Information School News

 This year Microsoft invited the iSchools to send a representative to their annual conference for university researchers (mostly in computer science), the Faculty summit, at their HQ at Redmond nr Seattle, WA. Andrew Cox drew the lucky straw, because there was a strong social media strand to the event this year. There were two full days of talks on latest developments including on social media and crowdsourcing, see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/facultysummit2012-071612.aspx There was also a “Future of social experiences” Social media workshop attended by most of the iSchool delegates.

Miguel Nunes, as a panel member on behalf of the University of East London (UEL) , took part in two different Quality Assurance (QA) events at the Financial Training & Management Services (FTMS) College , Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. These events   held on 18th and 19th June 2012 included the Validation of a new programme (BSc (Hons) Computer Networks) and the Collaborative Review  of the partnership between UEL and FTMS that involves 3 established undergraduate programmes and 2 master programmes.

Miguel Nunes visited the Faculty of Information Management of the Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) in Shah Alam, Malaysia, on the 20th of June 2012 invited by Professor Sohaimi Zakaria.  During the visit, Miguel gave a seminar on "Research Issues in the Study of Knowledge Management in Organisations: moving away from obsolete dichotomies".  The interaction with both staff and students was very rich and rewarding and laid the seed for the creation of more closer academic links between UiTM and Sheffield in the future.

Prof Jianfang Wang from the Department of Information Analysis, National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences, visited our School on the 29th June 2012.  Prof Wang also gave a research seminar on “Tailored Bibliometrics Analysis: in support of evidence-based S&T policy decision making”.  This talk aimed at  explaining how evidence-based S&T policy decision-making in China uses evidence from scientific output analysed through bibliometrics.  Prof Wang illustrated how to take advantage of bibliometric analysis to get reasonable evidence on current trends and patterns of current research and publication. This talk focused on professional and research practice of the National Science Library of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Rachel Bickley and Sheila Corrall's paper on student perceptions of staff in the Information Commons has been chosen for the American Library Association's Reference Research Review for 2011, which highlights 20 studies selected for their importance to the practice of reference. The paper was based on Rachel's 2010 MA Librarianship dissertation project and published in Reference Services Review, 39 (2), 223-243. The annotated bibliography is available at  http://connect.ala.org/node/180163 .

Val Gillet and Peter Willett were two of the speakers at the 3rd Strasbourg Summer School in Chemoinformatics , speaking on " / In silico / approaches to toxicity prediction" and "Chemoinformatics: the first half-century"

The best papers from the 15th International Symposium for Health Information Management Research (ISHIMR 2011) have been published in a special edition of the Health Informatics Journal, edited by Peter Bath, Barbara Sen and their colleagues in Zurich, Dimitri Raptis and Tobias Mettler. The papers were selected on the basis of the reviews by two members of the Programme Committee. The conference took place at the University Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland in September 2011. The special issue can be accessed at: http://jhi.sagepub.com/content/current The special issues includes papers from two PhD students in the Health Informatics Research Group, Tomislav Dimitrovski and Thomas Poulter. It is expected that an announcement will be made soon about the next ISHIMR conference (to be held in 2013).