Interested iSchools Doctoral Students can book their presentation slot for free for the iSchools Doctoral Students Seminar Series here. Doctoral Students Seminar Series takes place on 4 February 2026, 8 April 2026, 3 June 2026, 7 October 2026 and 2 December 2026.

Interested iSchools presenters can book their presentation slot for free for the iSchools Got Talent Keynote Series here. The iSchools Got Talent Series takes place on 19 February 2026, 23 April 2026, 18 June 2026, 17 September 2026 and 20 November 2026.

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York Application Deadline: Sep 15, 2026 The Department of Information Science in the Graduate School of Education, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York (SUNY) invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position to start in August 2027. We are a collaborative and collegial department that values research excellence, innovative teaching, inclusivity, and belonging. We currently offer an ALA-accredited MS in Information and Library Science, an MS in School Librarianship, an Advanced Studies Certificate, and a PhD in Information Science. We have collaborative agreements with the School of Law and the Department of Music for joint master’s degrees and with the Department of English and the Department of History for combined BA/MS-SL degrees, as well as an anticipated undergraduate major in information science. We welcome candidates from any area of expertise, with particular interest in those working in socio-technical policy and ethics, HCI/human-AI interaction, information practices, cultural heritage informatics, or theory development in information science. Responsibilities include: Maintaining an active and productive research agenda commensurate with a Research 1 tenure-track faculty appointment Seeking external grant funding Teaching a total of four courses each year Advising Information Science doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate students Participating in professional activities and serving on department, school, and university committees Minimum Qualifications A doctorate degree at the time of appointment in Information Science, or a related field. Preferred Qualifications Research agenda with potential for acquiring external funding Published research or scholarship Online teaching experience at the graduate or undergraduate level or interest Experience or interest in multidisciplinary collaboration Experience working effectively with minoritized students

Issue#14 Laura Sbaffi European/African Region United Kingdom University of Sheffield School of Information, Journalism and Communication iSchool is member since 2009 Hello Laura! Please tell us a bit about you! I am a Senior Lecturer in Health Informatics at the University of Sheffield, which I joined in 2016 and where I am currently serving, among other roles, as Postgraduate Research Lead for the School of Information Journalism and Communication. My research sits where health informatics meets information behaviour. I study how people find, judge and act on health information, with a particular focus on unpaid caregiving and on communities that tend to be left at the margins of digital services. I arrived here by a rather unusual route. I am originally from Italy, from the Marche region on the Adriatic coast, and my first degrees and my PhD were in Earth and Marine Sciences, split between the University of Trieste (Italy) and the University of Cambridge (UK). For the best part of fifteen years I was a palaeoceanographer, reconstructing past Mediterranean climates from deep-sea sediment cores to aid the modelling of future climate changes, and later worked as a research scientist at Geoscience Australia. Then, in 2012 I decided to go back to academia (my first and strongest love!), so I completed an MA in Library and Information Management at Manchester Metropolitan University and changed discipline altogether. Your research focuses on the digitisation of health services globally - What led you to choose this research focus? It began as a methodological curiosity and became something rather more pressing. What I loved about palaeoceanography was reading a signal out of noisy, incomplete evidence. When I retrained, I found the same problem waiting for me in health information, except that the noise is human, and the consequences are immediate. My early work in the field, with Professor Jenny Rowley, was on trust and credibility, specifically how people decide whether to believe what they read about health information online. At the time much of that literature treated quality as a property of the information itself. It became clear to me that the more interesting question was a distributional one, so not “Is good information available?” but “Who can actually reach it and in what form?”. That question travels well, which is how the work became global almost by accident. It took me to rural Malawi, working with informal carers of people living with HIV/AIDS on an intervention we co-created with them rather than designed for them; to Uganda, on shared health records; and to South Africa, where I contributed to deriver and validate COVID-19 triage tools for emergency departments in a middle-income setting, because the scores developed in well-resourced systems simply did not transfer. It also brought me to my adoptive home, to older and LGBTQ+ unpaid carers in England navigating a social care system that has digitised around them. The thread running through all of it is this that digitisation is sold as efficiency, but efficiency for a system very often means new, invisible labour for the person at the edge of it. Somebody has to do the work of