Information School News

Two iSchool students have successfully obtained paid work placements with the Sheffield City Council Lifelong Learning, Skills and Communities team . The students will be working one day a week from now until July to support the evaluation of a Community learning trust pilot scheme, one of only 15 in the UK.  The students will be working with the Data Manager to collect and analyse data from adult learners in Sheffield to evaluate the value of community learning, and contribute to defining the "Social Return on Investment" of community learning in Sheffield.

Dr Ana Vasconcelos and the School's Knowledge and Information Management Research Group   have been successful in securing funding to establish one of three inter-disciplinary doctoral networks across the University. The group's proposal involves three fully funded PhD projects under the theme of 'Building Economies and Resilient Societies' (BEARS), and is a collaboration between the Information School, the University departments of Architecture, English, Geography, the Management School, ScHARR, and Town and Regional Planning, along with Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council.

Rachel Hessey (MA Librarianship 2010-11) has won the JIBS Student Prize 2012 for her dissertation on "The Impact of Knowledge Exports from Librarianship and Information Science:  Investigating Cross-Disciplinary Citations". The JIBS award goes to a work that focuses on the area of library information systems, bibliographic databases or other resource discovery technologies and how such resources or technologies are being developed or exploited, while LIRG offers their prize to promote a greater awareness amongst students of the importance of research and to facilitate the dissemination of the results of outstanding projects.

Senior Lecturer Dr Stephen Pinfield gives a talk at Inside Government's Research Information Management: The Challenges and Opportunities of Open Access forum today in London. Stephen's talk is on "Research Data Management and Open Access: Institutional Responses".

The Times Higher Education Supplement interviewed Dr Farida Vis about her research into social media. Farida spoke about the use of social media to share information about major events such as Hurricane Katrina and the London riots. THE:  Changing landscape of the social-media deluge

Congratulations to Dr. Wen-Chin Hsu, former PhD student in the Information School,  whose PhD research has been chosen, by the Editor of  the Journal of Documentation, as a Highly Commended Award winner of the 2012 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Awards in the Information Science category. The title of  Wen-Chin's thesis is “Older people's use of the NHS Direct telephone advice and information service” and this research was undertaken in collaboration with NHS Direct.  Two research articles describing the research have been published in Age and Ageing, the UK's leading journal on Geriatric Medicine: Hsu W-C, Bath PA, Large S and Williams S. (2013) The association of geographical location and neighbourhood deprivation with older people’s use of NHS Direct – a population-based study. Age and Ageing . 42 (1): 57-62. Hsu W-C, Bath PA , Large S and Williams S. (2011) Older people’s use of NHS Direct. Age and Ageing. 40(3):

Congratulations to the School's Director of Undergraduate Programmes, Peter Bath, who has been awarded a Personal Chair. As of 1st January 2013, Peter is Professor of Health Informatics.