Information School News

Are you thinking about a degree in Library and Information Studies? Do you want to know more about the different options out there, and about potential funding opportunities? CILIP East are pleased to present "Applying to Library School", which will take place from 6pm – 7.30pm on Tuesday, 8th December via Zoom. Come along and hear Prof. Stephen Pinfield from Sheffield University, and recent graduates from a range of university LIS departments speak. We will be covering full-time, part-time and distance learning options, and there will be plenty of opportunities to ask questions during the evening. Programme: 6.00-6.05pm : Housekeeping 6.05-6.35pm : Programme director talk 6.35-6.55pm : Q and A 6.55-7.00pm: Break 7.00-7.20pm: Student Experiences 7.20-7.30: Questions and close There is a small fee to attend the event which will in part cover costs associated with the event. Any profit made on this event will contribute to the CILIP East Small Grants Fund. CILIP members £3 + VA...

Over 40 of Peter Willett’s ex-PhD students and long-time collaborators gathered in Sheffield in mid-September to celebrate Peter’s long and very influential career and to thank him for the personal support that he has provided to very many throughout this time. It is a mark of the very high regard in which Peter is held that so many people attended. They had travelled from as far as Canada, North America, Germany and Taiwan, as well as from all over the UK. Many of the attendees are now in very influential positions of their own including in academia, software companies and industry. Their connections to Peter spanned the full range of Peter’s career with one of his early PhD students having obtained her PhD over 30 years ago. A number of presentations were given that included reflections on Peter’s contribution to the fields of Chemoinformatics, Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics, a “Peter Willett: This is your Life” tribute, as well as many personal messages of thank...

Experts from the iSchool present a free and open 30 minute webinar on Friday March 22nd 2019, 10.00-10.30 UK time (see here for times elsewhere in the world): Media and Information Literacy for Informed Citizens in the Digital Age. They will highlight the value of Media and Information Literacy (MIL) for citizens’ lives, and the contribution that information and library professionals can make to developing MIL. This celebrates the first European Media Literacy week , set up to recognise the societal importance of media literacy and promote media literacy initiatives and projects. Sheila Webber (Interim Co-Chair of the European Chapter of the Global Alliance for Partnerships in Media and Information Literacy, former Standing Committee member of IFLA's Information Literacy Section and Head of the iSchool's Libraries and Information Society Research Group) will chair the webinar. She'll give her perspective on the European Media Literacy conference held earlier in the we...

Data Science knowledge provides you with a set of skills that is very much in demand by large and small organisations, and can land you a lucrative job. However, it does not need to be all about the money. There are also opportunities to use these skills to help other people. One such opportunity is provided by the group Sheffield Data For Good . They recently organised a data hack to help Roundabout , a Sheffield charity that tackles youth homelessness, and have already scheduled a second event for the 9th of March. I was at the first data hack on the 26th of January. Around 25 people, a mix of academics, data professionals and charity workers, came to the event. Amy Evans, data and finance coordinator from Roundabout, was at the event to explain the data that we were going to work on and what Roundabout was trying to understand about their data. I cannot provide details about the data due to data protection regulations, but what struck me the most was the atmosphere and the energ...

My name is Wasim Ahmed , and I am a doctoral student at the Information School. I recently attended the launch of the Information School research magazine Inform . This blog post highlights my key take-homes from the launch of the research magazine. Information is all around us and due to technological developments information is more readily available at speed. Our research at the Information School focuses on understanding the power of information and how it affects people, organisations, and society. The new research magazine Inform provides a cross-section of the research within the school, stories about our research, impact, recent successes, facts and figures, research culture and environment, and provides an overview of staff and students within the school. The event highlighted the international reputation of the department for world-class research. It was wonderful to see the range of multi-disciplinary areas of research which the school undertakes. The event a...

Dr Jorge Martins , Lecturer in Organisational Informatics at the Information School, will be leading on the Maker's Lives in Focus event in collaboration with Artist Patrick Murphy (Made North) . Makers’ Lives in Focus, part of Sheffield Design Week, addresses wider societal questions such as: How can creatives/designers and academics become more involved in developing ideas that put people and community at the heart of old industrial regions’ rejuvenation? What would a city look like that empowers artists, academics, firms and communities to work together in developing urban futures? The event will be held in Lecture Theatre 9, Arts Tower, 12:00 - 1:00 pm on Monday, 24 October 2016. The event is free and you can register here.

You are warmly invited to attend this Saturday's Festival of the Mind event concerned with highlighting the experiences of people with serious health conditions and the support and friendship that can be found in online forums.   Our aims are to: Raise awareness of the benefits and risks of online forums for people with serious health conditions   To bring to life the human stories of people experiencing serious health conditions who develop friendships in the virtual world   To explore how trust and empathy develops within the online world      The play explores the experiences of women living with breast cancer in a unique on-off performance.   The script is based on the findings of research that analysed threads on the Breast Cancer Care online forum and interviews with forum users.   This event is a collaboration between the Space for Sharing research project and the Dead Earnest theatre company. There will be an informal ...

You are warmly invited to attend this Festival of the Mind event concerned with highlighting the experiences of people with serious health conditions and the support and friendship that can be found in online forums.   Our aims are to: Raise awareness of the benefits and risks of online forums for people with serious health conditions   To bring to life the human stories of people experiencing serious health conditions who develop friendships in the virtual world   To explore how trust and empathy develops within the online world      The play explores the experiences of women living with breast cancer in a unique on-off performance.   The script is based on the findings of research that analysed threads on the Breast Cancer Care online forum and interviews with forum users.   This event is a collaboration between the Space for Sharing research project and the Dead Earnest theatre company. There will be an ...

