Information School 2011

Transcription

1 Information School 2011

2 Contents Photo: Peter Bath People... 3 Welcome... 4 New Arrivals... 5 Achievements and Awards... 6 Staff Activities... 7 Learning and Teaching Undergraduate Programmes Postgraduate Programmes Postgraduate Dissertations Research ilab Facility Research Group Reports Research Projects PhD Theses Completed Continuing Seminars Presentations Publications Where are they now? Cover Photo: Paula Goodale

3 People Academic Staff Alastair Allan, Senior University Teacher, Blib, MCLIP Peter Bath, Reader, BSc, MSc, PhD Briony Birdi, Lecturer, BA, MA, MCLIP Paul Clough, Senior Lecturer, BEng, PhD Sheila Corrall, Professor of Library and Information Science, PMA, DipLib, MBA, MSc, FCLIP, FCMI, FRSA Andrew Cox, Lecturer, BA, MA, MSc, MEd, PhD Nigel Ford, Professor of Information Science, BA, MA Jonathan Foster, Lecturer, MSc, MEd, PhD Val Gillet, Professor of Chemoinformatics, MA, MSc, PhD Peter Holdridge, Learning Technologist, BSc, MEd John Holliday, Senior Research Manager, BSc, PhD Philippa Levy, Professor of Higher Education Development, Head of School, BA, MA, PhD, FHEA Angela Lin, Lecturer, BA, MSc, PhD Miguel Baptista Nunes, Senior Lecturer, BSc, MSc, PhD, MBCS, FHEA, FIMIS Alex Peng, Lecturer, BSc, PhD Barbara Sen, Lecturer, BA, MA, MCLIP Peter Stordy, University Teacher, BEd, MSc, PhD Elaine Toms, Professor of Information Science, BA, B.Ed., MLS, PhD Ana Cristina Vasconcelos, Senior Lecturer, BA, PGDip, PhD Robert Villa, Lecturer, BSc, MSc, PhD Sheila Webber, Senior Lecturer, BA, Dip Lip, FCLIP, FHEA Peter Willett, Professor of Information Science, MA, MSc, PhD, DSc Administrative and Technical John Bennett, Learning and Teaching Manager, BA, MEd Paul Fenn, ICT Manager, BSc, MSc Wendy Hardman, Admissions Secretary Matt Jones, Research and Resources Assistant, BA Tim Nadin, Research and Resources Manager, BSc Julie Priestley, Examinations and Records Secretary Sophie Raynor, Programmes Assistant, BA Andrea Shaw, Programmes Assistant, BA, MSc Christine Shaw, Clerical Officer Andrew Stones, Computer Technician Professors Emeritus Micheline Beaulieu, BA, PhD, FCLIP Michael Lynch, BSc, PhD, CChem, FCLIP Bob Usherwood, BA, PhD, Hon FLA, FCLIP, FRSA Tom Wilson, BSc, PhD, Hon PhD, FCLIP Research Staff Dr Ben Allen, De Novo Design Mary Crowder, Developing Deep Critical Information Skills Dr Eleanor Gardiner, Belief Theory Paula Goodale, Personalised Access to Cultural Heritage Spaces (PATHS) Dr Mark Hall, Personalised Access to Cultural Heritage Spaces (PATHS) Dr Evangelos Kanoulas, EFireEval Dr Petros Lameras, Pathway Dr Andrew Madden, Developing Deep Critical Information Skills Monica Lestari Paramita, ACCURAT Dr Richard Sherhod, Development of Data Mining Methods for Knowledge Discovery in Toxicity Prediction Visiting Professors Martin Molloy, OBE, Strategic Director of Cultural and Community Services, Derbyshire County Council Martin White, Managing Director, Intranet Focus Ltd Professor Susan Williams, Institute for Information Systems Research, University of Koblenz-Landau Distance Learning Tutors Claire Beecroft, School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) Andrew Booth, ScHARR Helen Buckley Woods, ScHARR Louise Guillaume, ScHARR Alan O Rourke, ScHARR Angie Rees, ScHARR Advisory Panel Dr John Barnard, Scientific Director, Digital Chemistry Ltd Mr Neil Beagrie, Director & Principal Consultant, Charles Beagrie Ltd Mr Darron Chapman, Managing Director, TFPL Mr Tim Gollins, Head of Digital Preservation, The National Archives Ms Grace Kempster, Library Services Manager, Northamptonshire Libraries and Information Services Dr Shirley Large, National Research and Development Manager, NHS Direct Mr Robin Murray, Vice-President, Global Product Development, OCLC Mr David A Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, Communities and Local Government & Department for Transport Ms Nicky Whitsed, Director of Library Services, The Open University Mr Martin Lewis, Director of Library Services and University Librarian, University of Sheffield Dr Christine Sexton, Director, Corporate Information and Computing Services, University of Sheffield Mr Martin Molloy, Strategic Director, Cultural and Community Services, Derbyshire County Council Professor Susan P. Williams, Institute for IS Research, University of Koblenz-Landau Mr Martin White, Managing Director, Intranet Focus Ltd 3