translation, and it is usually a family member, a friend, a neighbour. I think that work deserves to be counted, valued and facilitated. At your iSchool in Sheffield, several researchers are conducting research on health informatics. Could you tell us a little more about your iSchool? Sheffield has had health informatics in its bloodstream for far longer than it has been an iSchool. What I would most want people to know is that we are not a single-method group. Within the School you will find qualitative information-behaviour researchers sitting alongside colleagues building machine learning models on emergency department data, social media analysts, and people working on digital inclusion and data ethics. Those conversations are occasionally uncomfortable and consistently productive. The second thing is that we are no longer an Information School in the narrow sense. We have merged with Journalism Studies to become the School of Information, Journalism and Communication, which puts information scientists in the same corridor as journalists and communication scholars. For anyone working on trust, misinformation and how health knowledge actually circulates, that is an extremely good neighbourhood to live in! We also benefit from sitting inside a large research-intensive university, so we collaborate widely with the School of Medicine and Population Health, the Healthy Lifespan Institute and the Centre for Care, among others. Also, we have a large, international doctoral community, which as PGR Lead, I would argue is the real engine of the place. Your iSchool was one of the first in Europe to join iSchools in 2009. Since then, the number of European and African schools has grown significantly, and today they form their own iSchools region. You took on the role of Regional Chair for the European/African Region in early 2026. Can you tell us a little more about the region and your impressions of it? The first thing to say is that the region is enormous. It runs from the Nordic countries to South Africa, and from Portugal to Turkey, and it contains institutions with very different histories, funding environments, languages of instruction and relationships to their national systems. A long-established European school with a century of library science behind it and a young African school building an information programme from the ground up are both iSchools, and both belong here, but their needs on any given Tuesday are not the same. Holding that range together without flattening it is the interesting part of the job. My strongest impression since taking on the role at the start of 2026 is how much appetite there is for connection, and how little of it is currently structured. Colleagues are remarkably generous with their time; what they lack is a low-cost, reliable way of finding each other. Most of what constrains us is logistical rather than intellectual - time zones, travel funding, visas. So my priorities are deliberately practical. Make membership tangibly useful for smaller and newer schools rather than only for those already well connected. Build doctoral and early-career links, because those outlast anyone’s term of office. And ensure that the Africa–Europe relationship runs in both directions, rather than being framed, as it too often is, as one region assisting another. What benefits do you see in belonging to the global iSchools Organization? How has it impacted you personally? Practically, it gives you a peer group you would otherwise have to invent. When you are redesigning a curriculum, making an internal case for a new programme, or trying to judge honestly whether your doctoral provision is any good, it is enormously valuable to compare notes with schools facing the same question inside a completely different national system. The iConference is the other obvious benefit; I have reviewed for it for years and chaired the posters track in 2025, and it is still where I meet the people I later end up collaborating and writing with. Personally, the effect has been more specific than that. I changed discipline in mid-career, after many years in the natural sciences. In many academic communities that is quietly treated as a liability, something to be explained away. The iSchools community treats interdisciplinarity as the normal condition rather than a suspicious one; nobody has ever asked me to justify why a former marine geologist is studying carers’ information needs. That gave me permission to bring my whole background with me instead of hiding half of it, and I do not think I would have built the research programme I have without it. If you could give just one advice to future information scientists, what would it be? Go and meet the people your data is about! It is very easy in our field to become an expert in the record and never once encounter the person the record describes. I have never learned anything important about carers’ information needs from a dataset that I had not first learned, in a cruder and far more useful form, by sitting in a room with carers in Malawi or in South Yorkshire. Ask early who is missing from your sample and why, and be wary of any finding you would be embarrassed to explain to the people it is about. And if I am allowed a second piece of advice: do not assume your background is a detour. Mine looked like one for the best part of a decade. It turned out to be the most useful thing I brought with me. Thank you very much, Laura! Featured Members is an iSchools Feature series spotlighting members of iSchools who are part of the development and organization of thought provoking projects or conferences. Please contact admin@ischools-inc.org in case you would like to be featured as well.

