Information School News

Professor Sheila Corrall presented at the Academic Librarian 2: Singing in the rain conference (held in Hong Kong 11-12 March). Her talk was Educating the Academic Librarian as a Blended Professional: a Review and Case Study and her paper is on the conference website: http://www.lib.polyu.edu.hk/ALSR2010/Programme.html

Daniela is an invited speaker at the Information Access for Personal Media Archives (IAPMA 2010) meeting, 28th March 2010 She is then giving a talk at Microsoft Research Cambridge, April 2010 and finally was invited to give a tutorial on “Essential HCI for the Semantic Web” at Extended Semantic Web Conference, 30th May 2010, Heraklion, Greece

We have an official event in the ESRC Festival of Social Science, Searching, shopping, sightseeing: literacies in virtual lives, organised by Sheila Webber (Sheila Yoshikawa in Secoond Life), with contributions from colleagues in Sheffield University's school of Education. This has official press release at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/PO/releases/2010/march/secondlife.aspx As the press release says "Are you a Second Life resident looking to get a bit more out of your virtual world? If so, join Sheila Yoshikawa at 8pm (1pm Second Life time) on March 18 on Sheffield University's Second Life island, Infolit iSchool, for hints and tips on searching, shopping and sightseeing. The event is part of the Economic and Social Research Council's (ESRC) Festival of Social Science which runs from the 12 to the 21 of March 2010." Sheila was also interviewed about the event for L'Atelier ( http://www.atelier.fr/usages/10/16032010/second-life-information-...

Mark Sanderson, gave a series of talks on information retrieval and research methodologies at the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia in late February, 2010.

Christopher Rhodes , who graduated from the Department of Information Studies in 2007 with an MA Librarianship (distinction) has been awarded an SLA Europe Early Career Conference Award . He will be sponsored to attend the annual Special Libraries Association Conference in New Orleans, USA, 13-16 June 2010. During his time at Sheffield, Christopher was awarded prizes at both departmental and national level. Christopher currently works at the Statistics Resource Unit, House of Commons Library, and is the National Coordinator for New Professionals, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.

Six current and ex-members of the department's Chemo-informatics group are among the 50 most prolific authors in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling's 50 years of publishing . Three current members of the group: Peter Willett, Val Gillet, John Holliday; are found in the list along with Michael F. Lynch (now retired) as well as ex members John M. Barnard and Geoffrey M. Downs.

The ACCURAT project run under the EU's FP7 programme started on February 2nd with a kick off meeting in Riga, Latvia. Sheffield is a major partner in the project involving both academics from Information Studies and Computer Science.