4 Welcome Welcome! This year was a busy and productive one for the School. The following pages detail the many activities and achievements of staff and students it is with pleasure that I draw special attention to just a few highlights here. We were delighted to welcome new staff to the School this year. Professor Elaine Toms joined us from Dalhousie University, Canada to take up the positions of Professor of Information Science and Head of our Information Retrieval Research Group. Elaine s personal research expertise lies at the intersection of human computer interaction, information retrieval and the representation and presentation of information. Her appointment has enabled us to develop exciting plans for investment in a new research facility for the School, to be called the ilab and to be launched, with Elaine s leadership, at the start of academic year Dr Robert Villa joined us as Lecturer in Information Retrieval from the University of Glasgow, bringing specialist expertise in interactive information retrieval, in particular the areas of image and video retrieval, support for complex search tasks, collaborative search and the evaluation of information retrieval systems. Among staff achievements I should like to highlight in particular Dr Peter Stordy s very successful defence of his PhD thesis on the topic of digital literacies, with his doctorate awarded formally in early There were staffing changes too in our Administrative team, to which we were very pleased to welcome Andrea Shaw as Programmes Assistant and thank Sophie Raynor who moved to the University s School of Management. I should also like to take this opportunity to warmly congratulate Julie Priestley, Examinations and Records Secretary, and Matt Jones, Research and Resources Assistant, for their very well-deserved promotions in The event we held in June 2011 to celebrate the launch of our new identity as Sheffield s Information School, and our membership of the international ischools organisation, was a major highlight for us this year, having changed our name from Department of Information Studies in We were delighted to take this opportunity to showcase our work to an invited audience, including our Advisory Panel, and to present key aspects of our strategic direction of travel. We included a special focus on our on-going work towards the redesign of our undergraduate programmes, including the launch of a new suite of Informatics programmes, for entry The timing of the ischool launch also coincided with the publication of a special Sheffield ischool issue of Aslib Proceedings (vol 63, issue 2/3, 2011), guest edited by Professor Peter Willett, which draws together a rich collection of research papers by members of the School. Staff and guests at the successful ischool launch in June I would like to conclude with thanks and appreciation to all who contributed so much expertise and energy to the School s many and diverse activities during 2011, including staff and students, Advisory Panel, external examiners and alumni. Special thanks are due to Dr Andrew Cox, Director of Learning and Teaching, for the tremendous hard work and commitment he brought to the task of coordinating our preparations for Periodic Review of Teaching. This is a major process in the University s monitoring and review of the quality of all its taught programmes. That the School came through the review with flying colours is a testament to all our staff s dedication to providing the very highest quality of research-led education and student experience at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as a core part of our overall commitment to contributing leadership to the development of the international information field. Professor Philippa Levy 4

