Information School News

“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.”

Congratulations to Chadwyn Tann for co-authoring a paper in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, one of the best known journals in the field. The paper is titled "Are Web Based Informational Queries Changing?". It describes the results of a survey conducted by Chad into the searching intentions of users. The striking result of the survey is that Google does not appear to be as dominant a search engine as it once was. Chad graduated from the IS department in 2006 on the BSc Information Management course.

On 8 January, Prof Sheila Corrall extended her promotion of information literacy to a new audience with a talk to the Dart Valley Branch of the University of the Third Age (U3A). Her presentation discussed benefits and problems in gaining access to information via the Internet and World Wide Web, before explaining the concept of information literacy and outlining how library and information professionals in different sectors were helping individuals and communities to become information literate.

Stephen Adams, of Magister Ltd will be speaking in the department on Thursday the 8th of January at 1pm in room 204. His talk will address some of the common misunderstandings about the role of published patent information and its place in the wider intellectual property system. The documents are commonly viewed as “difficult” or “obscure”, yet they are amongst the most widely available technical publications in the world, and subject to a high degree of bibliographic control and standardisation. The task of the professional patent searcher is to understand the complex mix of science, law and information retrieval skills which enables the industrial user to make sense of the documents and to exploit their contents effectively.