Information School News

Several iSchool members participated in the i3 conference that took place at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, last week. Two staff members presented: Dr Andrew Cox on Information in everyday practice and Sheila Webber presented a paper coauthored with Dr Phussadee Dokphrom (recent graduate and now Head of Department at Silpakorn University): Conceptions of Information literacy: Result findings from the case study of undergraduate students in the Faculty of Arts, Silpakorn University, Thailand . Another recent doctoral graduate, Dr Shahd Salha , presented her research on The Variations and the Changes in the School librarians’ conceptions of Information Literacy . Finally, current PhD student R obinah Kalemeera Namuleme (co-author Professor Nigel Ford ) presented HIV and AIDS related health information behaviour: an ethnographic study . Photo by Sheila Webber: Piper at the i3 Conference

Carly Miller, a student at the University of Sheffield, has won the first CILIP/IFLA Aspire Award. She will receive a free residential place at CILIP’s flagship conference, Umbrella 2011. The conference will take place at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield on 12-13 July. The Aspire Award was created in memory of CILIP’s Chief Executive Bob McKee, who died in August 2010. The Award will support Bob's passionate interests – developing new professionals and strengthening international relationships. It will help new professionals develop through networking at UK and international events. To win the award, qualifying CILIP members were required to identify an ambition or overall aim that attending Umbrella would help realise. They also had to demonstrate how attending the conference would bring a definable contribution to the library profession. Consideration was given to how their ambition related to Bob McKee’s core belief in the role of libraries as a means to a fairer and

The next meeting of the journal club in Second Life, the virtual world, will be on Wednesday June 29 2011, at 12 noon SL time (8pm UK time, see http://tinyurl.com/5so6eb9 for times elsewhere). We will be discussing: Webber, S., Boon, S. and Johnston, B. (2005) "A comparison of UK academics' conceptions of information literacy in two disciplines: English and Marketing." Library and Information Research , 29 (93), 4-1. http://www.lirg.org.uk/lir/ojs/index.php/lir/article/view/197 Questions for discussion will include: have you observed differences in the information literacy of students and faculty in different disciplines? This is a one hour session, with a short introduction in voice, and discussion in text chat. The location is : http://slurl.com/secondlife/infolit%20ischool/106/208/30/ (you need a SL avatar and the SL browser installed on your computer, to attend). There will be a short orientation session for people who haven't used SL before, at 9am SL time (5pm

Information School researcher, PhD student and MA Librarianship graduate Paula Goodale has been awarded one of just 5 coveted places at the DREaM project launch conference . The conference, organised by the Library and Information Science Research Coalition, takes place at the British Library Conference Centre, London on Tuesday 19th July 2011. The theme of the conference is Out of the Comfort Zone .

Eight current members of the School's Chemoinformatics Research Group are participating in the 9th International Conference on Chemical Structures in The Netherlands June 5-9th - the major conferences in the field in 2011. 9th International Conference on Chemical Structures Sheffield has a very strong presence at the meeting. The group is contributing two oral presentations: Richard Sherhod (Mining of emerging structural patterns for http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifidentification of toxicophores) and Ben Allen (De novo design of synthetically feasible compounds using reaction vectors and evolutionary multiobjective optimisation); three poster presentations: Hua Xiang, Sonny Gan and Jorge Valencia; and Val Gillet is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board. In addition, there are three oral presentations by our ex-PhD students (Sarah Aaron, Dave Wood and George Papadatos) and three posters (Richard Martin, Maciej Haranczyk, Nathan Brown).

On 13th June starting 11am Second Life time (which is 7pm UK time, 2pm EST, see http://tinyurl.com/5uf9wvk for times elsewhere) we are celebrating the fact that we became an iSchool with a full programme of events in Second Life. You will need a SL avatar and the SL browser installed on your computer to participate. - 11:00 SLT: Sheila Webber (Sheila Yoshikawa in SL), Senior Lecturer, the iSchool, University of Sheffield & Director of the Centre for Information Literacy Research. "Introduction to the iSchool and opening of the Exhibition" - 11:15 SLT: Dr Lorri Mon (Lorri Momiji in SL), Assistant Professor, College of Communication and Information, Florida State University. "Libraries and social media." [Presentation in voice] - 12.00 SLT: Dr Joe Sanchez (North Lamar in SL), Assistant Professor, School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University. "Reconfigurable culture: a journey through cyber ethnography." [Presentation in voice] - 12:4

Prof Sheila Corrall's paper on 'Educating the Academic Librarian as a Blended Professional' has won a 2011 Emerald Literati Network Award for Excellence, having been judged the best paper published in the journal Library Management during 2010. The paper is freely available on open access until 1 September 2011 at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?show=abstract&articleid=1891435&.