5 New Arrivals Elaine Toms, Professor of Information Science, moved to Sheffield from a post at Dalhousie University, Canada as Canada Research Chair in Management Informatics, working prior to that as an Associate Professor, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, Canada. "My teaching stretches across the human-technology interface to consider how technology meets peoples needs and what we need to design for human use, particularly when it comes to information", says Professor Toms. "I strongly believe in teaching the principles and foundations rather than how to push buttons. With rampant developments in technology, learning software applications is dated before graduation; foundations and principles have staying power. I have discovered over the years that teaching and research have a symbiotic relationship: research informs what we teach, and teaching influences the research path; this is the fundamental approach that I take in my teaching." I believe in teaching the principles rather than pushing buttons. "Understanding why information systems fail users and designing systems for optimum human use is the focus of my research. This involves understanding how people work and use information and how people use existing systems to accomplish their work. It also includes evaluating novel tools that facilitate access to and use of information. As a result my research lies at the intersection of human computer interaction, information retrieval and the representation and presentation of information." Robert Villa joined the Information School in May 2011, before which he worked at Glasgow University on the EU project SALERO, developing user interfaces for image and video retrieval systems. Previous to this, he worked at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) in Milan as part of the PENG project, working in the area of text filtering, and before this, at Strathclyde University on the Diogene project, on an ontology mapping system. He has a PhD from the Department of Computing Science, Glasgow University, an MSc in Human-Computer Interaction from Heriot-Watt University, and an undergraduate degree from Strathclyde University in Information Engineering (Computing Science and Electronics). Dr Villa is currently involved in teaching on modules such as Designing Usable Websites, Information Retrieval, Human Computer Interaction, and Digital Multimedia Libraries. His teaching is linked to his research interests, which revolve around the area of Interactive Information Retrieval, with an With my background in Computer Science, I tend to bring a more technical point of view to my teaching. emphasis on Multimedia Retrieval. "With my background in Computer Science, I tend to bring a more technical point of view to my teaching, often aiming to describe the principles behind how different computer systems work "under the hood", says Dr Villa. "For example, on the Information Retrieval module, I lectured on Web search and Multimedia retrieval. Most of my teaching has taken place as lectures, or as laboratories. Lectures have included discussions and student tasks, which prove particularly useful when discussing web site interface issues, for example." Andrea Shaw joined the ischool in August. She brings considerable experience from her career on both sides of the Atlantic and her Master s degree in Library and Information Management. Andrea supports the School s undergraduate programmes and our MSc in Health Informatics (Distance Learning). 5

6 Achievements and Awards Alice Schofield, PhD student, was awarded first prize for her Pecha Kucha presentation at the Vitae Yorkshire and NE Humberside Hub Conference on "Communication to the Public" in Durham on 6th April. Her presentation gave an overview of the early stages of her study: "Evaluating the intellectual assets of the Scholarship and Collections Directorate at the British Library". Alice was awarded first prize against competition from students from both social science and pure science disciplines. Dorothy Williams and Nigel Ford), who gained her doctorate from the Information School last year, was the only winner from a British university out of the three in the Information Science category. Her dissertation was on The current state and perceptions of one-person librarians in Ireland of continuing professional development and her supervisor was Sheila Webber. There is more information on the awards at htm Information School student Carly Miller won the first CILIP/IFLA Aspire Award in June. She received a free residential place at CILIP s flagship conference, Umbrella 2011, in July. The Aspire Award was created in memory of CILIP s Chief Executive Bob McKee, who died in August The Award will support Bob's passionate interests developing new professionals and strengthening international relationships. It will help new professionals develop through networking at UK and international events. To win the award, qualifying CILIP members were required to identify an ambition or overall aim that attending Umbrella would help realise. They also had to demonstrate how attending the conference would bring a definable contribution to the library profession. Consideration was given to how their ambition related to Bob McKee s core belief in the role of libraries as a means to a fairer and more prosperous society. Former PhD student Jesus Lau (grad. 1988) was given the award of FIL Librarian 2011, the most prestigious recognition that a Librarian can receive in Mexico. The award ceremony included a bio summary and professional achievements that was also published and distributed to the audience, a biographical video with several interviews, and a lunch banquet. It took place at the 25th Guadalajara International Book Fair, the largest in the Spanish-speaking region, and the second in the Western world. ischool graduate Dr Eva Hornung s PhD was chosen, by the editor of Journal of Documentation, as a Highly Commended Award winner of the 2011 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Awards. Eva (shown (left, below) with her PhD viva examiners Professors MA graduate Lauren Smith, called the "one-woman library-saving machine," was named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker She campaigned tirelessly throughout 2010 against the closure of libraries in Great Britain. She is the driving force behind the "Save Doncaster Libraries" campaign (savedoncasterlibraries.wordpress.com) in defence of library service in what nominator Laura Woods describes as "one of the most deprived areas of the country, where libraries... are a lifeline to the local residents." Information School researcher, PhD student and MA Librarianship graduate Paula Goodale was awarded one of just 5 coveted places at the DREaM project launch conference. The conference, organised by the Library and Information Science Research Coalition, took place at the British Library Conference Centre, London on Tuesday 19th July The theme of the conference was Out of the Comfort Zone. In March, MA Librarianship student Sam Wiggins was awarded the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Europe Early Career Award. Sam attended the SLA Conference in Philadelphia in June as part of his prize. He also received a one year membership of SLA, and is gaining experience in co-ordinating SLA events throughout the year. Prof Sheila Corrall's paper on 'Educating the Academic Librarian as a Blended Professional' won a 2011 Emerald Literati Network Award for Excellence, having been judged the best paper published in the journal Library Management during Late March saw a personal milestone for Professor Peter Willett with the appearance in print of his 500th publication, which was based on an MSc Chemoinformatics dissertation project: Gardiner, E.J. et al. (2011) Effectiveness of 2D fingerprints for scaffold hopping, Future Medicinal Chemistry, 3,

