Information School News

Chirag Shah from University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill presented a talk entitled. System-mediated and User-mediated Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) Abstract: Information seeking is typically seen as a single person activity, done in isolation without the support of other people. It is time we revise this assumption and acknowledge that seeking and using information can be a social activity, done in collaboration with others. Many situations call for such collaboration while seeking information. For instance, a couple planning a vacation have the same information need, but may have different expertise and opinions about how, where, and what aspects of the trip. In most such situations, we end up using different tools, such as browser, messenger, email, etc., in ad hoc manner to accomplish the common goal. Integrated solutions that not only provide the support for such activities seamlessly, but also encourage and facilitate collaborations in impromptu fashion are hig

When : Thursday 20 Aug 12 noon SL time; Where : Infolit iSchool, in SL, the virtual world http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/126/243/21/ (You need a SL avatar and the SL browser installed on your computer to participate) EDINA ( http://www.edina.ac.uk/ ) is a public-funded UK data centre, whose mission is to "enhance the productivity of research, learning and teaching" in UK colleges, universities and research institutes, with online services and learning materials. Nikla Tokyoska (Nicola Osborne, Social Media Officer) and Edina Taurog (Andrew Bevan, User Support Deputy Team Manager) will briefly introduce EDINA and then want to chat about ideas around how they, as academic service providers, could use SL (and perhaps other virtual worlds) to support or extend EDINA's services. This is part of the Department's Centre for Information Literacy Research SL discussion series.

Paul Clough spent a week at OCLC Research in Ohio (US) in July. As a part of the visit, Paul presented work on the EU-funded Multimatch project: Multimatch at OCLC

According to the Independent newspaper, it's because "this is not a degree for the old fashioned but for future managers. A new dawn of librarian has arrived...are you in? ... These days the degree is really broad and is a cross between computer science and management." The Independent A-Z of Degrees August 2009 As you will see, their objective overview of Library and IM degrees around the country places the University of Sheffield firmly at the front.

Three of the four presentations from the information literacy event held at Sheffield University on 6th August are available online. These were reports on projects that were undertaken for the Information Literacy Research module that is an option on the Masters programmes here. These presentations are all linked from the event page on the new Centre for Information Literacy ning : http://infolitresearch.ning.com/events/centre-for-information . Photo by Sheila Webber: Presenters (left to right) David Brown, Samantha Abrahams, Kate Coleson and Chloe Furnival after the event.

Sheila Webber has been interviewed for the JISC SIS Landscape Study blog "created to collect evidence about UK HE use of Web 2.0 services in preference to those provided by JISC or HE institutions." Her "case study" is at http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-sis-landscape/case-studies/lecturer-5/ All the "case studies" are at http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-sis-landscape/case-studies/ (Sheffield University library and Jamie Wood from CILASS are also featured)

Huda Farhan presented at a workshop on updating and improving the Arab league thesaurus. The workshop was held at the Arab league building, Cairo 26-27 July 2009. A number of specialists (thesauri development and organization of information) attended the workshop by invitation. Six predefined papers were presented in addition to three new papers requested based on the workshop discussions. The workshop resulted in a suggested framework to update the Arab league thesaurus and a committee of 7 members to follow up the updating process.