He is also a strong advocate for making better and more efficient use of information, and endeavouring to make it easier for others to do the same. A firm believer in sharing knowledge, Chris is also a frequent blogger, posting his thoughts and perceptions on a wide range of different topics. His passion for data is a consistent theme throughout his posts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Gutteridge

http://blog.soton.ac.uk/webteam/author/cjg/

EPrints Chris was involved in open access research from the outset of the idea, pioneering the development of the EPrints platform. He built a tool which met the needs of libraries effectively and enabled them to support researchers in green open access archiving. EPrints has wide uptake at universities across the country and has set the expectation that universities should support open access archiving. This expectation has been so embedded in UK Higher Education culture that all submissions to the Research Excellence Framework are now required to be available open access.

A major part of EPrints’ success is the flexibility of the platform, which has allowed it to be developed and extended to meet the evolving needs of institutions. Chris’s visionary system architecture has facilitated the addition of many new features, such as digital object identifier (DOI) minting and research data archiving. EPrints, which is open source, currently has an active development community, including a number of commercial companies that provide support for it. The registry of open access repositories has 645 active EPrints repositories registered, of which 121 are in the UK.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/23/eprints_prize_ukuug/

http://roar.eprints.org/

Open Data Since handing over lead development of EPrints, Chris has moved his attentions to open data. He was instrumental in pioneering open data services at University of Southampton. The service he developed has set the standard for open data services in the UK and was recognised with the Times Higher Education award for Outstanding ICT initiative of the Year, 2012.

Part of this endeavour was the creation of feature-rich software toolchain to aggregate data from disparate sources across the university. To facilitate the uptake of open data across the sector, Chris made significant parts of this tooling freely available as an open source project called “Graphite.”

In addition to his technical contributions, Chris was also responsible for advocacy of the technology and has developed documentation and guidance to help non-technical staff to engage with the service. Having struggled to persuade people to share their information, Chris went to great lengths to identify the many reasons people are uncomfortable opening their data and, in collaboration with his counterpart at Oxford University, has attempted to address each one.

http://data.southampton.ac.uk/

http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk

Data.ac.uk Chris founded Data.ac.uk as place to stimulate discussion between UK universities on the subject of open data. The service has a mailing list where good practice and success stories are shared. Data.ac.uk provides a number of services for aggregating data from multiple institutions. Such has been the success of Data.ac.uk that Jisc, the membership organisation that supports digital solutions for the UK education sector, have taken over ownership of the service to ensure its continued existence for the whole community.

Chris's biggest contribution to Data.ac.uk is the Organisational Profile Document (OPD) which is a lightweight standard for universities to signpost the open data they publish so that it can be ingested by auto-discovery tools. Currently 22 UK institutions publish an OPD and link a range of data from contact information through to archives of research data.

http://www.data.ac.uk/share-your-data

http://opd.data.ac.uk/

Equipment Data - Following on from the success of the Open Data service, Chris was heavily involved in the development of the National Research Equipment Portal, equipment.data.ac.uk. The aim of this project was to deliver a sustainable solution for the aggregation and displaying of published research equipment data from across UK HE in order to improve utilisation of existing research infrastructure. Its development has the backing of RCUK as its preferred medium for national equipment data sharing with the service now endorsed as strategically significant by HEFCE.

Launched in April 2013, equipment.data.ac.uk introduced the concept of linked open data technologies enabling data auto-discovery to provide a service. The service currently aggregates over 15,000 items of research equipment from 50 different UK Universities.

The National Research Equipment Portal is the first linked open data driven service in UK higher education, demonstrating a simple and sustainable system which can deliver a service which is not only extendable but, with introduction and application of the OPD, re- usable.

http://equipment.data.ac.uk/status

LIDAR data and Minecraft As part of an outreach activity, Chris created a detailed replica of his home town of Ventnor, Isle of Wight, in Minecraft. The model was created by hand in survival mode and represented hundreds of hours of effort. This esoteric artistic work was exhibited at the Ventnor Fringe festival to the delight of children and their parents. Canvas prints of Minecraft Ventnor using common real life postcard scenes were auctioned after the event for charity.

Chris was inspired by his experience at Ventnor to use freely-available LIDAR data to programmatically generate cities in the UK as Minecraft maps. Combining this open data with a popular computer game, he has been able to run events promoting open data to young children through a medium they are familiar with. Chris believes that as information becomes more and more important in the modern world, helping youngsters learn the value and significance of data sources and programmatic use of them will benefit them greatly in the future, and his activities in this area enable him to contribute to this goal.

http://ventnor.totl.net/

Sheila Webber is Senior Lecturer at the Information School, University of Sheffield. 

