Information School News

A research paper by Peter Bath and colleagues in the School of Health Related Research (ScHARR) has been published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The paper reports a study to investigate the benefits of providing an information sheet to patients with acute chest pain in an Emergency Department. The paper was published in the print version of the journal on 21st March 2009 and can be viewed at: the following link

in Salt Lake City, March 21-25. Richard Martin and Iain Mott both win CINF Scholarships for Scientific Excellence for posters entitled "Wavelet Compression of GRID fields for similarity searching and virtual screening" and "Multiobjective approach to optimising scoring functions for docking" respectively. Val Gillet presents paper on "De Novo design using reaction vectors: Application to library design" and Eleanor Gardiner presents "Development of test systems for pharmacophore elucidation".

Mark Sanderson gave an invited talk at a Reasoning Workshop on Friday the 20th of March. Held at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

Several members of the Department have just been accepted into the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College, starting in 2009 or 2010: Dr Ana Cristina Vasconcelos, Briony Birdi, Dr Daniela Petrelli, Professor Steve Whittaker and Sheila Webber.

Mark Sanderson has been invited to the Google Faculty Summit in Zurich, which runs from the 10th-12th of February, 2009.

“Forget stuffy types in sensible shoes and musty old buildings…today's information professional is also likely to be immersed in the virtual world of search engines, tags and all manner of web-based tools, working in a variety of settings.” So you want to study ... A master's in Librarianship guardian.co.uk, Saturday 24 January 2009 MA Librarianship student and AHRC scholar Katie Fraser features in an article in the Guardian on librarianship as a career. Katie was amongst other students and staff from the University of Sheffield, the University of Loughborough and the University of Aberystwyth who offered advice and their eperiences to people wanting to enter the profession. Katie commented on what the course covers, funding opportunities and job prospects. “It's a field that's changing quite a lot, with new technologies having a big impact and libraries starting to get more involved in providing services like online portals.”

Congratulations to Chadwyn Tann for co-authoring a paper in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, one of the best known journals in the field. The paper is titled "Are Web Based Informational Queries Changing?". It describes the results of a survey conducted by Chad into the searching intentions of users. The striking result of the survey is that Google does not appear to be as dominant a search engine as it once was. Chad graduated from the IS department in 2006 on the BSc Information Management course.