LIS DREaM Workshop 3: Edinburgh

Last week I attended the last of three workshops in the LIS DREaM series, in Edinburgh (I’ve also reported on workshops one and two). The sessions were all informative, and some were of particular interest as potential research methods for my PhD.

Repertory Grids

I found the session on repertory grids particularly useful. The repertory grid (RG) is an interviewing technique that enables the researcher to elicit “both the conceptual content embodied in an individual’s mental model and the relationships which exist among these concepts” (Latta and Swigger, 1992). This is something I’m going to investigate further because a lot of the reading I’ve been doing around political behaviour and how people conceptualise politics highlight the issue that politics is a very personal topic. In addition, people’s attitudes and behaviours are not always rational or directly influenced by knowledge, and are often influenced by heuristics or rules of thumb.

I want to talk to teenagers about their attitudes towards politics and participation, and what political issues they think are important to them, rather than assuming that I know what matters to young people. In order to do that properly, and talk about issues that are actually relevant, I need to be able to identify and define those topics. The use of repertory grids as a scoping tool prior to in-depth interviews seems like a good way of doing this. Dr. Turner pointed out that using a method like this with cards and scraps of paper is a very unthreatening way of getting a lot of information out of people, and I think this will be a benefit when talking about such a personal and potentially emotionally-charged issue.

I can also use my findings to identify any possible trends and groupings of concepts when the data from the grids is turned into chart form. Dr. Turner recommended Repgrid for this, but there’s also an open source alternative. OpenRepGrid – this is an add-on to R, which is free statistical computing software. I’d never heard of R until a Researcher’s Digest session in my department a few weeks ago, and I’ve never used statistical software before, so at some point in the future I’m going to have to acquaint myself with it. I imagine bucket-loads of coffee will be required.

This week I’m reading about the use of RGs in Information Science, including the following journal articles:

• Birdi, B. (2011). ‘Investigating fiction reader characteristics using personal construct theory’. Aslib Proceedings, 63 (2/3), pp.275-294.
• Crudge, S.E. & Johnson, F.C. (2004). ‘Using the information seeker to elicit construct models for search engine evaluation’. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55 (9), pp.794-806. 
• Latta, G.F. & Swigger, K. (1992). ‘Validation of the Repertory Grid for Use in Modeling Knowledge’. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 43 (2), p.115.
• Madigan, D. et al. (1995). ‘Repertory hypergrids for large-scale hypermedia linking’. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 43, pp.465-481.
• McKnight, C. (2000). ‘The personal construction of information space’. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51 (8), pp.730-733.
• Mengshoel, O.J. (1995). ‘A reformulation technique and tool for knowledge interchange during knowledge acquisition’. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 43, pp.177-212.
• Oppenheim, C., Stenson, J. & Wilson, R.M.S. (2003). ‘Studies on Information as an Asset II: Repertory Grid’. Journal of Information Science, 29 (5), pp.419-432.
• Potthoff, J.K. et al. (2000). ‘An Evaluation of Patron Perceptions of Library Space Using the Role Repertory Grid Procedure’. College and Research Libraries, 61 (3), pp.191-203.
• Rugg, G. & McGeorge, P. (2005). ‘The sorting techniques: a tutorial paper on card sorts, picture sorts and item sorts’. Expert Systems, 22 (3), pp.94-107.
• Whyte, G., Bytheway, A. & Edwards, C. (1997). ‘Understanding user perceptions of information systems success’. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 6 (1), pp.35-68.

Discussions about research and practice

Much as the sessions were all interesting introductions to different research methods, I found that the conversations snuck in between talks were also of great value (and wish we’d had time for more). Along with the final session of the day – impact snakes and ladders – I found that some issues I have about the ‘state of the profession’ and current goings on are shared with others. For the final session we were split into groups and asked to answer some questions, then join with another group to share our responses, which roughly lined up with one another. My group, full-time PhD researchers, was paired with the group of public library workers.

The questions we were asked to answer were these:

1. To what extent do you consider that it is a PhD student’s responsibility to ensure that their PhD study has impact?
2. What strategies have members of your group developed to ensure that your PhD project is having/has impact?
3. Are there any particular difficulties with ensuring that your project has impact when you are a PhD student?

And the public librarians were asked these:

LIS researchers would like to complete projects to support librarians in delivering their services.
a) What do researchers need to do to make this happen?
b) Are there any particular difficulties for public librarians in accessing and using LIS research? How could these be addressed?

We were asked to discuss issues of relationships between research and practice and come up with recommendations about how to improve communication and getting research into practice etc. The usual suggestions came up, including ‘continuous discourse’, ‘networking events’ and ‘communicating with each other’. This is all well and good, and I appreciate the value of events such as the LIS DREaM Project and the work that goes into them, but I think the issues we have go far deeper than putting researchers and a few interested practitioners in a room with each other. No amount of that will solve the underlying systemic issues that exist within higher levels of the profession, and stem from a lack of appreciation of the values and principles of public libraries and the point of academic research.

