Information School News

As our graduate intern over the last six months, Stuart Crowley has worked on improving our provision for our iLab facility. On his last day in the department, he has written the following blog about his work here. After my graduation in English Language and Linguistics and an arduous stint of unemployment, I successfully applied to become a graduate intern for The Information School. For the past six months, I was tasked with evaluating and improving the state of the iLab facilities, a research facility with the purpose of observing and analysing human interaction with and without electronic devices. Thus, the iLab can be used to test website design and accessibility as well as analysing social interaction accompanied or unaccompanied by electronic devices – a potential goldmine for innovative and creative research projects. Before I arrived, the iLab was not always reaching its full potential. To evaluate this, I researched the needs and wants of previous and potentia...

MA Librarianship student Lucy Branford-White has been selected as a Policy Analyst to join a team of staff and students going to the G20 summit in Hamburg next month. Lucy has been selected as part of the Faculty of Social Sciences' Global Leadership Initiative, which is part of GLOSS . The 2017 G20 Hamburg summit will be the 12th G20 meeting. It is planned to be held from July 7th to 8th in Hamburg, Germany. G20 was initiated in 1999 and consists of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Republic of Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union (EU). Before the outbreak of global financial crisis in 2008, G20 meetings of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors were held to discuss international financial and monetary policies, reform of international financial institutions and world economic development. The first G20 Leaders' Summit wa...

Information School PhD student Jessica Elmore (co-supervised by Sheila Webber and  Dr Peter Stordy) is recipient of the inaugural Mark Hepworth Memorial  Award. The award commemorates Professor Hepworth  (1955-2016).  Jessica  received the award for submitting the best abstract to the i3  (Information: interactions and impact) conference. Her paper, which  she presents on 29 June at i3, is entitled "Information Sharing in the  ESOL (English Speakers of Other Languages) classroom: a case study" She is shown here with i3 Chair Professor Peter Reid and Professor  Graham Matthews, from Loughborough University, where Mark was a  faculty member.

Doctoral student Wasim Ahmed and Professor Peter Bath , pictured below, from the Health Informatics Research Group, recently delivered a talk at a CERN workshop in Geneva . The talk was based on the industry and academic perspectives on social media research ethics, and the also talk highlighted the approach that has been undertaken by the University of Sheffield.  Wasim Ahmed , pictured below, also presented a poster on his PhD research during the CERN workshop. Wasim’s poster was based on his PhD research which is examining how people talk about infectious disease outbreaks such as Swine Flu and Ebola on Twitter. Wasim also touched on the benefits of engaging with research blogs such as the LSE Impact blog .

Dr Elisa Serafinelli presented the AESOP Guidelines for effective communication between Critical Infrastructure operators and members of the public during crisis situations at the IMPROVER project workshop that was held at the Joint Research Centre, in Ispra Italy on the 11th and 12th May 2017. Recommendations included: creating platforms and/or channels of communication that can provide feedback about CI operators’ services before, during and after a major incident. The guidelines was published along with the deliverables for task 4.2. Researchers, operators and the IMPROVER consortium joined forces for two days of presentations, knowledge sharing, and networking. The workshop was also an opportunity to present IMPROVER project activities and results in order to get feedback from critical infrastructures (CI) operators.

CILIP Conference (5-6 July, Manchester) is a highlight of the professional calendar for library and information professionals in the UK, and this year the Information School is delighted to award bursaries for six postgraduate students to attend the conference and share their experiences. Our bursary award-winners are: Hannah Beckitt – MA Library and Information Services Management Erica Brown – MA Digital Library Management Jaimee McRoberts – MA Library and Information Services Management Itzelle Medina – PhD (and previous MA Librarianship student) Lucy Sinclair – MA Librarianship Louise Wasson – MA Library and Information Services Management All are looking forward to making the most of the conference programme , including excellent keynotes by Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, and Luciano Floridi of the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Your Career track, which is sponsored by the Information School. Watch out for tweets and blog posts from our students about thei...

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly has had an article published in a new report on the 2017 UK General Election edited by Einar Thorsen, Dan Jackson and Darren Lilleker from Bournemouth University. This rapid response report features 92 contributions from over 100 UK and international academics. Paul's article presents some preliminary findings from a study of 1,842 tweets posted during the BBC Northern Ireland Leaders’ Debate, which took place a few days before polling day. ‘ It explores the response of Northern Irish tweeters to statements made by the representatives of the main political parties during the debate. The article can be accessed here  and the full report is available to download from here