University of Michigan Application Deadline: Sep 20, 2026 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time The University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI) invites applicants for the University of Michigan Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP) (http://presidentspostdoc.umich.edu/index.php). Faculty at UMSI have a successful record of providing a nurturing and productive postdoctoral experience for Presidential Postdoctoral Fellows. In keeping with the PPFP program, UMSI seeks applicants whose research, teaching, and service will, as determined by the University of Michigan and in accordance with law, contribute to the core values of the University of Michigan, and to equal opportunity in higher education. Candidates will be evaluated on fit with current needs and strengths of the institution and future funding possibilities. UMSI is particularly interested in candidates whose work focuses on aspects of privacy and technology, with a particular interest in how privacy intersects with AI. We define privacy broadly, and welcome applications from researchers approaching privacy through technical, policy, design, ethical, and/or social lenses. UMSI views these postdoctoral fellowships as providing an exceptional opportunity to recruit new faculty to the University and we expect PPFP positions to lead to a tenure-track faculty appointment. Candidates are required to name a UMSI faculty mentor in their application. We highly encourage candidates to reach out and confirm potential faculty mentors at UMSI in advance of submitting their applications. A description of the requirements and expectations for mentors can be found on the UM PPFP website. Minimum Qualifications: Ph.D. in any information-related field and demonstrated record of research excellence. A strong interest in teaching at the undergraduate and/or graduate levels. A strong commitment to contribute to an interdisciplinary research culture. How to Apply: Applicants must submit TWO separate applications: UMSI application through Interfolio must be submitted no later than 11:59 PM EDT, September 20, 2026 U-M President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP) application (http://presidentspostdoc.umich.edu/ppfp-application.php) no later than 11:59 PM EST, November 1, 2026 Please direct inquiries about this position to SISearchSupport@umich.edu

The iSchools Inc. represents an international organisation of over 130 universities. A common interest in all aspects of research and teaching about information unites them. The scope is deliberately broad and methodologically agnostic, with a strong reliance on the social and behavioural sciences, as well as computing, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. The Future of Information The iSchools represent an international organisation of around 130 universities. A common interest in all aspects of research and teaching about information unites them. The scope is deliberately broad and methodologically agnostic, with a strong reliance on the social and behavioural sciences, as well as computing, and linguistics. iSchools topics include artificial intelligence, data science, human-computer interaction, information organisation and access, bibliometrics, and information integrity. Information scientists share a common perspective on the importance of how intelligent creatures and machines understand the universe. Learn More News & Updates Tenure-Track Assistant Professor Department of Information Science Jobs Featured Member Featured Member Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow/Assistant Professor - Privacy and Technology Jobs 1 2 3 4 5 iConference The iConference series is presented by the iSchools, a worldwide association of Information Schools dedicated to advancing the information field, and preparing students to meet the information challenges of the 21st Century. Affiliation with the iSchools is not required—all information scholars, researchers and practitioners are welcome at the iConference. Read More Become a Member iSchools Regions The iSchools Organization is a global consortium, with over 130 schools distributed on every inhabitable continent. iSchool leadership from each region meets regularly to discuss challenges and opportunities globally as well as topics common to their area. Regional approaches to education, research and other matters are described in the regional subpages. Read More By the Numbers 1988 Since 133 iSchools Worldwide 21 iConferences 24 Grants funded 10 Global Communities iSchools Communities The iSchools Organization maintains community groups chaired by our members. These groups frequently organize meetings, events, and get-togethers. Everybody is welcome to join the community groups of their interests. Doctoral Students Read More iSchools Research Grants The iSchools organization maintains a research fund for the benefit of its members. Members of the iSchools may apply for these funds. The grant application submission date is July of each year. Read More Any Questions? Contact Us First Name Last Name Email Write a message Submit Thanks for submitting!

