Information School News

On Wednesday, Sheila Webber contributed to a virtual world panel at the US EDUCAUSE conference, via her avatar Sheila Yoshikawa in the virtual world. Secomd Life. She has been invited onto a further panel session at the Digital Library Federation's (DLF) Fall Forum panel, entitled Taking the Next Step With Digital Collections: Innovative Teaching, Learning & Research in Virtual Worlds, November 13, 2008. Outside the virtual world, she gave a keynote Information Literacy: an international perspective , at the conference, L'education à la culture informationnelle [Education for/in information culture], held in l’Université Charles de Gaulle Lille3, Lille, France, 16-18 October.

Sheila Webber , Director of the Department's Centre for Information Literacy Research, has been leading the University of Sheffield's explorations in Second Life by teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate students in this virtual world as well as engaging in several research activities in SL. A short account of her recent ventures in our Infolit iSchool can be found in the latest Higher Education Academy Information and Computer Science Subject Centre Newsletter . Open Issue 11 - Oct 2008 and turn to page 6 for the article; 'Second Life case study: Infolit iSchool'.

A team of University of Sheffield students, including Information Studies undergraduate Jessica Butterfield , have won the SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise) European Symposium. More information Jessica and the winning team with their SIFE award.

The Department has registered a record number of new undergraduate students this year; 30 to its single honours degree programme, and 40 to its two dual honours programmes. This is a significant increase on previous years, and outstrips the programmes' recruitment targets.

David Brown and Katie Fraser , who joined the Department's MA Librarianship programme last week, have both won free places at the 1st Research Libraries UK (RLUK, formerly the Consortium of University Research Libraries) Conference on 'The Power of Knowledge' to be held at the University of Leeds on 22-24 October. The competition was sponsored by RLUK in association with the Department. Applicants were asked to explain why they wanted to attend the event and how it would help their career development. The standard of entries was so high that the Department has awarded additional prizes of books on academic librarianship to two runners-up, Samantha Abrahams and Chloe Furnival .