Information School News

Dr Mark Sanderson is presenting a paper at the RIAO (Recherche d'Information Assistée par Ordinateur) conference being held in Pittsburgh, USA, this week. The paper is co-authored with Hideo Joho (a former Research Assistant in this Department) and entitled Document frequency and term specificity

The above conference was held on Tuesday 22nd May at Leeds Town Hall. All the presentations from the conference about the NHS Connecting for Health NPfIT Programme are available at the following link: http://etdevents.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/756

Dr Kendra Albright travels to Africa this week to working on proposals with Makerere University's East African School of Library and Information Science in Kampala, Uganda.

Briony Train is visiting Portugal, to give a paper on Reading promotion in UK public libraries at the “Encontro Oeiras a Ler” book trade/public libraries seminar, and helping with various seminars on European cross-sectoral reading promotion.

Chih-Ping Li goves a research seminar on this topic on Tuesday 22nd May in Regent Court Room 204 at 1pm.

On Tuesday-Wednesday 22nd-23rd May, Sheila Corrall attends a meeting of the Learning and Teaching Committee of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the HE Funding Councils at the University of Warwick. The first part of this extended two-day residential event includes a joint meeting with members of the JISC Organisational Support Committee, to discuss shared interests and concerns. Further details of work of the JISC Learning and Teaching Committee can be found at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/committees/sub_committees/jclt_home.aspx .

On Saturday, 19th May, Prof Sheila Corrall travelled to London to celebrate the SLA Europe Dissertation Awards at a special teatime event at The Lanesborough hotel, along with former MA Librarianship student, Rachel Adams , who received the award for her investigation into Information Literacy and the provision of information skills training in the government sector (which was supervised by Sheila Webber). Saturday’s event was attended by SLA Europe Board Members, Barbara Robinson (Awards Organiser), Rachel Kolsky (SLA Europe President) and Sylvia James (SLA Europe and SLA Main Board Treasurer), along with students and staff from Brighton, London Metropolitan and Loughborough Universities. Rachel Kolsky had previously visited Sheffield to present Rachel Adams with her certificate at the Department’s Graduation Reception in December 2006. The SLA Europe Dissertation Awards were established in 2006, following a round table discussion with Sheila Corrall and other LIS academics, as part

On Wednesday 23rd May, Prof Peter Willett visits the Centre for Bioinformatics at the University of Hamburg, togive a paper on " Chemoinformatics research at the University of Sheffield ".

On Monday Maykel Perez , Lecturer, University of Havana, Cuba will give a research seminar on Changing the subject: Conceptual frameworks, legitimisation strategies, andcontradictions in Cuban information policies . "The seminar concentrates on outlining the main characteristics of the Cuban model of information production, transfer, and consumption that shapes and informs national information policies and strategies. The emphasis is placed onthe conceptual frameworks, discourses, metaphors, and representations that underpin and legitimise information policies. The aim is to illustrate how ruling groups in Cuba proactively work through discourse to control the appropriation and use of information systems to promote their own interests and priorities. "

Congratulations to DIS PhD student Vaiva Kalnikaite who was awarded a best paper (in any category) award at the ACM Computer Human Interaction conference in San Jose, USA for her work on Memory Prostheses. This is a real achievement for an experienced researcher, but especially for someone who is just 18 months into their PhD. The overall acceptance rate is about 20% and 5 awards were made in total making the paper one of the top 1% for a very competitive conference. This is a real achievement for her as well as bringing esteem to the department.

James O'Brien , a student on our MA Librarianship programme, has been awarded a free place on the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians ( BIALL ) conference taking place this June.

On 10th May John C. Tang of IBM Research, Almaden, gave a research talk on Consolidarity: Exploring Patterns of Social Commonality Among File Directories at Work.

Nora G. Agustero Friday 18 May 07 1.00pm Room 204 The long tradition of co-operation among libraries and the resurgence of interest towards participation in library consortia in recent years presume that it is crucial to how libraries cope with socio-cultural, political, economic and technological challenges. However, a number of practitioners expressed concerns or discontents with library consortia on issues like cost in terms of travel and staff time, time delays in terms of license negotiation or renewal, inefficiency, or sustainability. Therefore the focus of this research is not whether or not libraries should co-operate, but how they collaborate and with whom.

Briony Train - Principal Investigator Kerry Wilson - Research Associate Tuesday 12 May 07 12.00pm Meetings Room 324 This talk will present progress made so far on this AHRC funded research project looking at public library staff attitudes towards social inclusion policy and disadvantaged groups in society. The two year project (March 2006 - February 2008) has been designed to investigate the relationships between staff's own social, cultural and professional background and their capacity to make an effective, empathic contribution to social inclusion objectives. The project explores the concept of empathy within a professional public service culture, using a combination of research methods including a national survey, focus groups and interviews with a stratified sample of public library staff in England. Specific research objectives include an exploration of the appropriateness of organizational structures and recruitment policies, particularly with reference to the traditional

Dr Mark Sanderson will next year co-chair SIGIR , the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. This international conference is the world's largest in the field of information retrieval.

Recently two groups of students have given presentations about their experience of learning in the Department. Two MA Librarianship students from the Information Literacy Research class gave an IBL cafe (Inquiry Based Learning) session on 25th April (see http://cilass.group.shef.ac.uk/?p=165 ), talking about their IL project and the module itself. On 30th April, level 1 BSc Information Management students joined with members of the teaching team in the Inquiry in Information Management module, to talk at the CILASS Staff/Student symposium, held in the new Information Commons (see http://www.shef.ac.uk/cilass/symposium.html )

It looks like a successful Fourth Joint Sheffield Conference on Chemoinformatics is in prospect, since the conference is already fully booked with a waiting list drawn up. It will be held in The Octagon Centre, University of Sheffield, UK, from 18th to 20th June, 2007, under the aegis of The Chemical Structure Association Trust and the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society. The Organising Committee consists of Dr Val Gillet, Dr John Holliday, Dr Eleanor Gardiner, and Professor Peter Willett (all from this Department), plus Peter Gedeck, Novartis (on behalf of the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society) and David Wild, University of Indiana (on behalf of the Chemical Structure Association Trust). http://cisrg.shef.ac.uk/shef2007/

Professor Steve Whittaker presented two sessions at the Computer/Human Interaction ( CHI ) 2007 conference this week, taking place 28 April - 3 May, 2007 in San Jose, California, USA. Vaiva Kalnikaite (also from this Department) and Steve presented Software or Wetware? Discovering When and Why People Use Digital Prosthetic Memory. He was also copresenter with colleagues from IBM USA (John C. Tang, James Lin, Jeffrey S. Pierce and Clemens Drews) of Recent Shortcuts: Using Recent Interactions to Support Shared Activities . The abstract for this presentation is "We describe an empirical study identifying opportunities to support user work on shared activities through improved access to recently used computer objects and present a prototype to realize those opportunities."

Sheila Webber has been the second guest blogger on UKOLN's UK Web Focus blog: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2007/05/01/ guest-post-webbed-or-web-sceptic-you-decide/