Information School News

Decolonising the LIS curriculum: starting the conversation Dr Briony Birdi Our Senior Lecturer in Librarianship, Dr Briony Birdi, has written a guest blog post for the New Librarians Professional Network.  Decolonisation has become a key aspect my work as an LIS [Library and Information Science] academic and as the Co-Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield. I hear librarians and academics talking about decolonising both universities and library collections, but I rarely hear anyone from the information professions bringing in LIS education to these conversations. This seems a little odd to me, so in this post I’m focusing on the intersection between the two, using three steps we can go through in order to find that space we need to talk through the context in which our universities and libraries are based, and to think about how others might experience the same space quite differently. Yo...

I was fortunate enough to receive a student bursary from the University of Sheffield to attend the CILIP Conference 2017 in Manchester. As a distance-learner I was excited to finally meet some iSchool staff and fellow students in person! It didn’t disappoint, and I really enjoyed talking to attendees on the iSchool stand, sharing my experiences of managing full-time work with intensive study. The conference was crammed with interesting keynotes, my favourites were: Dr Carla Hayden (Librarian of Congress) addressed us as her ‘British Peeps’ and described her job interview with Barack Obama. She was passionate about engaging the public with library services, particularly ones that are traditionally research institutions, and heralded the British Library as an example of getting this right. Dr Hayden called upon the younger and older generations of librarians to work together, bridge the gap and benefit from each other’s skillsets.  Luciano Floridi (Professor of Philosophy and E...