Sheila is the Head of the Libraries and Information Society Research Group, Director of the Centre for Information Literacy Research, and Director of Alumni Relations of the iSchool, as well as Module Coordinator for “Information Resources and Information Literacy (PG)”, “Information Literacy Research (PG)” and “Healthcare Information (PG)”. Sheila is an exceptional teacher, as demonstrated by her being awarded the University of Sheffield’s Senate Award for sustained excellence in teaching 2014-15. That she merits the Jason Farradane Award is demonstrated by the fact that two independent nominations were received. One nomination notes her deep insight into the library world and understanding of the pressures of a modern information workplace which together make her a fantastic supervisor and mentor who always supports her students, even those who are not on campus.

Sheila’s career began at the Health and Safety Executive, followed by 13 years at the British Library (BL) - with the pioneering online service, BLAISE, becoming manager of BLAISE Online Services, and finally moving to become Head of the BL’s Business Information Service. The focus on business information continued when she moved into academia and joined the Information Science department at Strathclyde University, Scotland, as a lecturer. Her primary research interest is investigating information literacy and information behaviour in a variety of contexts including different disciplines, different educational levels, different countries and cultures, different life stages, and in the context of both physical and virtual environments. Sheila has been instrumental in information literacy research and teaching since the late 1990s, and her original and entertaining Information Literacy Weblog has been operational since 2005 with a truly international reach. Her publications and presentations at conferences have brought information literacy to a wide audience. Sheila is the co-manager of two virtual information literacy journal clubs, including one that meets in the virtual world Second Life.

Sheila was an early innovative adopter of educational technology and social media, which helped her with engaging with her students and researchers from around the world, and has resulted in her supervising PhDs in many aspects of information literacy and information behaviour, and the use of technology (e.g. virtual worlds, Web 2.0) in learning. It was also recognised at academic level when Sheila was selected as a CILASS (Centre for Inquiry Based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences) Academic Fellow 2008-2010. Sheila is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College and is a Fellow of both CILIP and the Higher Education Academy; she was awarded the Information World Review award for Professional Excellence in 1999.

UKeiG is particularly pleased to make this award in view of Sheila's long history with the Group - serving on the Management Committee for a number of years and editing one of our popular Guides.

The Award was presented to Sheila during Internet Librarian International in London, October 20th-21st.

Professor Cronin’s career really began at Aslib in 1980, where he worked in the Research and Consultancy Divison alonsgide well-known figures such as John Martyn and Peter Vickers. From there, he was appointed, at age 34, to the Chair of Information Science at the University of Strathclyde, where he was instrumental in raising the profile of both information management and information science throughout the UK. In 1991 he left Glasgow for Bloomington, Indiana when he was appointed Dean of the School of Library and Information Science. He held this post with distinction for almost 20 years while maintained active links with the UK Information Science community, holding visiting professorships at the University of Brighton, Manchester Metropolitan University (where he was the Talis Information Visiting Professor of Information Science), and also Edinburgh Napier University. He is also an active researcher, whose research focuses on collaboration in science, scholarly communication, bibliometrics, citation analysis, the academic reward system and cybermetrics, i.e. where information science and social studies of science intersect. He has also consulted widely.

As would be expected, he is a prolific writer, and his books include: The Web of knowledge (edited with Helen Barsky Atkins; Information Today Inc., 2000); The hand of science (Scarecrow Press, 2005); Beyond bibliometrics (edited with Cassidy Sugimoto; MIT Press, 2014); and Metrics under the microscope (edited with Cassidy Sugimoto, Information Today Inc ./ASIST Monograph Series, 2014). He has also published extensively on topics such as information warfare, knowledge management, competitive analysis, digital pornography, and strategic intelligence.

Cronin’s 30 years of innovative research and teaching, coupled with his demonstrated leadership in the fields of information science and information management, make him an eminently worthy winner.

Lucy Tedd,  an internationally recognised figure in the field of library management, has been involved with computer systems in libraries since the early 1970s - having been amongst the first undergraduates in the UK to study Computer Science. Later that decade, following a period as Researcher in the College of Librarianship Wales (CLW), she was appointed as Part-Time Lecturer, a post that she held until her retirement in 2013 from the more recent manifestation of the College - the Department of Information Studies (DIS) at Aberystwyth University. She was a committed and highly effective teacher and supervisor at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and, demonstrating commitment to information science education above and beyond her academic remit as Lecturer, she acted as Director of the International Graduate Summer School during the 1990s.

