Information School News

Research Seminar: Back to better? post-pandemic challenges for research cultures, policies and prioritisation. Professor James Wilsdon ** Please note that you will be sent a web address for this seminar on June 29th** Book your place here. Among the myriad disruptions and uncertainties of the Covid-19 pandemic, now rippling across all aspects of our social and institutional lives, within research systems, the crisis has triggered some rapid innovations in funding, peer review, dissemination and communication. What evidence and insights can we draw from these responses to help in strengthening research systems and cultures over the longer term? Can we identify wider lessons for processes of research prioritisation; for the use of rapid or flexible funding mechanisms (e.g. https://fastgrants.org/ & the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator); for wider process innovations (e.g. in collaboration, review and open research); and for longer-term changes to research practices (e.g. more digita...

On 3rd July 2019, the Information School, University of Sheffield, hosted a one-day workshop that started a conversation between Global North and Global South practitioners, researchers and academics about open scholarship in a global context, with Africa as a focus for that discussion. We were also lucky enough to be hosting (courtesy University of Sheffield GCRF QR funding) participants in this debate from Rwanda, a country in the East and Central African region, which has an interesting socio-political context deriving from a checkered colonial past, internal conflict and genocide and language policies implemented to craft a modern political identity. In introducing the debate, the two convenors of the workshop, Pamela Abbott and Andrew Cox, both senior lecturers in the Information school, set out some markers as to why they were interested in this topic. For Pamela, her background as an ICT4D researcher working in African contexts with librarian communities of practice, and her own...

This week Dr Ángel Borrego is visiting the Information School. Ángel is a ​Senior Lecturer in the Department of Library and Information Science at the University of Barcelona. His research interests focus on scholarly communication and research evaluation. On Thursday he gives a research seminar at 12pm in room 231, entitled 'Scholars’ information behaviour in the electronic environment: attitudes towards searching, publishing and libraries'. You can read the abstract below: The seminar aims to summarise the results of several studies conducted during the past decade in order to understand the impact of the transition from print to electronic journals on scholars’ information behaviour. The studies have focused on the behaviour of the academics affiliated to the eight public universities that make up the Consortium of Academic Libraries of Catalonia. The presentation combines the results obtained through the analysis of usage statistics provided by publishers, surveys and...

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly is giving an invited research seminar at the Faculty of Media & Communication at Bournemouth University on Wednesday 24th May, 4-5pm. The talk is entitled 'Social media and contentious parades in divided societies: Tweeting the 2014 and 2015 Ardoyne parade disputes.' The abstract for Paul's talk is below: To what extent do social media facilitate debate between Catholics and Protestants about contentious parades and protests in post-conflict Northern Ireland? Do these ‘affective publics’ tend to escalate or de-escalate the tensions caused by these events? This paper addsresses these issues through a qualitative study of how citizens used Twitter in response to contentious Orange Order parades in the Ardoyne district of North Belfast in 2014 and 2015. Twitter provided a platform for ‘affective publics’ who expressed a myriad of sentiments towards the Orange Order, in addition to the residents who opposed the loyalist parade passing the...