The Early Career Colloquium provides a high-quality mentorship and networking opportunity for early career researchers who work in an iSchool, a similar department, or want to work in an iSchool Back to Tracks Early Career Colloquium The purpose of the Early Career Colloquium (ECC) is to provide a high-quality mentorship and networking opportunity for early career researchers who work in an iSchool, a similar department, or want to work in an iSchool (e.g., post-doctoral fellows, assistant professors). During the colloquium, early career scholars will share their research plans and aspirations with accomplished mentors that have expertise in various interdisciplinary areas represented within the iSchool community, as well as extensive experience in grant writing, promotion and/or tenure review, the peer-review process, teaching, and professional service. Early career scholars will engage in discourse with these mentors and their peers to improve their understanding of having a successful career in the information field. Navigation Overview Application Participation Timeline Chairs Overview Please note that iConference 2027 will have a virtual and a physical component, but the Early Career Colloquium will only be held physically onsite in Wellington, New Zealand. During the iConference, participation in the Early Career Colloquium will be restricted to those who have applied and been accepted; the colloquium will not be open to observers. Participants in the Early Career Colloquium will be selected based on their application, perceived relevance and potential contribution to research in the information field, and their anticipated contribution to the colloquium goals. The applications will be reviewed by the chairs. Emphasis will be placed on the formation of groups of participants whose research careers are at a stage that can best benefit from the colloquium and who reflect individual excellence and motivation while at the same time contributing to the colloquium objectives and the aggregate diversity of the cohort. Conditions : Please note that accepted applicants must register during the Early Bird registration period for the full conference to take part in the Early Career Colloquium at iConference. The organizers reserve the right to withdraw the acceptance if these conditions are not met. Application The Early Career Colloquium is open to scholars within eight years since completing their Ph.D. at the time of application submission. Early career scholars will be chosen through a competitive application process. Scholars with involvement in iSchool-related research are encouraged to apply. Each application should contain the following within one PDF document in the following order and be submitted through the ConfTool submission system by 20 October 2026 . All materials must be in English. A cover page containing : Name Institution Current position Personal webpage E-mail address A 1-page personal statement including : Research topic and/or specialization (e.g., research questions) Current career status Career objectives Reason for participating Research and career challenges to explore in the colloquium Career-related questions Current CV Participation & Format In order to promote extended interaction among conference attendees, those accepted for the Early Career Colloquium will be expected to meet the following obligations after they have been accepted: Register for the iConference during the early-bird period, and participate throughout the entire iConference. Applicants are expected to participate physically. The colloquium is projected to be a 90-minute to half-day event, with multiple small group discussions. We will focus on collaborative inquiry and scholarly discourse with peers and a panel of experienced faculty serving as mentors. Main activities can include: Discussion on crafting a research agenda, careers paths, and teaching strategies with mentors and peers. Opportunities for group and individual consultation and networking between early career scholars and senior colleagues, exploring potentials for long-term mentorship from accomplished mentors in the early scholars’ field(s) of interest. Meeting with conference chairs to discuss the writing and reviewing process in highly regarded journals and conferences. Prior to the session, a few preparatory activities are required to enable us to use the time within the session as best as possible. More information will be forthcoming once selected. Submission Portal Conftool Timeline Submission portal opens: mid June 2026 Submission deadline: 20 October 2026 Decision notification date: 19 November 2026 All deadlines are in GMT-11 23:59. Early Career Chairs Fiorella Foscarini Early Career Chair University of Toronto Canada Contact Anne Goulding Early Career Chair Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand Contact Tanja Svarre Early Career Chair Aalborg University Denmark Contact Questions Contact staff regarding iConference in general. Contact

iConference papers push the boundaries of information scholarship, explore core concepts and ideas, and help identify new technological and conceptual configurations. Back to Tracks Short Research Papers The goal of the Short Research Papers track is to encourage the iConference community to present new, provocative, and cross-cutting themes in a short paper submission. Short research papers might include, but are not limited to, critical literature reviews of an emerging topic, theory building that is in the early stages of development, or new analysis / methods applied to existing data. Short papers are more focused and succinct contributions to the research program and are likely to have a smaller scope of contribution than Full Research Papers . For example, short papers on applications design may not cover the entire iterative design cycle (observation, design, implementation, evaluation, etc.) but may instead go into depth in specific areas. Navigation Info Guidelines First Submission Final Submission Presenting On-Site Timeline Chairs PDF Version Review Process All research papers submitted to the iConference undergo a rigorous double-blind review process. Each paper is reviewed by at least two reviewers independently. The selection of papers is carefully made by the three track chairs based on the reviewers' evaluations. The confidentiality of the submitted papers is maintained during the entire review process. The papers are evaluated based on innovation, contribution, and quality of reasoning and writing. Submitted papers must be original works and must not have been published elsewhere. Presentation All accepted papers will be presented virtually during iConference on the SCOOCS platform in a 20-minutes presentation followed by 10 minutes Q&A ; All authors who presented online will also have the opportunity to present additionally on-site. Publication Accepted papers will be published in Information Research (IR), an established international peer-reviewed open access journal indexed in Scopus , Web