Information School News

There was a strong presence from the iSchool at the European Conference on Information Literacy , which took place in Prague, Czech Republic, October 10-13 2016. Sheila Webber presented a paper on Information Literacy, Threshold Concepts and Disciplinarity with Bill Johnston (University of Strathclyde, Scotland) and chaired and presented in a panel session Radical, Critical? Exploring discourse around information literacy , with fellow panelists Professor Annemaree Lloyd (Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Sweden), Dr Ola Pilerot (Swedish School of Library and Information Science) and Bill Johnston (University of Strathclyde). In the Doctoral Forum, Evanthia Tramantza presented her ongoing PhD research into the information literacy of engineering students and Webber (who supervises both PhD students) presented on behalf of Syeda Hina Batool , whose completed PhD research is on information literacy of primary school children in Lahore, Pakistan...

Sheila Webber presented an invited talk on Information Literacy in Europe, MIL and Sustainable Development Goals , as part of the IFLA Information Literacy Section's session at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Columbus, Ohio, USA on 16 August. The powerpoint is embedded below. Another invited presenter in the session was Dr Jesus Lau , Director, Research Center on Veracruzana University Documentation, México and an alumnus of the Information School's doctoral programme, who talked about the UNESCO Media and information literacy (MIL) assessment guidelines, and MIL in Latin America.

Sheila Webber chaired the opening session of the 2nd European Media and Information Literacy Forum , sponsored by UNESCO in Riga last week, and she also presented at the first plenary session. The opening session included a welcome from the Speaker of the Latvian Parliament, Ināra Mūrniece. A key message of Sheila's own presentation (embedded below) was picked up in the title of a news report: Media and Information Literacy is a tool that enables life . Sheila, who is interim co-chair of the European Chapter of the Global Alliance for Partnerships in Media and information Literacy , was also part of the drafting committee for the Riga Recommendations on Media and Information Literacy in a Shifting Media and Information Landscape , which were published at the end of the conference.

Paul Clough and Paula Goodale were co-organisers of, and contributors to, a half day workshop on Accessing Cultural Heritage at Scale on June 22. This was part of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2016: Big Libraries, Big Data, Big Innovation , held at Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA. Professor Clough also presented a paper coauthored with Daniel Grech: Investigating Cluster Stability when Analyzing Transaction Logs.

On 2nd June Pamela McKinney presented a paper, coauthored with Sheila Webber , at the 8th Creating Knowledge conference , which took place  in Reykjavík, Iceland. It is embedded below. Teaching the next generation of Information Literacy educators: pedagogy and learning from Sheila Webber

Last week at the International Qualitative and Quantitative methods in Libraries Conference held in London, Sheila Webber gave an invited plenary talk: Trends and Challenges to Future Libraries: Exploring Research Approaches , which is embedded below. In it she presented the challenging future of (academic) libraries, described examples of phenomenographic, ethnograpic, autoethnographic, case study and action research, and finally explained how qualitative research can develop librarians and libraries and enable them to meet future challenges. Trends and Challenges to Future Libraries: Exploring Research Approaches from Sheila Webber

Last week there was a strong showing from the Sheffield iSchool at the European Conference on Information Literacy held in Tallinn, Estonia. Sheila Webber led a workshop on Supporting Information Literacy in MOOC Learning , and was co-presenter (with Bill Johnston, Strathclyde University) of Information Literacy and the Scottish Independence Referendum (2014): An Autoethnographic Exploration of Political Decision-making . She had also been asked to be raporteur for the conference and presented her summing up as part of the closing session. In the doctoral seminar, Jess Elmore presented on Exploring the Information Literacy Experiences of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) Learners: A Discussion of Methods and Evi Tramantza on Electronic Engineering Student Information Literacy Needs: A Pilot Study at the University of Surrey . Jess Elmore also presented a paper based on her Masters research: How Do Home Educating Families’ Experiences of Information Literacy Relate ...

Sheila Webber was the acting chair of the inaugural interim board meeting for the new European Chapter of the Global Alliance for Partnerships on Media and Information Literacy (GAPMIL), the UNESCO-supported initiative on Media and Information Literacy. The meeting took place at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris last week.

