Information School News

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...

The Information School's MSc Information Managment course has been promoted in the Indian press, appearing in The Tribune on 1 June 2016.

Jonathan Foster is currently in India from the 10-16th March, visiting universities and educational agencies to raise awareness of PGT courses; and to talk with students who are looking to apply to our PGT courses here at Sheffield. The whistlestop tour is taking in Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, and Mumbai; and it's proving to be a diverse, ordered, sometimes bamboozling place!

Rachel Davies We would like to offer our warmest congratulations to our latest cohort of postgraduate students on their recent graduation. Almost 250 postgraduates successfully graduated from the School's single- and dual-honours degree programmes, and now go on to join the thousands of Information School alumni working throughout industry, government, education and other organisations across the world. You can view the Graduation Cermony, which took place in the University's Octagon Centre, on this Gigapixel Image , and if you are a Facebook user, you can find and tag yourself in the photo. The School held a reception after the ceremony, where our prize winners were honoured for their outstanding achievements. Images are copyright Peter A Bath. Please click to enlarge. Penny Dunn Michelle Parker

According to the Independent newspaper, it's because "this is not a degree for the old fashioned but for future managers. A new dawn of librarian has arrived...are you in? ... These days the degree is really broad and is a cross between computer science and management." The Independent A-Z of Degrees August 2009 As you will see, their objective overview of Library and IM degrees around the country places the University of Sheffield firmly at the front.

“Forget stuffy types in sensible shoes and musty old buildings…today's information professional is also likely to be immersed in the virtual world of search engines, tags and all manner of web-based tools, working in a variety of settings.” So you want to study ... A master's in Librarianship guardian.co.uk, Saturday 24 January 2009 MA Librarianship student and AHRC scholar Katie Fraser features in an article in the Guardian on librarianship as a career. Katie was amongst other students and staff from the University of Sheffield, the University of Loughborough and the University of Aberystwyth who offered advice and their eperiences to people wanting to enter the profession. Katie commented on what the course covers, funding opportunities and job prospects. “It's a field that's changing quite a lot, with new technologies having a big impact and libraries starting to get more involved in providing services like online portals.”

The Department has registered a record number of new undergraduate students this year; 30 to its single honours degree programme, and 40 to its two dual honours programmes. This is a significant increase on previous years, and outstrips the programmes' recruitment targets.

David Brown and Katie Fraser , who joined the Department's MA Librarianship programme last week, have both won free places at the 1st Research Libraries UK (RLUK, formerly the Consortium of University Research Libraries) Conference on 'The Power of Knowledge' to be held at the University of Leeds on 22-24 October. The competition was sponsored by RLUK in association with the Department. Applicants were asked to explain why they wanted to attend the event and how it would help their career development. The standard of entries was so high that the Department has awarded additional prizes of books on academic librarianship to two runners-up, Samantha Abrahams and Chloe Furnival .

MSc in Health Informatics student James Duncan is one of several students interviewed in the Independant, for an article about the benefits of distance learning master's programmes. "Distance learning is helping workers' careers – and their pockets, too" In the article, James explains how the programme directly helped him in his career in healthcare consultancy communications.

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 Friday 9th March we a holding a day school for our MSc Health Informatics course, a distance learning programme.

Last week was the start of our Spring Semester, so it was a busy time for all our staff and students. A new module starting this year is the Inquiry in Information Management module which is taken by our 1st year BSc Information Management students as part of their core curriculum. This is gaining extra support from being one of our Departmental CILASS (Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences) projects (scroll down the page to see information about this particular project).