Free IFLA/NPSIG/CPDWL Webinar, July 26 2016 (at 4pm UK time): Information Literacy in My Career (in Adobe Connect, link at the end of this message) Speakers: Emily Wheeler, Sheila Webber, Pam McKinney, Liam Bullingham IFLA Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning Section and IFLA New Professionals SIG have partnered with the American Library Association to present a one-hour webinar Information Literacy in my career. Professionals at different stages of their career will talk about what information literacy means to them, how they engage with it in their job, and how they see information literacy featuring in their future. Keynote and moderator: Sheila Webber (@sheilayoshikawa) Sheila is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Information Literacy Research in the Information School, University of Sheffield. She is a committee member of IFLA Information Literacy Section (http://www.ifla.org/information-literacy and interim co-chair of UNESCO’s GAPMIL (...

A workshop on Supporting Discovery of Archival Collections: Challenges and Opportunities has been organised by Professor Paul Clough   of the Information School, along with Chris Hilton (Wellcome Trust) and Sarah Higgins and Pauline Rafferty (Aberystwyth University). This one-day meeting is being held 10am-4pm 8 th July 2016, Wellcome Trust, London and includes attendees from BBC Archives, The British Library, Bletchley Park and Houses of Parliament. The one day meeting is for representatives from library and archives communities will discuss the issues surrounding the provision of effective access to digital archives and/or online archives catalogues. It will provide an opportunity to share and discuss discovery challenges and new ways of designing the archives search experience, such as: identifying user groups, their information needs and tasks; the provision of information access to digital collections beyond the search box; helping users make sense of results (especial...

Information School Students are cordially invited to The Information School Class of 2016 Summer Social.  The Summer Social event will be held in the iSpace, 2nd Floor, Regents Court on Thursday 14 July from 12:30-3:00pm. There will be the chance to socialise with your classmates and sample some international food. The event is free and you can book your place on eventbrite

Dr Andrew Cox visited the Information School's former PhD student Xuguang Li, who is now an associate professor at the School of Information Management, Central China Normal University, in Wuhan, Hubei province in China. Andrew participated in the summer school, teaching the students about Research Data Management.

The first Data Science Forum Meeting took place on 4 May 2016 and was opened by Dr Gianluca Demartini and Professor Paul Clough. The event also included a talk from Christopher Hopkinson, Virgin Media. Professor Paul Clough  The forum is aimed at data professionals located within the city of Sheffield and surrounding areas to provide: Opportunities for networking between industry/business practitioners, academics and students Sharing of knowledge and experiences in topics of interest around data science and data analytics Informal and friendly environment to chat and get to know others working in the same or similar fields  The next meeting will be hosted by Sheffield Hallam University on 20 July 2016.

Dr Igor Bernik is Associate Professor of Information Sciences, and Head of the Information Security Department at the Faculty of Criminal Justice and Security, University of Maribor, Slovenia. His research fields are information systems, information security, and the growing requirement for information security awareness. Dr Bernik is visiting the Information School from 9 to 20 May 2016 and durin g his visit will deliver the following seminars and workshops: Cybersecurity in a changing workplace environment 12th May 12-1pm , RC-204 Experts emphasise that cybersecurity is an important issue in the modern world as cybercrime is increasingly targeting individual users and, through them, also threatening the economic sphere and organisational environments, which possess large amounts of valuable data. In this seminar, we outline a practice-based understanding of contemporary cybersecurity problems from the perspective of individuals and organisations. Cybersecurity...

The Data Science Forum aims to provide a catalyst for networking and the sharing of knowledge between industry/business practitioners, academics and students on topics related to Data Science.  The Forum is organised by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University for data professionals located within the city of Sheffield and surrounding areas. The first forum meeting will take place on 4 May 2016, 7:00pm - 9:00pm, Richard Roberts Building, University of Sheffield. The evening will include a talk from Christopher Hopkinson- Virgin Media Title: Understanding Processes and Experiences from Event Data Abstract : In a large organisation, understanding the myriad of processes and experiences can be a complex task. Traditional Business Process Analysis methods rely on interviews and observations which are then documented by a Business Analyst. By focusing on event data generated by source systems we can build an alternative view of processes and...

18th April 2016, 13:00 - 15:00 - Room 205, Information School Applying for jobs? •    What are employees looking for in your CV? •    How do you deal with complicated online application forms? This will be an interactive session run by careers advisor, Sarah Kettlewell that will help iSchool students to improve their CVs and provide advice on how to get the most out of online job applications. This session is particularly recommended for Information School Masters students. For further details and to book a place click the eventbrite link here

A paper co-authored with Professor Peter Bath and Gianluca Demartini titled The Role of Social Media for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Management was presented by PhD student Wasim Ahmed at the Sheffield Institute for International Development (SIID). SIID is an interdisciplinary research body comprising of staff and postgraduate students from various disciplines within the University of Sheffield.  The theme for this year’s Conference was “”Emerging Challenges facing Development and Development Studies”. A link to the slides 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 .

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...

Students and staff at the Information School shared an international celebration of new year, in an event organised under the aegis of the Information School Society . Dr Andrew Cox introduced the event and Syke Xin Zhao and Cindy Fu explained Chinese New Year customs. Piyapat Jarusawat described Songkran in Thailand. As well as enjoying traditional Chinese nibbles, attendees could participate in a number of activities run by experts from The Confucius Institute : - Tea ceremony, Miss Yi Yang - Chinese traditional costume, Miss Tingting Cai - GuZheng music performance, Dr. Shu Jiang - Paper cutting, Ms. Li Li   Shu Jiang  (Confucius Institute) shows Akmaral Imangaliyeva how to play GuZheng .     Piyapat Jarusawat tries on traditional Chinese costume. Skina Ehdeed tries traditional Chinese costume and the GuZheng   Confucius Institute Staff Ms. Li Li and Tingting Cai demon...