Information School News

We would like to offer our warmest congratulations to our latest cohort of postgraduate students on their recent graduation.   On 15 January 2016 the School held a reception before the ceremony, where our P rize W inners were honoured for their outstanding achievements.    The West Riding Country Library/Annenberg Prize is given for outstanding performance in the field of public librarianship and was awarded to Anya Badock, MA Librarianship. Anya Badock and Dr Briony Birdi The Henry Heaney Memorial Prize is awarded for the best dissertation in the field of academic librarianship, and the winner this year was Lucy Woolhouse a student on the MA Librarianship programme.  Dr Briony Birdi and Lucy Woolhouse The Peak Indicators Prize aims to recognise the achievement of students for their Dissertation within the MSc Data Science programme and was awarded to Justine Nicholls. Andy Ball (Peak Indicators CEO), Justine Nicholls and Professor Peter Bat...

The Information School would like to congratulate  Jess Elmore who has been awarded the 2014 Library and Information Research Group (LIRG) Student Prize for an outstanding research-b ased project. LIRG offers the Student Prize award to promote a greater awareness  among  students of the importance of research and to facilitate the dissemination of the results of outstanding projects.  The prize is awarded to a student who has completed a course leading to a first professional qualification recognised by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) in Library and Information Studies departments.   Jess' MA Librarianship dissertation was entitled  “We don’t go home. We carry on our lives: An exploration of the information literacy experiences of home educating families”.  The awarding committee believed the dissertation  "to be of an extremely high standard as well as having an original focus" which is fan...

Dr John Holliday of the Information School has been awarded the Royal Geographical Society GIScience Research Group Masters Dissertation prize for the dissertation completed in his recent MSc Geographical Information Systems at Leeds University.      His paper appeared in the recent edition of the Journal of Information Science which marked the 50 th anniversary of Information School and was guest edited by Professor Peter Willett of the Information School.

John Holliday has been awarded the Emma Walton Prize for his Masters degree at the School of Geography, University of Leeds. The Emma Walton Prize is awarded once a year to the postgraduate student with the best overall performance from the School of Geography.

Laura Williams, graduate of our MA Librarianship programme, has won the SLA Europe Early Career Conference Awards 2013 .  Laura, along with three other winners, will attend the SLA Conference & INFO-EXPO in San Diego in June. Laura is currently working in the media library at ITV as a Media Logistics Co-ordinator responsible for delivering programme content on tape across the organisation for broadcast.

Dr Alex Peng Information School Lecturer Dr Alex Peng has won the University's  SURE 2012 Academic Supervisor of the Year . He received his award at this year's SURE Showcase yesterday. Alex's student Marcus Walton was also one of only three students nominated for the SURE 2012 Student Researcher of the Year.

Rachel Davies We would like to offer our warmest congratulations to our latest cohort of postgraduate students on their recent graduation. Almost 250 postgraduates successfully graduated from the School's single- and dual-honours degree programmes, and now go on to join the thousands of Information School alumni working throughout industry, government, education and other organisations across the world. You can view the Graduation Cermony, which took place in the University's Octagon Centre, on this Gigapixel Image , and if you are a Facebook user, you can find and tag yourself in the photo. The School held a reception after the ceremony, where our prize winners were honoured for their outstanding achievements. Images are copyright Peter A Bath. Please click to enlarge. Penny Dunn Michelle Parker

Peter Willett attended the Internet Librarian International 2012 conference in Olympia, where he received the Jason Farradane Award on behalf of the School's Chemoinformatics Research Group (Val Gillet, John Holliday and Peter Willett). Next week he will be visiting the USA to give talks on "Introduction to chemoinformatics" at Fordham University and "Fusing database rankings in similarity-based virtual screening" at Rutgers University.

Anneli Sarkanen, who graduated from the School's MA Librarianship programme in 2005, is the winner of the 2012 Special Libraries Association Europe/LMD Conference Award . The award recognizes outstanding achievement in the information profession amongst those living and working in Europe.  Anneli works as Information Officer at Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP, and  is an active member of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL), and currently serves as Vice-Chair of their PR & Promotions Committee. Anneli was recommended for the award by a former colleague, who described her as  ‘an excellent ambassador for the information profession in London and the UK’.

The Information School's Chemoinformatics Research Group has been awarded the 2012 UKeiG Jason Farradane Award , in recognition of its outstanding 40 year contribution to the information field. The prize is awarded to the three current members of the group,  Professor Val Gillet , Dr John Holliday and Professor Peter Willett . The judges recognised the Group's status as one of the world's leading centres of chemoinformatics research, a major contributor to the field of information science, and an exemplar in raising the profile of the information profession. The School has a long association with the Farradane prize. Its second recipient was long time member of staff Professor Mike Lynch in 1980.

Congratulations to Ruth Jenkins, student on our MA Librarianship degree, who has been announced as one of the five winners of the SLA Europe Early Career Conference Award (ECCA) 2012 . Ruth is studying with us following a graduate traineeship at the Bodleian Social Science Library at the University of Oxford. Ruth has also worked as a library assistant in a public library and Devon School Library Service. Ruth is co-sponsored by the Business and Finance Division.

We are pleased to announce that OCLC are to sponsor a new annual £100 prize for the best postgraduate dissertation on a digital library theme. Founded in 1967, OCLC Online Computer Library Center is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing the rate of rise of library costs. More than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories around the world use OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library materials. http://www.oclc.org/uk/en/about/default.htm

Daniela Petrelli has won a design award to attend the 1st international workshop on Digital Object Memories . The design study, done with Ann Light (Communication & Computing Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University) and entitled 'Memory Baubles and History Tinsels', beat the competition to the prize of 750 Euros (made available for travel and accommodation). The one day workshop will be held in Barcelona in July, part of a conference on Intelligent Environments. As it happens the design is for means of storing Christmas digital memories in traditional seasonal objects so it will seem rather inappropriate in the Spanish summer sun.