Information School News

Professor Emeritus Tom Wilson received the award of Doctor Honoris Causa at a ceremony at the University of Murcia, Spain, on 30th September, 2010. The event was timed to coincide with the ISIC conference and participants at the conference were able to attend. Professor Wilson's "Guarantor", or promoter, was Professor Jose Vicente Rodriquez Munoz, Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Documentation.

Sheila Webber had an active September and early October with external enagagements. As well as presenting a poster at the Creating Knowledge conference in Bergen (as mentioned in a previous posting), in September Sheila was invited to present on the Information Literate University at Uppsala University and then at Lund University, Sweden. She also gave a workshop at Lund University for librarians and presented at a research seminar in the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences. These presentations were all given with Bill Johnston, Strathclyde University, and there is a video of their talk at Lund University at: http://uwap03.uw.lu.se/KongressCentrum5/Viewer/?peid=9d3f3d440b6d4b5f953c08d4594b5424 At the end of September Sheila was invited to present at the annual information literacy conference in the Czech Republic, on Using Second Life as a learning environment. This is the presentation: Using Second Life as a learning environment Finally, in October, Sheila presented a worksho...

The best papers from the 14th International Symposium for Health Information Management Research (ISHIMR 2009) have been published in a special edition of the Health Informatics Journal, edited by Peter Bath and Göran Petersson. The conference took place at Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden in October 2009. The special issue can be accessed at: http://jhi.sagepub.com/content/current The next ISHIMR conference will take place in Zurich in September 2011.

There is a meeting in the virtual world, Second Life. You need the SL browser on your computer, and to have a SL avatar, to participate. When : Wednesday 20th October, 12 noon Second Life time, 8pm UK time, see http://tinyurl.com/3832may for other times around the world Where : http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit iSchool/46/28/21/ : This is the Information School's Second Life island What : There is a new "Health Information Literacy corner" on Infolit iSchool in Second Life. It currently has a health literacy quiz by Brielle Coronet, an HIV/AIDS information literacy exhibit by Robin Mochi, and (in the sky) a "Bird Flu" exhibit on a model of the 7 Pillars of information literacy. We will look at these, and also discuss further ideas for the corner. This is a Centre for Information Literacy Research event.

The Information School's MSc Information Management student Ruth Wong has been awarded a special mention in the The Library and Information Research Group (LIRG) and JIBS 2010 Student Awards, for her paper The scientific impact of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre by citation analysis . Congratulations to Ruth - we'll release more information as it arrives.

Research by Rabiah Ahmad and Peter Bath and colleagues has been published in a paper published today in the British Medical Journal. The research article appears online at: http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c4467 and will be published shortly in the print version. The research build on research Rabiah Ahmad undertook as part of her PhD, which developed CoRGA (Cox Regression Genetic Algorithm) to identify risk factors for mortality in older people. As part of the Mortality Review Group, Peter Bath and Rabiah undertook additional analyses examining the relationship between hand-grip strength and long-term mortality in older people. The results are included in the meta-analysis presented in the paper.

Sheila Webber and Professor Sheila Corrall have been participatng in the Creating Knowledge VI conference 8-10 September in Bergen, Norway. Sheila Corrall ran an invited workshop on Mapping Staff Competencies for Information Literacy Interventions and Sheila Webber presented a poster roundtable on Developing diverse learners’ conceptions of information literacy through different tools and spaces