assessing children’s IL skills: Findings from a multiple case study of six primary schools in Pakistan ) and Kondwani Wella ( Experiencing HIV and AIDS information: a phenomenological study of serodiscordant couples in Malawi ). Additionally, some iSchool alumni presented including Sara Chizari who graduated with MSc Information Management in 2010 ( How do cultural differences and cognitive styles affect online information searching behaviour? ) and Yi Wen Hon who graduated with MA Librarianship last year (presenting on her Masters research, Representations of privacy in the context of care.data: conf...

iFutures, now in its third year, was held on the 7th of July 2015. The conference is for all information science PhD students and is organised by PhD students from the University of Sheffield’s Information School. The conference is deliberately open and welcoming for early stage researchers to present their research to their peers in a constructive environment.  The keynote speakers included Prof. Helen Kennedy in the morning session and Prof. Fabio Ciravegna in the afternoon session. As with previous years there were two parallel workshop sessions, one led by Prof. Paul Clough and the other by Dr Barbara Sen. PhD students across the Information Science discipline presented their research over three sessions:  the morning session: applied social media, the Pecha Kucha Session, and the paper session. Over l unch PhD students also had the opportunity to showcase their research via colourful poster presentations.  This year saw PhD delegates and speakers from not on...

The iFutures conference for PhD researchers in the information science field is back for 2015. Organised by PhD students in the Information School, 2015 sees the third running of the conference.   The theme of the 2015 conference is “Open Information Science: exploring new landscapes”. Openness is a key part of Information Science research, from using open source tools and big open data sets to open standards advocacy, creating open accessible environments in institutions, and opening information science to radical perspectives and exploring diverse communities. The conference will give delegates the chance to talk about how open information influences and relates to their research. In addition to these workshops, the programme will include keynote talks by two distinguished speakers - Fabio Ciravenga (Professor of Computer Science, University of Sheffield) and Helen Kennedy (Professor of Sociology, University of Sheffield), who will get to the heart of the technical and soci...