Information School News

Peter Stordy successfully passed his PhD viva in January. His thesis explored Information School undergraduates' and academics' perceptions of Internet literacy.

Twenty postgraduate students visited the Sheffield Archive for a behind the scenes tour given by Archivist, Kirsten Smith. Original materials were made available for students including the 1296 Market Charter.

Today 10 librarians from the University of Stockhom, Sweden, visited Sheffield University. As well as learning more about the work of the library, with a programme organised by Lyn Parker, three of the librarians participated in the Masters level class Information Literacy Research , which is led by Sheila Webber . Here Lina, Per and Andreas from Stockholm University Library are pictured together with visiting speaker Bill Johnston (Honorary Research Fellow, Strathclyde University) and students taking the Information Literacy Research class.

Val Gillet is presenting a paper on "Multiobjective design of drug-like molecules" at a workshop on multi-disciplinary integration and optimisation in science and engineering at University College London on April 2nd.

Val Gillet, Sonny Gan and Jorge Valencia, members of the Chemoinformatics Research Group, are all presenting at the Spring 2012 American Chemical Society Meeting in San Diego, March 25-29th. Val is presenting an oral paper on "De novo design of synthetically accessible molecules". Sonny and Jorge are presenting posters on "Identification of alternative druggable targets for prion diseases" and "A Lanczos-based approach to the spectral clustering of chemical data", respectively.

On 1-2 March, Prof Sheila Corrall participated in a strategy colloquium organised by the CONUL consortium of Irish research libraries in Athlone, where she delivered a keynote presentation on library support for learning and teaching. On 9 March, Prof Sheila Corrall delivered a keynote presentation on the use of balanced scorecards and strategy maps prior to participation in a SCONUL workshop for university librarians on performance measurement in Leeds.

The Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference is a major conference (with 2,500 participants last year) taking place in the virtual world, Second Life. Sheila Webber and PhD student Ridvan Ata were 2 of the 3 judges deciding which of the 40 poster exhibits should be nominated for the three "best poster" awards. Additionally: - Sheila and Ridvan are giving a presentation at the conference on Teaching and learning in Second Life as Part of a Blended Approach:reflections and lessons learnt , on 16th March at 11am SL time (6pm UK time, see http://tinyurl.com/7y7yjxf for times elsewhere). The location is http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/CAVE/225/220/25t - Sheila and Marshall Dozier (Edinburgh University) have an exhibit on Running a Journal Club in Second Life . As part of this they have an example journal club session also on Friday 16th March, 1pm SL time (which is Pacific time; 8pm UK time; see see http://tinyurl.com/7ulvad2 for times elsewhere). This is

Drs. Andrew Cox and Ana Vasconcelos will be delivering keynote addresses at the SLA-AGC Conference in Manama, Bahrain, 12-14th March. Further details can be found at http://www.slaagc2012.org/index.php/agenda-a-speakers/keynote-speakers