The Information School or iSchool of the University of Sheffield, in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, was founded in 1963 as the University's Postgraduate School of Librarianship and became in 2010 the first UK iSchool.
Such is the status of the school, that it has twice been honoured with a special issue of the Journal of Information Science devoted entirely to the department, its staff and its research outputs.
In this UK-government sponsored assessment of research outputs, no other department in its subject field (or its University) achieved this consistency; few departments of any subject area in UK universities managed such a high level of continuous research output (see the following links to the 1992,[6] 1996,[7] 2001[8] RAE results).
In 2008, rankings of departments was left to news organizations; the Times Higher Education placed Sheffield at No.
[9] In 2008, an analysis of citations showed four of the ten most cited UK information studies academics were working in the Sheffield department.