Information School News

What: Talking about our research methods: three brief presentations about what research approach is being used in a project, and why, with discussion. When: 23 April 2014 at 12 noon SL time (8pm UK time, see http://tinyurl.com/nd43vb7 for times elsewhere) Where: Infolit iSchool (the iSchool's SL island), in the virtual world, Second Life (you need a SL avatar and the software on your computer, to participate) http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/49/203/23 Talking about our research methods Sheila Webber (Information School, Sheffield University, Director of the Centre for Information Literacy Research; Sheila Yoshikawa inside Second Life (pictured, above), Marshall Dozier (Edinburgh University Library; Pancha Enzyme intside Second Life) and Ridvan Ata (PhD student in Sheffield University's Education School and Information School; Ridvan Atolia inside SL) will each briefly explain what research approach they have, or intend to, use in a research proj

Dr Barbara Sen and Pamela McKinney of the Information School are among the speakers at LILAC 2014 , which takes place at Sheffield Hallam University from 23 to 25 April 2014.     On Wednesday 23 April Barbara and Pamela will be delivering a workshop entitled ‘Supporting information literacy educators: reflective pedagogic planning improving information literacy practice’ , which draws on research in reflective practice which has been carried out at the University of Sheffield. Barbara will also be speaking in two further sessions at LILAC 2014.  On Thursday 24 April she will presenting on ‘Innovation, creativity and change: utilising appreciative enquiry and reflective practice to achieve asset based information literacy’ in collaboration with Vicky Grant and Denise Harrison of the University of Sheffield Library; and on Friday 25 April she will speak with Hannah Spring of York St John University on ‘Supporting young people’s health information needs’ . LILAC attracts deleg

Submissions are invited for CLEF 2014 : Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, Information Access Evaluation meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Visualization which takes place in Sheffield from 15 to 18 September 2014.  Papers are welcomed on all aspects of Information Access in any modality and language. This is the 15th year of the CLEF initiative as a forum for Information Access Evaluation, with special attention to multimodality and multilinguality. All submissions to the CLEF main conference will be reviewed on the basis of relevance, originality, importance, and clarity. CLEF welcomes papers that describe rigorous hypothesis testing regardless of whether the results are positive or negative. Methods are expected to be written so that they are reproducible by others, and the logic of the research design is clearly described in the paper. The conference proceedings will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Authors are i

Papers are invited for submission ahead of the workshop on Gathering Efficient Assessments of Relevance (GEAR) at SIGIR 2014, 11 July 2014, Gold Coast, Australia . The workshop will revisit how relevance assessments can be efficiently created.  A discussion and exploration of this issue will be facilitated through the presentation of results based and position papers on the topic.  Participants will also be invited to participate in a design task focusing on developing a benchmarking exercise.   An aim of the workshop will be to provide a forum where short research papers can be presented, reporting work which may not conventionally be published in papers at formal venues, including ‘practice and experience’ papers concerning relevance assessment gathering, and position papers concerning the concepts and issues.  Papers reporting negative results are also welcome. Two types of paper are solicited:           Short papers: 4 pages max, which present research work related

Dr Paul Clough of the Information School is attending the 36 th European Conference on Information Retrieval in Amsterdam, between 13 and 16 April 2014. At the conference, he will be presenting a short paper entitled: “A Comparison of Approaches for Measuring Cross-Lingual Similarity of Wikipedia Articles” .

This week saw the launch of the Digital Society Network . This new initiative has been set up by the University of Sheffield’s Faculty of Social Sciences to support the development of collaborative bids in the area of digital society. A number of Information School staff attended the launch event and presented research.  The Information School is also represented on the Steering Committee of the network.  More information can be found on the DigitalSociety Network’s web pages .  

Congratulations to Dr Andrew Cox who has secured funding for the following project. Wicked Ways with Research Data Management The Leadership Foundation for Higher Education has funded this small project to create a community of practice around the exploration of Research Data Management (RDM) as a "wicked problem", i.e. the kind of complex issue that is interpreted differently by different actors. Many issues in UK universities have all the hallmarks of being “wicked problems”: complex, hard to solve issues that stakeholders perceive in very different ways.   A new wicked problem for universities that has emerged in the last few years is what to do about RDM. The aim of the  ‘ Wicked Ways’ project is to bring together a network of those involved in tackling the wicked RDM problem in different institutions and through an iterative, reflective and participative process construct an open educational resource about leadership in wicked problem contexts.  This res

On 10 April 2014 Dr Jo Bates appeared by video conference before the Canadian Parliament's Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates as an invited international expert to present and answer questions for their study on Open Data practices. She was joined by three other panellists: Richard Stirling, International Director of the UK's Open Data Institute;  Barbara Ubaldi, an expert from the OECD; and  Lyne Da Sylva, Associate Professor, School of Library and Information Science, Université de Montréal. Jo presented on how Canada's Open Government Data initiative compares to other countries, and discussed the types of value that could be generated from opening up government data.   During the questions session of the conference issues which were discussed included the relationship between open data, democracy and social inclusion; the economic value of Open Government Data and some of the risks around some types of commercial re-use; where the drive

Research published by staff and students from the Information School can be accessed for free via the University’s open access repository, White Rose Research Online . HEFCE have just published a ‘Policy for Open Access in the Post-2014 Research Excellence Framework’ which calls for all research outputs to be made publically available through a repository.  The Information School has been committed to the principal of open access for some years, and in December 2013 almost 15% of the University’s content in White Rose Research Online was provided by the Information School.  At present, an ongoing project within the School is working to further expand the volume of research content which is available online through open access.  This has already dramatically increased the volume of the School’s research which is available online. Some recent additions of new publications include: Smith, J., Hall, M.M., Goodale, P., Clough, P. and Stevenson, M. (2014) PATHS in conte