Information School News

On June 10, 2022, The University of Sheffield (UoS) organized the User Researcher Industry (URI) Day at the Diamond building. This event had speakers from different industries sharing their experiences and giving us an idea about working in research. The day consisted of diverse segments and was quite interesting especially for international students. Read on if you’d like to know more! We were first greeted with a table of refreshments and a stand where we registered our presence and sticked a name tag on our chests. I had come in a bit late, so it was only a few minutes before we were signaled by Dr. Sophie Rutter to enter the lecture theatre for the program to start. Sophie also made the welcoming speech and gave us the program for the day. Figure  1  Reception: breakfast and registration Employability Team The day started with the employability team at the university. Mr. Liam Barr discussed the overarching strategy that the employability team works in adherence to. ...

MA Librarianship student Bethany talks us through her tips and tricks for navigating the daunting task of writing her dissertation. She's also done a short video on the topic, which you can view below. The thought of writing a dissertation can be quite overwhelming! You may not have written one before and have no idea where to start. Before my master’s degree, I did have some experience in writing a dissertation, but even with this previous experience, I still found it a bit daunting at first! I am currently nearly halfway through my master’s dissertation, and I thought I would share a few tips that I have picked up along the way… I recommend starting to think about your dissertation topic early. This will give you enough time to choose a topic that you feel confident about, instead of rushing into one last minute. During Semester 1 it might be useful to read a few articles that are linked to your area of interest. By taking these small steps, you will be able to submit a more ...

Laura Sbaffi (Unfair Means Officer) and Skye Xin Zhao (Introductory Tasks Lead) are the winners of the University of Sheffield 2022 Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Learning and Teaching for the Digital Innovation category. The Vice-Chancellor’s Award is a prestigious and highly competitive award that is designed to encourage, promote and celebrate good practice across the university. As a department, we are very proud to have our staff members winning this award. The award has been awarded in recognition of a suite of resources and support developed since 2020 to support students’ academic transitions and enhance their understanding of Academic Integrity-related concepts, policies, and practices. The resources are a key part of the Information School’s early intervention strategy to provide positive and proactive, and sustained support to students in their academic work. Engaging students as partners, Laura and Skye have developed an online module incorporating a suite of interactive...

Manchester bound LILAC, the Information Literacy conference, took part in Manchester this year and I was fortunate enough to attend because of a generous bursary I won from Sheffield's Information School. The iSchool is where I am currently studying for the part-time, long-distance MA in Library and Information Services Management (LISM). So yes, this was the first time I had the chance to meet fellow students and my lecturers in person; at my first librarianship conference. LILAC is a unique experience and with more than 60 parallel sessions to choose from this year, the diversity of cutting-edge information literacy research and practice was well represented. One of the panels I attended (and more on that a bit further down) discussed whether and in what way information literacy is its own discipline of Library Science and - to put if flippantly - one look at the  programme  bears much of the answer. There is a certain nervousness that comes with attending your first b...

As I collected my lanyard and notebook at the start of the LILAC information literacy conference, I noticed a bee theme. From a display of origami bees crafted by delegates to the logo on the cover of our conference notebooks, bees reflected this year’s Manchester setting. They also reminded me of the value of library conferences. Like bees working together, the conference allowed library and information professionals from around the world to gather and share ideas around information literacy. The sessions that addressed library teaching with diverse learners stood out to me, as one of the reasons I wanted to attend LILAC was to keep working on the inclusivity of my teaching skills. One of these was a session on ‘Dyslexia, creativity and information-seeking: how can academic librarians acknowledge neurodiversity in their information literacy teaching practice?’ by Lynne Beveridge. This session helped us to understand some of the barriers undergraduates with dyslexia encounter in thei...

92 per cent of research and its real-world impact at the University of Sheffield has been rated as world-leading or internationally excellent 91 per cent of the Information School's research is rated world-leading or internationally excellent Our impact submission was rated 7th nationally The REF results are used to inform the allocation of around £2 billion per year of public funding for research The University of Sheffield’s submission to the REF included 3,684 outputs, 114 impact case studies and 1,690 staff The framework assesses the quality of our research, as well as the impact of that research beyond academia, measuring the benefits of innovative collaboration with business, industry, the public sector and civil society organisations which help to translate groundbreaking ideas into real-world solutions The University of Sheffield is today (12 May 2022) celebrating its pioneering research which is addressing some of the biggest global challenges and making a real-world impac...

I recently attended a VIP Preview Evening at Bletchley Park (BP) to launch their new exhibition called The Intelligence Factory. This also included a new temporary exhibition called The Art of Data. The new exhibition narrates how the activities at BP turned data into intelligence products that were then used for tactical and strategic decision making by the likes of Churchill. However, it is presented as a factory which not only includes the innovative technologies (e.g. Colossus for codebreaking), but also the organisation and management required to do this effectively. It also shows the need for good data and information management, analytics, visualization and storytelling etc and is a great blueprint for any analytics activities in modern day organisations. David Kenyon from BP came to present at the iSchool a couple of years back on the topic, which was his early thinking about an intelligence factory that eventually helped to this new exhibition. In the Art of Data exhibition th...