7 Staff Activities Photo: Peter Bath Alastair Allan In 2011, I continued my secondment from the University Library teaching my e-government module and assisting on other modules that involved referencing or information literacy. Over the summer, from June to August, I taught the e- Government module at the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, USA. Peter Bath During 2011, I participated in various research, teaching and administration activities within the Information School, the Faculty, University and externally. In terms of research, I collaborated with colleagues from the Department of Palliative Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine, in a study examining the feasibility of a holistic needs assessment questionnaire in a supportive and palliative care services and in a study evaluating the Midhurst Real Choice Project. Both studies were funded by MacMillan Cancer Care and I was involved in analysing the data from these projects. I also coordinated the University of Sheffield s participation in an application to the Medical Research Council to set up a White Rose e-health Informatics Research Centre. The proposed centre will involve the Universities of Sheffield, Leeds and York, as well as partners from the health sector and industry. I co-ordinated and helped to organise the 15th International Symposium for Health Information Management Research (ISHIMR 2011), which took place in Zurich, Switzerland in September I was involved in several presentations at the conference. I was an invited speaker at the Healthcare Computing 2011 conference, the UK s leading conference for IM&T managers in the National Health Service. (April 2011). The title of my talk was The interface between information, health and healthcare delivery. I also visited the Headquarters of NHS Direct in London to give a presentation to senior managers on the work that Wen-Chin Hsu had undertaken for this PhD analysing data on older people s use of the NHS Direct service. I also gave a public lecture on Health Informatics in Tirana, Albania, which was attended by over 250 people. Three of my PhD students in the Health Informatics Research Group were awarded their PhDs in 2011: Jackie MacDonald, Wen-Chin Hsu and Simon Read. I continued supervision of Tom Poulter, Jean Stevenson-Ågren, Rabab Al Jishi and Robinah Namuleme, and four new students started their 7

8 Staff Activities research under my supervision: Tomislav Dimitrovski, Eliza Mazlan, Jennifer Salter and Hanadi Husain. I was also appointed External Examiner for 1 MPhil thesis (University of Manchester) and one PhD thesis (Liverpool John Moores University). As part of my work as Programme Co-ordinator for the MSc in Health Informatics programme, I visited Tirana, Albania, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia and Thessaloniki, Greece to explore possibilities for developing the Health Informatics programme for South-East Europe. During my visit to Tirana, I was interviewed by two television channels and was asked various questions regarding the importance of health informatics. I continued in my role as the School s Deputy Director of Learning and Teaching and was involved in the School s Periodic Review of Teaching in November During the Spring Semester of 2011, I acted as Director of Learning and Teaching while Andrew Cox was on study leave. During 2011 I was asked to lead the development of new UG programmes for the Information School, the BSc in Informatics, the BA in Management and Informatics and the BA Accountancy and Financial Management and Informatics. These new programmes will commence in September In October 2011, I visited the University of Limerick, Ireland, in my role as External Examiner for their MSc in Health Informatics programme. I continued my work as the representative for the Faculty of Social Sciences on the University Research Ethics Committee. I also organised Faculty Red- Lining Days for staff from within the Faculty to dedicate three days to being in ICOSS and to writing research papers and grant applications. In November 2011, I convened a workshop on Health Informatics in collaboration with Professor Panos Ketikidis (South East Europe Research Centre). Briony Birdi A highlight of my year was securing an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, in partnership with Derbyshire County Council. The project, Evaluating the Outcomes of Cultural Services: a Mixed Methods Investigation, will commence in January 2012 when we will be joined by former student and MSc graduate Martin Simmons, who will be rejoining us to study for his PhD. I continued in my role as UG Examinations Officer and Deputy Coordinator of the MA Librarianship programme. In September I took maternity leave and look forward to returning to the School in Summer Paul Clough In 2011 I began a new three-year EU-funded research project entitled PATHS (Personalised Access to Cultural Heritage information Spaces) that explores the notion of pathways/trails through digital collections and the use of recommender systems to adapt paths to specific user profiles. The project is STREP funded under the EU FP7 programme with a total budget of 2 million, of which 460,000 will come to Sheffield. There are 6 partners in the project: Universidad del Pais Vasco (Spain), i-sieve technologies (Greece), Asplan Viak Internet Ltd (Norway), MDR Partners (UK) and Alinari 24 Ore Spa (Italy). Content has been made available by Alinari, an historic Italian photographic company, and Europeana, the large-scale European initiative to manage Europe s cultural heritage. I am a Primary Investigator for Sheffield in the project, Scientific Director and also Work Package leader for User interaction and interface design. The project is being led by Dr Mark Stevenson in Computer Science and also involves Professor Nigel Ford from the Information School as well as Mark Hall and Paula Goodale as Research Assistants. In January 2011 I also completed a project funded by the UK National Archives (TNA) entitled Improving Information Finding at the UK National Archives. Tim Gollins, Head Of Digital Preservation and Resource Discovery, said this of the project I think it is important that I document some of the impact of this work here; you should know that the outputs of the work were provided in such a focused and timely way that they have been able to dovetail with our system development activities this year [2011] and inform critical decisions in designing our new resource discovery system to the benefit of the organisation and ultimately the public that use The National Archives. The outputs were provided in such a focused way that they have been of benefit to the public that use the National Archives. I have continued my involvement in the organisation of workshops and conferences, acting as programme co-chair of the world s 3rd largest conference on IR: the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) the Lab Organising Committee Chair for the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2011 conference (equivalent to PC co-chair), a member of the Senior Programme Committee for the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2011, the co-organiser of Session Track at Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2011). a member of 8