Elizabeth Chapman , who recently successfully completed her PhD viva in the iSchool, has a featured post on the CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) blog. It focuses on the subject of her dissertation, and is entitled: Improving LGBTQ* provision in your library: why and how to do it http://www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/blog/improving-lgbtq-provision-your-library-why-how-do-it

Four iSchool members presented at the i3 conference in Aberdeen, Scotland in June 2015. Sheila Webber gave a paper on Self-identified Information Behaviour of learners in the FutureLearn “Play” MOOC . Three of her PhD students also presented on their research: Joseph Essel ( Conceptions of the Information literate teacher by teacher trainees at a Ghanaian University ), Syeda Shahid ( Assessing children’s IL skills: Findings from a multiple case study of six primary schools in Pakistan ) and Kondwani Wella ( Experiencing HIV and AIDS information: a phenomenological study of serodiscordant couples in Malawi ). Additionally, some iSchool alumni presented including Sara Chizari who graduated with MSc Information Management in 2010 ( How do cultural differences and cognitive styles affect online information searching behaviour? ) and Yi Wen Hon who graduated with MA Librarianship last year (presenting on her Masters research, Representations of privacy in the context of care.data: conf...

Sheila Webber is attending the EAHIL + ICAHIS + ICLC 2015 Workshop in Edinburgh this week, delivering invited workshops on phenomenography (with Bill Johnston, Strathclyde University) and on running a journal club (with Marshall Dozier, Edinburgh University and President of EAHIL - European Association for Health Information and Libraries). Sheila also acted as a mentor in a session giving feedback on research projects.

Pamela McKinney and Emily Wheeler (former MA Librarianship student, now Research Support Advisor at University of Leeds Library) presented at the UK's information literacy conference, LILAC, this week. The presentation, Teaching or training? Academic librarians’ conceptions of their IL activities , was based on Emily's 2014 Masters dissertation.

Today a number of iSchool academics are presenting at the the University of Sheffield Faculty of Social Sciences learning and teaching conference. The talks are: Pamela McKinney and Barbara Sen : Situational analysis of group work: student reflective assessment Paul Clough : Utilising MOLE for multiple choice assessments: a case study in the Information School Peter Stordy : Back to the future: reinventing exams Sheila Webber : Futurelearning! Reflections on teaching in the Future Learn Play MOOC Briony Birdi: Supporting isolated adults via the Six Books Challenge in Sheffield: developing student cultural awareness and community engagement

Pamela McKinney and Dr Stephen Pinfield provided a feature article ( Career support for LIS students ) for the popular monthly discussion group that takes place on Twitter, #uklibchat . The lively Twitter discussion took place on March 3rd: the hashtag is obviously #uklibchat, and their twitter stream is here https://twitter.com/uklibchat

The iSchool had strong representation at the European Conference on Information Literacy held in Dubrovnik at the end of last month: Sheila Webber gave an invited talk (with Bill Johnston, Strathclyde University, Information Literacy as a discipline: a contemporary perspective ), she chaired a panel session on Relating Research and Practice in Information Literacy (with panelists Dr Ola Pilerot and Professor Louise Limberg (University of Boras, Sweden), and Bill Johnston), was one of the academics providing feedback at the doctoral forum, and also presented a poster, Digital Citizenship: Global Perspectives Across Age Levels , created with Dr Valerie Hill (Texas Woman's University, USA). Two of her PhD students also presented at the conference: Syeda Hina Shahid presented in the doctoral forum on Early findings from a study of information literacy practices in primary schools of Pakistan . Evanthia Tramantza (with Konstantina Martzoukou, Robert Gordon University) gave a presen...

The Information School is currently hosting a display of original drawings of information, or iSquares, from an arts-informed visual study of information by visiting scholar Jenna Hartel of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.  iSquares currently on display were created by Information School students on the School’s Management for Library and Information Services (INF6005) and Information Systems and the Information Society (INF6400) modules on 20 and 21 October 2014. These students drew a response to the question ‘what is information?’  on a 4” by 4” piece of paper and provided a few words to describe their drawing on the reverse of the paper.  The data set produced within the Information School will be included in a larger international study of drawings from information courses in Croatia, Malaysia, Iran, Taiwan, Canada, Brazil, Ghana, Australia and Finland. The exhibition will be on display in the Information School between 24 and 3...

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 a...

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 pa...

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 .  

Sheila Webber's work with Bill Johnston on the Information Literate University is the lead feature in the latest Institute for Learning and Teaching newsletter of Okanagan College, Canada. Sheila, who is Director of the iSchool's Centre for Information Literacy Research , and Bill (Honorary Research Fellow at Strathclyde University) were invited by Okanagan librarian Jennifer Sigalet to provide the keynote for this issue, which focuses on information literacy. Jennifer had previously attended an invited workshop run by Sheila and Bill on Building the Information Literate University at the University of Alberta, Canada in 2011. Jennifer said "Your workshop inspired the theme of this issue and your lead article created a perfect framework and focus for the topic! The process of involving many interested contributors to this issue has been a step towards helping create an awareness of information literacy at our institution and stimulating an awareness of building an infor...