From her early years in academe, Lucy Tedd engaged in significant research activity, and has been a prolific author of research and professional reports, articles, and books, including internationally established standard textbooks such as An introduction to computer-based library systems (now in its 3rd edition), Digital Libraries Principles and Practice in a Global Environment (with Professor Andrew Large),  Information seeking in the online age: principles and practice (with Professor Andrew Large, and Professor Richard. J. Hartley). These works have had a seminal influence on ILS education worldwide. In addition to her role as author, one of Lucy's most significant contributions to raising the profile of the information profession was as Editor, for over two decades, of the international journal Program: electronic library and information systems. In 2011, Lucy Tedd was awarded an Outstanding Service Award by the Emerald Literati Network to acknowledge her exceptional work and to mark her retirement as Editor. Lucy was great communicator and disseminator of her work, and consequently a frequent participant at international conferences, from the early days of the International Online Meeting in London to more recent major conferences. She has spoken at conferences and courses in very many countries including Argentina, Australia, Brunei, India, Kazakstan, Laos, Lebanon, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand as well as in European countries.

The nomination and the judges felt that Lucy Tedd should be acknowledged and rewarded for her sterling work as an international advocate for the information profession throughout her career, both within education and in the wider library and information profession.

The nomination says "Charles is surely one of the outstanding UK figures in information science " - he has moved between work in the information industry and academia and has been professor in two departments of information science and a research centre. His other interests include research evaluation, citation studies and bibliometrics, open access, scholarly communication and the digital library. Charles is a member of the Legal Advisory Board of the European Commission, and of the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance. 

The judges were pleased to make the award to Professor Oppenheim on the basis of his major contributions to the theory and practice of information science and his demonstrable excellence in teaching information science, all of which has served to raise the profile of the information profession.

The presentation was made at Internet Librarian International 2013 at the Olympia Conference Centre on Wednesday 16th October. The award was made by David Ball, Honorary Secretary of UKeiG. 

The Award is made in recognition of the Group’s work in raising the profile of the information profession within a field of endeavour in a way which has become an exemplar to others; demonstrating excellence in education and training; and for their major contribution to the theory and practice of information science. An important part of the Group’s educational activities has been the training of students who have subsequently gone on to join the chemoinformatics workforce, with some of them now in senior positions.  The nomination notes that the Group’s first publication dates from 1967 and it has made very significant contributions to the theory and practice of chemoinformatics over a period of more than four decades, by means of both its published research and its extensive collaborations with pharmaceutical, agrochemical and software companies. Their work spans search algorithms and data structures; 3D and patent (or Markush) searching; ligand docking and pharmacophore mapping; and the detailed comparison of different tools for some chemoinformatics application to enable the identification of the most effective and/or efficient approach.

The judges had no hesitation in awarding the three current members of the research group: Val Gillet, John Holliday and Peter Willett the 2012 UKeiG Jason Farradane Award

The Award is made in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the information profession in keeping with the Council’s mission to promote repository management and administration as a recognised and respected profession, provide a forum for discussion, and promote the exchange of best practice, experience, and development opportunities. UKCoRR encourages members to stress the value of information, in particular open access to research information, and supports improvements to the speed and functioning of the research process itself.

The nomination notes that the achievements and success of UKCoRR are "even more astounding given that, at present, there is no subscription charge and the committee works on an entirely voluntary basis. It is one of the un-sung heroes of Open Access in the UK and therefore deserves this award for its contribution to the information profession. "

Shawky Salem’s citation for the Jason Farradane Award makes reference to his unique role in the ILS Profession in his region, as a part of a team working together to promote advocacy for the Profession and to provide wider access to information, and a “perfect use of electronic resources”, so as to enrich cultural activities in both the Arab World and Canada. More specifically highlighted are the development of the first Arabic Edition of Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) in 1982; the creation of a new department, Knowledge Management and Informatics (KMI) in Beirut Arab University (BAU) in 2002; supervision and discussion of  over 18 PhD and 21 MA thesis in Alexandria University and other Universities in Egypt; his creation of the grant with IFLA, the SSCG (Shawky Salem Conference Grant), and of the Prize for KMI (Knowledge Management and Informatics) with the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology in Egypt; and – of course – his writings.