Blog: My Year as a Librarianship Student

By Fernando Bravo

Fernando studied Librianship in 2019/20

Hello everyone, I am writing this text for prospective students interested in the University of Sheffield Information School. I’m a mature and international student who planned to study the MA Librarianship a long time ago after working some years in University, Public and National Libraries. The time here has been challenging, the overall course is one of the best in the world and with a very good reputation between the librarian community, certified for one of the most important professional associations in the world. U.K library information association: CILIP.

During the course I have had the opportunity to assist activities related to my field, for instance, a Reference Training Session in the British Library in London, a session in Manchester with new professionals, also in Sheffield I visited the headquarters of the Children Library Service and the children book award, as well as knowing in depth some university library systems such as Halllam, Sheffield and Leeds Universities.

From my interest, the modules are updated and for me, the Management in LIS was very important due to my own goals, my future plan is to return to my job in my country and develop projects related with electronic legal deposit, information literacy and training session for library staff, in this sense the access to the key literature and databases in Library and Information Science give me the chance to discover more resources and a hundred of journals (LISA - EBSCO). The library system - with a 24/7 opening hours - has a special librarian assigned for our department and the iSchool has a special database with publications produced by staff and students from 1963 onward!

Sheffield as a city is so comfortable, walkable with a majestic nature and sound of birds everywhere, beautiful parks around the University and also you can travel to other nearby cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, York, etc. In my free time, I used the Sports Centre that gave me access to the swimming pool, gym and sauna to keep healthy and improve my mood during hard study periods.

Definitively, if someone else is looking for the MA Librarianship, the Information School is the perfect place where you can find a very challenging time with a lot of new opportunities for your future or current job in the information world, improving your knowledge and skills base with a valuable certification.

Raspberry Pi Weather Project now live

A project to create a raspberry pi weather station is currently live in the Information School. The Sheffield Pi weather station has been created by Romilly Close, undergraduate Aerospace Engineering student at the University of Sheffield. The project was funded by the Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) scheme and is being supervised by Dr Jo Bates, Paula Goodale and Fred Sonnenwald from the Information School. Information about the Sheffield Pi station and how to create your own can be found on the project website . You can also see live data from the Sheffield Pi station on Plot.ly , and further information can also be found on the Met Office Weather Observations Website . This work compliments the School’s existing project entitled ‘The Secret Life of a Weather Datum’ which explores socio-cultural influences on weather data. This project is funded under the AHRC’s Digital Transformations Big Data call. It aims to pilot a new approach to im

Our Chemoinformatics Group wins Jason Farradane Award

The Information School's Chemoinformatics Research Group has been awarded the 2012 UKeiG Jason Farradane Award , in recognition of its outstanding 40 year contribution to the information field. The prize is awarded to the three current members of the group, Professor Val Gillet , Dr John Holliday and Professor Peter Willett . The judges recognised the Group's status as one of the world's leading centres of chemoinformatics research, a major contributor to the field of information science, and an exemplar in raising the profile of the information profession. The School has a long association with the Farradane prize. Its second recipient was long time member of staff Professor Mike Lynch in 1980.

Professor Mike Thelwall gives inaugural lecture

Professor of Data Science Mike Thelwall recently gave his inaugural lecture at the University of Sheffield, entitled How helpful are AI and bibliometrics for assessing the quality of academic research? The lecture, delivered in the University's Diamond building, was introduced by Head of the Information School Professor Briony Birdi. It covered Mike's research into whether Artificial Intelligence can inform - or replace - expert peer review in the journal article publication process and what this could look like, as well as to what extent bibliometrics and citation statistics can play a role in assessing the quality of a piece of research. Mike also discussed whether tools like ChatGPT can accurately detect research quality. The inaugural lecture was well attended by colleagues from around the University.

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