Information School News

Lecturer in Information Management Dr Jonathan Foster responds to the recent news story about the historic 'Right to be Forgotten' ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union in favour of search engine giant Google. The Ruling by the European Court of Justice earlier this week raises two important issues. First the issue of how democratic societies strike a balance between the privacy rights of the individual on the one hand, and the public interest on the other. Second, the limits of legal jurisdiction and of institutional obligation. The ‘Right to be Forgotten’ - or ‘Right to Erasure’ as it is now known - is a provision under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This provision provides individuals with the right to request organisations, search engine operators for example, to remove specific personally-identifying information about them. A number of reasons can be given by the user to justify their request: that processing of the data is no longer nec...

Dr Jonathan Foster, Lecturer in Information Management and Programme Coordinator for the MSc Information Management, recently received his Teaching and Excellence in the Social Sciences (TESS) award from the University's Faceulty of Social Sciences. 'It was wonderful experience to receive the TESS award, in recognition of the Deliberation Day that we hold annually during Induction Week', says Dr Foster. 'The aim of the event is provide an enabling context for new students - many of whom are international - to experience a setting where dialogue and the revision of views - rather than their dogmatic reception - becomes a distinct possibility.' Dr Foster received his award, along with other colleagues from across the Faculty, at a reception in the ICOSS building at the University. During his acceptance speech he elaborated more on the influences he drew from for the Deliberation Day event. 'I believe that a democratic approach to learning and teaching is ne...

David Walsh, a part-time PhD student at the Information School (also works as a Senior Lecturer at Edge Hill University) has won second prize for Best Paper at the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2017 (TPDL'17)  in Thessaloniki, Greece. David's paper explored categories of visitor to the National Liverpool Museums website via a large-scale museum user survey in which data on a wide range of user characteristics was collected to provide well founded definitions for the user group's motivations, tasks, engagement, and domain knowledge. The results highlighted that the general public and non-professional users make up the majority of users and allow us to clearly define these two groups. David is supervised by Paul Clough and Jonathan Foster from Sheffield and Mark Hall from Edge Hill. Walsh D., Hall M., Clough P., Foster J. (2017) The Ghost in the Museum Website: Investigating the General Public’s Interactions with Museum Websites....