Information School News

Rachel Bickley and Sheila Corrall's paper on student perceptions of staff in the Information Commons has been chosen for the American Library Association's Reference Research Review for 2011, which highlights 20 studies selected for their importance to the practice of reference. The paper was based on Rachel's 2010 MA Librarianship dissertation project and published in Reference Services Review, 39 (2), 223-243. The annotated bibliography is available at  http://connect.ala.org/node/180163 .

Val Gillet and Peter Willett were two of the speakers at the 3rd Strasbourg Summer School in Chemoinformatics , speaking on " / In silico / approaches to toxicity prediction" and "Chemoinformatics: the first half-century"

The best papers from the 15th International Symposium for Health Information Management Research (ISHIMR 2011) have been published in a special edition of the Health Informatics Journal, edited by Peter Bath, Barbara Sen and their colleagues in Zurich, Dimitri Raptis and Tobias Mettler. The papers were selected on the basis of the reviews by two members of the Programme Committee. The conference took place at the University Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland in September 2011. The special issue can be accessed at: http://jhi.sagepub.com/content/current The special issues includes papers from two PhD students in the Health Informatics Research Group, Tomislav Dimitrovski and Thomas Poulter. It is expected that an announcement will be made soon about the next ISHIMR conference (to be held in 2013).

Becky Broadley, who graduated from our MA Librarianship in 2010, worked with current head of School Prof Peter Willett to produce a paper based on her dissertation. The resulting work, entitled "Effective public library outreach to homeless people," has won first prize at Emerald's Outstanding Paper Awards 2012. Congratulations to Becky and Peter!

Dr Farida Vis, who joins the School as a research fellow this September, was part of a team awarded First Prize for ‘Data Visualisation and Storytelling (National/International)' at the inaugural Data Journalism Awards . The team's project analysed rumours spreading across Twitter during the 2011 London riots, presented as an interactive front end at the Guardian's Reading the Riots site. The rumours were a mixture of the true, such as the fire at the Miss Selfridge store in Manchester, and the (sadly?) untrue, such as the supposed release of tigers from London Zoo.

Prof Sheila Corrall and PhD student Angharad Roberts are in Croatia this week for the biennial Libraries In the Digital Age conference at the University of Zadar, to present a plenary paper on Information Resource Development and “Collection” in the Digital Age, which draws on recent work by Sheila and Angharad’s doctoral research to explore new definitions of collection development for the network world. Angharad will also participate in a PhD Forum sponsored by ASIST and Sheila will present a poster on her collaborative study with colleagues at Charles Sturt University, Australia, which is investigating bibliometric and research data services in academic libraries.

Prof Sheila Corrall is contributing two sessions to the SCONUL Annual Conference 2012 in Liverpool today and tomorrow. This afternoon she has been invited to speak on the Balanced Scorecard Approach to Evaluation, as a follow-up to her keynote address on the same topic at a previous SCONUL event in March. Tomorrow she will be leading a workshop on Continuity and Change in the Mission of Academic and Research Libraries as part of the SCONUL Fringe Programme.

Dina (Nordiana Shah) is presenting a paper "Factors influencing academics use of microblogging tools in teaching and learning" @ eLearning2.0 at Brunel University - slideshow of the day .