Information School News

Professors Val Gillet and Peter Willett were two of the invited speakers at a symposium to honour the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. This is the world's leading journal in chemoinformatics, and Sheffield was the only institution to be represented twice amongst the speakers at this symposium, which was held on the 23rd August as part of the Boston national meeting of the American Chemical Society

Vanessa Fuidge, an MA Librarianship student, has been awarded a John Campbell Trust Dissertation Bursary (for details see http://www.cilip.org.uk/interests/jct/dissertation_bursary.html ) to defray the costs of her dissertation on "The Role of the Music Specialist Librarian"

As of this month the Department of Information Studies has officially changed its name to the Information School . This new name captures more concisely the range of activities in the department.

A number of Departmental members are speaking at the WLIC (IFLA conference) next week in Gothenburg, Sweden. Firstly, in the main conference: "We are here because you were there": minority ethnic genre fiction in UK public libraries BRIONY BIRDI (Information School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom) Developing inclusive models of reference and instruction to create information literate communities SHEILA CORRALL (Information School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom) The secret diary of Adrian Librarian MOLE. The value of using e-journals to reflect on learning and professional development in the area of management skills development for LIS students BARBARA SEN (Information School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom) Sustaining learning for LIS through use of a virtual world SHEILA WEBBER (Information School: the iSchool, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom) and DIANE NAHL (Library and Information Science Program, Inf...

The Department has been awarded a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to study how young people’s ability to develop and engage in deep critical information behaviour – to seek, find, evaluate and use information effectively – might be enhanced. There is evidence that relatively “surface level” approaches to information behaviour are not uncommon amongst young people at both school and university level. This behaviour is characterised by relatively unsophisticated and ineffective information seeking based on a “least effort” principle, and a relatively uncritical approach to evaluating information in terms of its authority and appropriateness in relation to task needs. This is problematic in that a deeper (i.e. more reflective and critical) approach to information seeking, evaluation and use has been empirically linked to academic performance, and is key to the development of the independent evidence-based learning and problem solving required to participate fully in wo...

Hideo Joho, who graduated from the department in 2005 has just been appointed evaluation co-chair of the leading Japanese search engine evaluation conference NTCIR. Hideo will be working with Tetsuya Sakai from Microsoft Research in Beijing. The conference meeting will be in Tokyo, December 2011.

Journal of Information Science has published quantitative research by Jesper Kallehauge , a PhD student who graduated rom the Department in 2008. Jesper's supervisor was Professor Nigel Ford . The title of Jesper's article is 'Stage-driven information seeking process: Value and uncertainty of work tasks from initiation to resolution' (vol. 36, no. 2, 2010, pp. 242–262, DOI: 10.1177/0165551509360142). Abstract "The stage-driven information seeking process to reduce uncertainty and increase value was systematically validated with real users (n=60) with real work tasks from social sciences and applied sciences domains in a UK and Danish university. A broad set of information sources are applied and core relevance criteria are measured. The research seeked to test the hypothesis that the information seeking process is seen as a dynamic and iterative development to reduce uncertainty through four stages until the problem is solved: (1) problem recognition: kind of probl...