Information School News

This week Professor Stephen Pinfield is visiting Sun Yat-Sen University in China. Whilst there, Stephen will be giving three lectures on recent research projects in which he has been involved and also discussing research collaboration opportunities. Stephen is hosted by old colleagues Miguel Nunes and Alex Peng, who are both Professors there; Miguel is Dean of the Information School. The three lectures that Stephen is giving on his visit are as follows: Open-Access Mega-Journals and the Future of Scholarly Communication (research conducted with Claire Creaser, Jenny Fry, Valérie Spezi, Simon Wakeling & Peter Willett): Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) represent an increasingly important part of the scholarly communication landscape. OAMJs, such as PLOS ONE and Nature’s Scientific Reports, are large scale, broad-scope journals that operate an open-access business model, and which employ a novel form of peer review, focusing on scientific ‘soundness’ only and not judgments o...

Professor Josephine Nabukenya, Chair of Health Informatics in the Department of Information Systems, School of Computing and Information Sciences at Makerere University, Uganda, has paid a five-day visit to the Information School as a guest of Dr Laura Sbaffi and Dr Pamela Abbott, representing the Health Informatics and Information Systems Research Groups, respectively. Josephine’s visit follows on from a five-day research visit made by Drs Sbaffi and Abbott to Makerere University in April to establish research collaborations, which were initiated between Professor Nabukenya and Professor Peter Bath, Chair of Health Informatics and Head of the Information School. While visiting the School, Josephine met researchers mainly in the Health Informatics and Information Systems research groups and presented a seminar on “Transforming Uganda’s Healthcare and Ecosystem Using Health Informatics Research”; details of the seminar are here . She also spent time exploring current research ...

In June, the Information School welcomed visitors from the Rutgers University summer school for library and information management. The summer school involves masters students from Rutgers and other partner universities, who are based in the UK for two weeks at Wroxton College near Oxford. The students are involved in lectures and seminars during their time in the UK involving speakers from this country and other parts of Europe. The students visited Sheffield for a day and were involved in classes led by Dr Briony Birdi and Professor Stephen Pinfield. Briony led a class on public libraries and Stephen on academic libraries. There were some really excellent discussions, with students contributing based on their knowledge of good practice and the literature. Students were also given a tour of the Information Commons and the Diamond building at Sheffield as examples of library and learning environments in the UK. Thanks to Helen Dickinson,  Information Se...

On Friday 31st August 2017, members of the Information School (Dr Ana Vasconcelos, Prof Paul Clough and Dr Simon Wakeling) and Professor David Ellis (Department of Information Studies, University of Aberystwyth) visited Bletchley Park  to meet with staff and discuss potential collaborative research activities. Following an initial discussion about the role of Bletchley Park in WWII – home of the top-secret codebreakers and what is now GCHQ – the visitors were provided with examples of archival materials held at Bletchley, such as the cataloguing system maintained with index cards, examples of intercepted coded messages and synthesised highlights created each day and sent to people such as Winston Churchill. They also toured the site at Bletchley Park, which is a major UK visitor attraction and film location for the Oscar-nominated film “The Imitation Game”.  Thanks go to Dr David Kenyon (research historian) and Peronel Craddock (Head of Collections and Exhi...