of Science Core Collection , and DBLP . Best Paper Award The best Short Paper will be awarded with a sum of USD 500 . Guidelines Conditions : At least one presenting author of each accepted submission must register during the Early Bird registration period to present their work at iConference. The organizers reserve the right to withhold publication if these conditions are not met. All papers must adhere to the complete guidelines. Submissions that do not conform to the lengths defined are subject to desk rejection by the chairs. All papers must be original work, not published elsewhere. For all academic submissions, the use of AI-generated content is strictly prohibited. AI tools may be used only for surface-level proofreading or language polishing; all intellectual content, analysis, and argumentation must be produced entirely by the author(s). Any submission found to contain AI-generated intellectual material will be rejected immediately or, if discovered after acceptance, formally retracted without exception. All submissions will be made using the secure ConfTool submission system. Length : Up to 3,000 words (excluding captions and references) Language : English Please use one of the provided Templates : (DocX) Information Research Journal Template (Latex) Information Research Journal Template Information Research Journal: Author Guidelines Pre-Recorded Presentations (optional): Presenters can submit a pre-record of their paper presentation additionally to their live presentation during the virtual iConference. This recording will be available in the media library on the virtual conference platform for all participants 24/7 after the live presentation. Pre-recorded paper presentations are due 09 February 2027 guidelines will follow soon here . Deliver your pre-recorded presentation here (available soon): Submit Pre-recording First Submission First submissions can be uploaded to the ConfTool submission site. The deadline for the first submissions is 15 September 2026 . Format : PDF Font: Lora - Download https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lora https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/lora https://www.fontshare.com/fonts/lora Keywords : When uploading to the submission system, select at least three keywords. These keywords do not need to appear in the submission document itself. Anonymization : Author-identifying elements must be excluded from first submissions to facilitate double-blind review. Authors are encouraged to cite their own work in the third person, e.g., avoid “As described in our previous work [10], …” and instead use “As described by [10], …”. This includes reference numbers that could identify the funding of a project described in a paper. Please replace such references with “XX”. Appendix: When required, the appendix needs to be discussed (rather than merely referenced) in the paper itself. The paper must also be completely understandable without the appendices. This means that if an argument depends on an appendix, the relevant data must be incorporated into the paper concisely. Lengthy appendices should be formatted as a dataset, deposited in a relevant scientific repository (e.g., Zenodo), published without an embargo under a license at least as permissive as the journal’s (CC-BY-NC), and linked to in the paper rather than copied in full into the appendix section. File Naming : Please use all or part of your paper title as the file name Final Submission Authors of accepted papers will submit a final version containing author-identifying information. Final versions of accepted papers should be uploaded to ConfTool by 11 January 2027 . Format : doc, docx or LaTex Please use one of the provided Templates : (DocX) Information Research Journal Template (Latex) Information Research Journal Template Font: Lora - Download https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lora https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/lora https://www.fontshare.com/fonts/lora Keywords : When uploading to the submission system, select at least three keywords. These keywords do not need to appear in the submission document itself. Appendix: When required, the appendix needs to be discussed (rather than merely referenced) in the paper itself. The paper must also be completely understandable without the appendices. This means that if an argument depends on an appendix, the relevant data must be incorporated into the paper concisely. Lengthy appendices should be formatted as a dataset, deposited in a relevant scientific repository (e.g., Zenodo), published without an embargo under a license at least as permissive as the journal’s (CC-BY-NC), and linked to in the paper rather than copied in full into the appendix section. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of all substantive content, including numeric and bibliographic data. Manuscripts will not be copy edited by iConference organizers. Acceptance of a submission is conditional on the completion of changes that were identified during review. In making these changes, authors must adhere to the word limit of 3,000 words in the interest of fairness. If necessary, we suggest having a professional editor help identify redundant words and thoughts. Papers authors will also provide details of these changes with their final submission. These details will be entered into ConfTool using the open field titled Remarks on This Contribution Section . Papers that do not comply with the final submission requirements will be removed from the proceedings and not be published. Presentation All accepted papers must be presented virtually on the virtual iConference SCOOCS platform with a 20-minutes presentation followed by a 10 minutes Q&A; more detailed presentation instructions will be available soon . Presenters may optionally request to present their paper onsite in addition to the virtual presentation. If an author requests an additional onsite presentation slot, at least one author of the accepted submission must register for the onsite portion of the iConference during the Early Bird registration period to present their work onsite. The organizers reserve the right to withhold the presentation slot if these conditions are not met. The option to request an on-site presentation slot will be available here once registration opens in mid-November. Presenting On-site Timeline Submission portal opens: June 2026 Submission deadline: 15 September 2026 Decision notification date: 19 November 2026 Final camera-ready versions due: 11 January 2027 Pre-recording submission due: 09 February 2027 All deadlines are in GMT-11 23:59. Short Research Paper Chairs Ana Roeschley Short Research Papers Chair University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill United States Contact Chern Li Short Research Papers Chair Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand Contact Ian G. Anderson Short Research Papers Chair University of Glasgow United Kingdom Contact Questions Contact staff regarding iConference in general. Contact