‘Managing and evaluating personal reputations on the basis of information shared on social media: a Generation X perspective‘ has been published this week in Information Research. I co-authored this paper with Centre for Social Informatics PhD student Frances Ryan, and colleagues Peter Cruickshank and Alistair Lawson. Continue reading
The Centre for Social Informatics is currently undertaking a project entitled Information Literacy for Democratic Engagement (IL-DEM). Supported by a grant from the CILIP Information Literacy Group, our work investigates levels of digital and information literacy within Scotland’s Community Council system.
Specifically Peter Cruickshank, Dr Bruce Ryan and I are exploring how community councillors develop the skills required to inform and engage with the citizens that they represent, and how libraries support this work. In doing so we’re extending two established research streams within the Centre for Social Informatics: Cruickshank and Ryan’s work on digital engagement in local democracy (such as our DigiCC workshops), and mine with Christine Irving on information literacy and life-long learning. This work also builds upon our group’s track record in library and information science research. Continue reading
Congratulations to Leo Appleton, who was awarded the 2016 Research Practitioner Excellence Award by the Library and Information Research Group (LIRG) at the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) 2016 New Professionals Day in London last Friday 28th October 2016. Leo is Associate Director of Library Services at the University of the Arts, London, and a part-time PhD student within the Centre for Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University, where I am his Director of Studies.
Leo Appleton at the awards ceremony in London on Friday 28th October 2016 (photo credit LIRG)
Today I’m giving the opening keynote presentation in Copenhagen at the SIG USE Information Behavior in Workplaces. This is one of a series of workshops taking place as part of the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST2016). It has been organised by the SIG/USE Symposium Chairs:
The title of my presentation is ‘Watching the workers: researching information behaviours in, and for, workplaces‘. The slides are available on SlideShare and below.
Many congratulations to Centre for Social Informatics research student Alicja Pawluczuk on winning the best poster award at the The Digital Human: Humanities and Social Sciences in the Digital Age conference hosted by Strathclyde University on 12th September.
The conference focused on the challenges and potential of interdisciplinary digital research. Alicja’s poster outlined the proposals for her doctoral study on youth digital participation and measuring the social impact of such work. For further information about the conference and Alicja’s contribution to the day check the post on her blog www.phdadventures.com.
Lyndsey Jenkins
Many congratulations to Centre for Social Informatics PhD student Lyndsey Jenkins on winning a ‘best paper’ award with co-authors Ruoyun Lin and Debora Jeske at the 15th IFIP Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society last week.
The winning paper is entitled ‘Influences and benefits of role models on social media’. On the basis of their empirical work, the authors argue that having a role model is associated with greater perceived support for one’s career aspirations, and access to information. In addition, those who have role models online report that their online profiles give more realistic self-presentations of their values and priorities. These individuals also have higher expectations of reciprocity in online environments. Continue reading
Information Seeking in Context (ISIC) 2016 takes place in Zadar, Croatia 20-23 September 2016. The programme for the conference is now available. Four research students from the Centre for Social Informatics will be making contributions at this event. They are Iris Buunk, Lyndsey Jenkins, John Mowbray, and Frances Ryan. Continue reading
Dr Ella Taylor-Smith
Many congratulations to Dr Ella Taylor-Smith of the Centre for Social Informatics. Ella will graduate with a PhD from Edinburgh Napier University at the Usher Hall this morning.
Ella has been awarded a PhD for her thesis entitled Participation Space Studies: a socio-technical exploration of activist and community groups’ use of online and offline spaces to support their work. Her doctoral work was supervised by Professor Elisabeth Davenport, Dr Colin Smith, and Dr Michael Smyth.
Next week Ella will be sharing some of her PhD findings in a paper entitled ‘Non public eparticipation in social media spaces’ at Social Media and Society 2016. This major international conference takes place between 11th and 13th July in London. Continue reading
iDocQ 2016 – the sixth annual Information Science doctoral colloquium – took place on Thursday 23rd June at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. Twenty-eight delegates from Scottish and English universities enjoyed a varied programme on the day. This included: Continue reading
This week the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) and the Archives and Records Association (ARA) published a series of 24 fact sheets on the demography of the UK workforce in libraries, archives, records, information management, and knowledge management. The data, presented in the fact sheets by sector and region, derive from the findings of the Workforce Mapping Project.
This project was completed in 2014/15 by an Edinburgh Napier University team that comprised three staff from the Centre for Social Informatics (Hazel Hall, Christine Irving and Bruce Ryan) and three from the Employment Research Institute (Robert Raeside, Tao Chen and Matthew Dutton). In November 2015 CILIP and ARA used data from the final project report to publish the headline findings from the study. Continue reading
Hazel Hall 