Ms Sheila Webber - p.2

Departmental responsibilities

I am Director of Learning and Teaching in the Department and member of the Departmental Strategy Group and the MA LIbrarianship Programme Team. In 2006/7 I coordinated undergraduate modules Information Literacy (Inf104) and Business Information (Inf304) and postgraduate modules Information Literacy Research (Inf6014) and Introduction to Management (Inf6120)

I am Director of the the new Departmental Centre for Information Literacy Research.

Research students

• Phussaddee Dokphrom, who is investigating the information literacy needs of undergraduate students at Silpakorn University
• Eva Hornung, who is looking at the training and development needs of solo librarians in Ireland.
  Maryam Nazari, who is investigating information literacy needs in the context of e-learners in Geographic Information Systems
• I co-supervised Dr Yazdan Mansourian, who graduated in 2006, having developed models concerning the perceptions and behaviour of web use of people in the University of Sheffield biology community – see http://invisibleweblog.blogspot.com/

University activities

Member of the Social Sciences Sub-faculty Learning and Teaching, Teaching Quality, and Programmes committees. Departmental Champion for the Centre for Inquiry-based learning in the Arts and Social Sciences.

External activities

In addition to the activities mentioned on the previous page, I am External Examiner for the Management Development Programme, Business School, University of Strathclyde (2005- ). Previously I was External Examiner for the MEcon in Information and Library Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (2000-2004) and for the BA course in Information and Library Studies at the University of Central England in Birmingham's School of Information Studies (1993-1998)

I have been assessor for research proposals from the following agencies: Israeli Science Foundation, National Research Foundation (South Africa), Arts & Humanities Research Council; British Library Research and Innovation Centre.

I was coordinator of Undergraduate Programmes in the Department, 2000-2004.
From 1992-2000 I was lecturer in the Department of Information Science, University of Strathclyde.
From 1980-1992 I worked with the British Library; my last post (1988-1992) was Head, British Library Business information Service and previous posts included Manager, BLAISE Online Services.
Prior to this I had worked as Assistant Librarian, Health and safety Executive and as a library assistant at the University of Sussex.

Research Projects

• “UK academics' conceptions of, and pedagogy for, information literacy”; November 2002 - November 2005; Funding Body: Arts Humanities and Research Board
• “Information literacy, libraries and students’ experience of learning in Higher Education: a research literature review”; January 2006 – June 2007; Funding Body: Higher Education Academy
• “Business information and the internet”; July 1998 - September 1999; Funding Body: British Library Research and Development Department. Project report

Recent presentations

Recent invited presentations are:

• “Information Literacy” British and Irish Association of Law Librarians, Sheffield (June 2007)
• “Conceptions of Information Literacy” University of the West of England, Bristol (June 2007)
• “The phenomenographic approach” (with Bill Johnston and Stuart Boon) Higher Education Academy, Introducing Pedagogic Research Methods, Glasgow (June 2007)
• “Blogging in LIS teaching and learning” (telepresentation); Web 2.0 na Ciência da Informação, Oprto, Portugal (May 2007)
• “Blogging and libraries” CILIP University, College and Research Libraries seminar, Leeds (December 2006)
• “Information Literacy in Higher Education”at the ZBDS conference Informacijska Pismenost med teorijo in prakso [Information Literacy between theory and practice], Ljubljana, Slovenia (October 2006)
• “There and Back Again: Learning Trajectories for Information Literacy in Education and Work" (with Bill Johnston) at the Australia and New Zealand Institute for Information Literacy Symposium, Brisbane, Australia, July 2006
• Workshop on workplace information literacy (with Ola Pilerot), Stockholm, Sweden, April 2006
• Keynote at the CAVAL information literacy conference in Melbourne, Australia, November 2005; plus workshop on creativity and information literacy in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia (both with Bill Johnston)
• Session on “Assessment of Information Literacy” at the TICER seminar, Tilburg University, Netherlands, August 2005
• “British academics from different disciplines: comparing their conceptions of information literacy.” (with Stuart Boon) Les Rencontres FORMIST, Lyon, France June 2005
• Keynote paper on information literacy: Deutsche Informationsgesellschaft conference, Frankfurt, Germany, May 2005
• Keynote paper on information literacy (with Bill Johnston) 34th WILU Conference, University of Guelph, Canada. May 2005
• Information literacy seminar, (with Bill Johnston and Stuart Boon) University of Skovde, Sweden, March 2005

Websites and Weblogs

I post most to the Information Literacy Weblog most days, with news and reports.

I also maintain a blog for my Second Life avatar.

Less frequently, I maintain the pages at the Information Literacy Place.

I also blog sometimes on the Inquiry Based Learning blog and the Inquiry in IM Staff Team blog

There is also this full report from the Business information and the Internet project. From 1994-2000 I maintained the Business Information sources on the Internet site, which got into the Economist guide to the Internet and the Rough Guide to the internet. It is now deceased, but there are still some archived pages (the ones dated 2001 and earlier).

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