Information School News

Richard Sherhod, postgraduate research student in the chemoinformatics research group, has won an award at the Young Modeller's Forum, held on 10th December 2010. The award was for his poster entitled " Mining of Emerging Structural Patterns for Association with Toxicological Activity".

Sheila Webber has been very active in Second Life. On 9th December she gave an invited presentation on the University of Worcester Second Life island on Second Life and Inquiry Based Learning . There is a video of it here: http://player.vimeo.com/video/17679864?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=C00000&autoplay=1 The previous day she had presented an exhibition of posters in Second Life relating to an activity in a Masters class "What information literacy means to my future career", which was attended by an international audience. Anyone with a Second Life avatar can visit the exhibition at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/230/35/28/ Other engagements in November were: - Being interviewed in Second Life by Eleni Zazani, a librarian from Birkbeck College, as part of a live seminar that Eleni was conducting for staff development at Birkbeck; - Invited panel guest on the virtual TV programme "Gridwrap", where Sheila was the focus of a 50 mi

Laura Steel, who completed our MA Librarianship programme in September, has had a paper on Digital Asset Management in University Libraries and Information Services published in Relay, the journal of the University College & Research Group of CILIP. Laura's paper, which was based on an assignment for the Academic & Research Libraries module, has been chosen as the freely available article in the current issue and can be accessed from the CILIP website via http://bit.ly/54mfAO .

The UK eInformation Group Strix award is an annual award for outstanding contributions to the field of information retrieval and is presented in memory of Dr Tony Kent, a past Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists (IIS), who died in 1997. Tony Kent made a major contribution to the development of information science and information services both in the UK and internationally, particularly in the field of chemistry. The Award is given in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the field of information retrieval, and the 2010 recipient is Emeritus Professor Michael F. Lynch for his work on the development of novel techniques for the processing of chemical and textual databases. Prof. Lynch received his award on 29th November at a one-day conference "Celebrating the history of chemical information" that was held at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London.

Professor Philippa Levy is presenting a keynote speech at the SCONUL conference Proving the case - are our libraries and learning spaces making a difference? being held in London tomorrow. Her talk is entitled Evaluating learning space design: a 'theory of change' perspective. Professor Levy also delivered a talk jointly with Sheila Webber last week, at the Web 2.0 Untangled conference held at Oxford University. Their presentation can be viewed below. Starting as we mean to go on: Technology-rich Inquiry Based Learning in the first undergraduate year