9 Staff Activities the organising committee of Enterprise Search Europe I acted as external reviewer (and panel member) for Universidad Nacional de Educatión a Dictancia (UNED) for the thesis Harnessing Folksonomies for Resource Classification by Arkaitz Zubiaga Mendialdua (July 2011); was external reviewer for RMIT University of the thesis: Source code authorship attribution by Steven Burrows (Feb 2011); and was external reviewer of the MSc Information Management programme as a part of a five-yearly Institution-Led Subject Review of the Department of Information Management at Aberdeen Business School, Robert Gordon University ( ). Two of my PhD students (Robert Pasley and Antje Bothin) successfully gained their PhDs in 2011 (Rob was my first PhD student). Sheila Corrall I was on study leave for the first half of 2011 and used this time to develop teaching and research collaborations with colleagues in the Division of Information and Technology Studies at the University of Hong Kong and the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University in Australia. In Hong Kong I provided advice to the undergraduate and postgraduate programme teams on curriculum development and professional accreditation. In addition, I redesigned and delivered a core course on Methods of Research and Inquiry for the MSc in Library and Information Management, for which I received a Letter of Commendation from the Dean of the Faculty of Education for my exceptionally high student ratings for teacher effectiveness (83.3%). I also presented a seminar on information literacy research for the Centre for Information Technology in Education. At Charles Sturt University, I presented a research seminar on data literacy conceptions and pedagogies, delivered a presentation on preparing for research assessment exercises and discussed ideas for teaching and research collaborations on library management of research data, which led to a 12-month study of data management and bibliometric services in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK, funded by the CSU Faculty of Education. On my return from study leave, I resumed leadership of the Libraries & Information Society Research Group and took on the role of Graduate Research Tutor for the ischool. During the year I acted as lead supervisor for eight MPhil/PhD students and examined doctoral theses at Aberystwyth University and the University of Huddersfield. In addition, I delivered 14 conference presentations in five countries (including eight invited keynote/plenary addresses) and served on the Credo Reference Corporate Advisory Board, the Facet Publishing International Advisory Board, the Online Information Asia-Pacific Exhibition & Conference Committee and the Research Information Network Working Group on Information Handling. Andrew Cox The preoccupation in my research in 2011 was exploring ideas about using practice theory: a paper in Journal of Information Science on this topic being published early in This work took up much of my study leave from February through to June. Another continuing research interest is in the application of visual methods in our field. At the end of the year I was leading a small project with a colleague at Sheffield Hallam University collecting data using participatory mapping with residents to explore their experience of a Sheffield suburb. Martin Simmons, who is starting as a PhD student in 2012, did excellent work as the research assistant on the project. A highlight of the year from my perspective was visits from researchers from other institutions such as Eric Meyer from the Oxford Internet Institute in November and Professor Caroline Haythornthwaite in December. Professor Haythornthwaite was in Sheffield to hear the successful viva defence of Nashrawan Taha. Liz Brewster (for whom I was second supervisor) also successfully passed her viva. Another highlight was starting to work with two new research students, Soureh Latif Shabgahi and Nordiana Shah. As Director of Learning and Teaching for the ischool, I was heavily involved in the preparatory work for a major internal University Periodic Review of our learning and teaching, held in November. Teaching related research included collecting focus group data for a University-funded internationalisation project, Owning and sharing space: promoting inter-cultural encounters, working with Prue Chiles and Leo Care from the Department of Architecture. In terms of professional activities, I was involved with organising CILIP s MmIT group programme at the Umbrella conference and also the early preparations for holding their national conference in Sheffield around Easter Nigel Ford In 2011 I continued as Principal Investigator on the 216,115 AHRC-funded project Developing deep critical information behaviour with Dr. Andrew Madden and Mary Crowder. This project is investigating the development of critical information skills as young people progress through school to university. I also continued on the editorial boards of Journal of Documentation and the Online 9

