Sheffield iSchool

The Information School or iSchool of the University of Sheffield, in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, was founded in 1963 as the University's Postgraduate School of Librarianship and became in 2010 the first UK iSchool. Other names were the Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science (PGSLIS, 1967-81) and Department of Information Studies (1981-2011).^[1] As of 2011^[update], it employs 19 academic staff, 8 administrative/support staff, 13 affiliated research staff, and has about 40 research students. The current head of department is Professor Philippa Levy.

The department opened in 1964 as a library school, becoming only the seconnd University based department in the UK.^[2] Since then, like many information science departments it has grown to encompass teaching and research in cheminformatics, educational informatics, health informatics, information retrieval, information systems, knowledge and information management, as well as libraries and information society. Such is the status of the school, that it has twice been honored with a special issue of the Journal of Information Science devoted entirely to the department, its staff and its research outputs.^[3][4]

Research achievements

The school has ranked highest or joint highest in its subject rating in every Research Assessment Exercise since the running of the first exercise in 1986. In this UK-government sponsored assessment of research outputs, no other department in its subject field (or its University) achieved this consistency; few departments of any subject area in UK universities managed such a high level of continuous research output (see the following links to the 1992,^[5] 1996,^[6] 2001^[7] RAE results). In 2008, rankings of departments was left to news organizations, the Times Higher Education placed Sheffield at No. 1 again.^[8]

In 2008, an analysis of citations showed four of the ten most cited UK information studies academics were working in the Sheffield department.^[9] It is also the first UK-based (and 2nd European) department to be become an iSchool.

Notable staff, past and present

• Micheline Beaulieu - Chair of the Computing and Informatics Panel of the European Research Council (2008-2011)
• Sheila Corrall - First President of CILIP: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.
• Michael Lynch
• Bob Usherwood - President of the Library Association, 1998; fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
• Steve Whittaker - inducted into the SIGCHI academy in 2008.
• Peter Willett - Leading researcher in cheminformatics.
• Tom Wilson - Recipient of the ASIS&T SIG USE award for "outstanding contributions to information behavior"^[10]

Notable alumni

• Michael Buckland - Emeritus Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and Co-Director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
• John McTernan - Director of Political Operations at 10 Downing Street under Tony Blair.
• Alasdair Paterson - Poet, winner of the 1975 Eric Gregory Award for poetry.

References

1. ^ "iSchool Timeline". University of Sheffield: Information School. http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/about/history.html. Retrieved 8 October 2011. 
2. ^ Saunders, W. (1989). "The University of Sheffield Department of Information Studies". Journal of Information Science 15 (4-5): 193–202. doi:10.1177/016555158901500402. 
3. ^ Journal of Information Science 15 (4-5). 1989. http://jis.sagepub.com/content/vol15/issue4-5/. 
4. ^ "Special Issue, 40 years of the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield". Journal of Information Science 29 (4). 2003. http://jis.sagepub.com/content/vol29/issue4/. 
5. ^ http://www.rae.ac.uk/1992/c26_92t64.html
6. ^ http://www.rae.ac.uk/1996/1_96/t61.html
7. ^ http://www.rae.ac.uk/2001/results/byuoa/uoa61.htm
8. ^ http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/Journals/THE/THE/18_December_2008/attachments/RAE_2008_THE_RESULTS.pdf
9. ^ Sanderson, M. (2008). "Revisiting h measured on UK LIS and IR academics". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 59 (7): 1184–1190. doi:10.1002/asi.20771. http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/4579/. 
10. ^ http://www.asis.org/SIG/SIGUSE/awards.php

External links

• University of Sheffield Information School home page