10 Staff Activities Information Review, and as external examiner for the MSc in Intelligent Systems and Robotics at De Montfort University. As in previous years, I reviewed a number of papers for journals including the British Journal of Educational Technology, Journal of Documentation and the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. I was also a member of the International Programme Committees of the Information: Interactions and Impact (i3) conference held in Aberdeen, and the 3rd International Symposium on Information Management in a Changing World (IMCW) held in Ankara, Turkey. From the end of September 2011, I moved to part time status, stepping down as Head of the Educational Informatics Research Group. Jonathan Foster My main research activity in 2011 consisted of the completion of the AHRC Beyond Text project Riders Have Spoken: Designing and Evaluating an Archive for Interactive Performances for which I was Principal Investigator. The archiving of electronic artworks and interactive performances presents considerable challenges of capture and documentation, information organisation, and interaction; and the Riders Have Spoken project contributed to the ongoing exploration of these challenges through an iterative, prototyping approach that enabled the incremental design and evaluation of a usable archive. The project was in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Nottingham and the University of York. In February 2011 I attended the ischool Conference in Seattle, USA, disseminating findings from an educational project From Marketplace to Marketspace funded by the University of Sheffield Knowledge Transfer Fund. In April I gave a talk about the Riders Have Spoken project at a Beyond Text funded Spatial Technologies Workshop in York, UK; in May I participated in the GURT2011 (Georgetown University RoundTable on Language and Linguistics), Washington DC, USA; and in September I attended the Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts Conference in Shanghai, China, again giving a paper on the AHRC Beyond Text Riders Have Spoken Project. During 2011 I became Programme Coordinator for the MSc in Information Management. Val Gillet 2011 saw the start of three new research collaborations with external organisations. A project with AstraZeneca on Belief Theory started in February with Dr Eleanor Gardiner as researcher. The project was aimed at investigating the effectiveness of belief theory for combining the results of similarity searches applied to AstraZeneca data. A two year Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Dr Jonathan Vessey at Lhasa Limited in Leeds began in March. The aim of the partnership is to investigate and apply computer software techniques involving emerging patterns of chemical descriptors to knowledge discovery in the field of toxicity prediction. The project builds on the PhD work of the associate, Richard Sherhod (Richard successfully completed his PhD in April Development of a Data Mining Tool for the Identification of Toxicophores). Later in the year, I started a new collaboration with Mike Bodkin at Eli Lilly and Dr Beining Chen in the Department of Chemistry on building reaction networks for use in de novo design also saw the completion of a collaborative project with the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre and Eli Lilly in de novo design. Several presentations on the project were made at various international conferences and a manuscript describing the work should appear soon. Within the School, I took on the role of Director of Research. The role involves overseeing the development of research activities within the School and liaising with Faculty via the Faculty of Social Science Research and Innovation Committee. I also continued as Research Excellence Framework (REF) coordinator directing our activities in the areas of research outputs, impact and environment in preparation for REF2014. I also continued with various external activities including being on the advisory boards of the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling and the Journal of Cheminformatics and reviewing of manuscripts and grant applications for various organisations. I also served on the scientific advisory board and chaired two sessions of the 9th International Conference on Chemical Structures in The Netherlands, June 5-9th, the major conference in the field in Peter Holdridge A large part of my year was taken up overseeing the ischool's move to the new virtual learning environment as part of the second wave university wide implementation of the Blackboard 9 system. Largely this went smoothly and has become central to our ever-developing suite of digital teaching tools. In the first half of the year I co-delivered Digital Multimedia to the largest cohort of students the module has ever seen. We received exceptional positive feedback for the module, both from students and the external examiner. Later, I enjoyed the process of helping to design and deliver a 'reimagined' and 're-invigorated' version of the 10