This isn’t something new and is an ongoing problem. A number of our ‘solutions’, ironically, were things that used to exist. And quite frankly, it’s a crime that they don’t any more. Public Library Journal, for example, was the only UK journal that published the kind of research that’s actually useful and potentially implementable by practitioners. And without consultation or notice, CILIP killed it.

We suggested publishing research that promoted improvement and innovation in library services, and demonstrated the value of libraries to society. If only there was some kind of government department that ‘got’ that kind of thing. It could maybe include related services…museums, and archives, perhaps. We could call it the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. What’s that, we had one? Oh, the coalition government got rid of it? Bummer.

A number of us also felt quite strongly that although high-quality research is being conducted in academic departments across the UK, its impact is severely limited if those in control within library services find it inconvenient to listen and respond to the results in a meaningful way. This is if researchers can even get access to library services to research within in the first place, which for various reasons can be incredibly difficult.

Thanks to Hazel and everyone involved in the workshop for another useful and thought-provoking day.

SHARP Conference, Dublin

I’m going to be speaking at the SHARP Conference in Dublin at the end of June, with Professor Claire Squires and my supervisor David McMenemy. In fact, we’re lucky enough (?) to be the very first session on the very first day of the conference. The programme is available here.

Our bit is about this:

The Fight for Libraries: 21st Century Advocacy, Austerity and Alliance

• David McMenemy (University of Strathclyde) Losing the library faith? The public library ethos in an era of austerity
• Lauren Smith (University of Strathclyde) Advocating for libraries in an era of cuts
• Claire Squires (University of Stirling) Uneasy Alliances: Libraries and the UK Book Trade in the 21st Century

I’m really excited to be presenting for the first time as a PhD researcher (although what I’ll be talking about isn’t within the remit of my research and is based on my experiences and what I’ve learnt over the last couple of years as an activist/advocate/interested party) and it looks like a really varied programme with an audience who might not usually be exposed to library and information science research and goings on, which is always a good thing. I’m a bit disappointed that I’ll be missing Alistair Black’s session, which will be happening at the same time as mine, but I’m looking forward to the rest of my time there.

Here’s a bit of blurb about the conference:

The 20th Annual SHARP Conference
The Battle for Books
26-29 June 2012
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

“In a city like Dublin, which has been home to Swift, Wilde and Joyce one
naturally thinks of ‘The Battle for Books’ in terms of censorship,
constraint and restraint. This major international conference will address
these topics but will also consider the concept of ‘the battle for books’ as
broadly as possible.

More than 180 papers will be presented at the conference. Keynote speakers
include Professor Ann Blair (Harvard), Professor Germaine Warkentin (Toronto),
Professor Nicholas Cronk (Oxford), Professor Claire Connolly (Cardiff),
Professor James Raven (Essex), and Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS.

This conference will bring the leading practitioners in the field of ‘book
history’ from around the world to Dublin, a city which has recently been
designed as a UNESCO City of Literature.

If you are interested in books, and the cultural, social and economic
conditions in which books are produced and consumed, you should not miss this
conference.”

iLab

I’ve not posted in a while so I thought I’d share the presentation I gave yesterday to some members of my department here at Strathclyde now that I’m a couple of weeks away from the three month mark. It’s an introduction to my PhD topic (which has taken a bit of a different direction to the one my proposal was supposed to be going down, but that seems to be fairly standard procedure) and gives a brief outline to the problems, research questions and theories I’m considering. I’m by no means an expert in political or critical theory, so it’s all new, but I managed to justify how it’s relevant to information science in a fairly convincing way I think!

AHRC Justice Symposium

I’m going to be submitting a position paper to the AHRC Justice Symposium that’s being held at the University of Stirling on Saturday 28th April. I think it’s a really good opportunity for Computer and Information Science researchers to make contact and share ideas with researchers in  other disciplines, as well as being good practice for presenting in an academic environment, so I thought I’d share the details in case there are other Strathclyde or Stirling students who’d like to get involved.

Any Strathclyde/Stirling students wishing to participate in the event should email  graeme.t.brown@strath.ac.uk by no later than Friday 30th March for a booking form, and ensure that they provide a brief outline of the intended topic and content of the position paper to be presented.

Students and staff from Strathclyde will be able to take advantage of free transport from campus to the symposium and lunch and refreshments will be provided on the day, again free of charge.

The purpose of the event is to bring together researchers and students from Strathclyde and Stirling in intellectual debate and discussion, and to mark the establishment of the Consortium agreement that now exists between our universities.  As you may know, the Consortium has attracted significant financial support in the form of studentships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

There will be two main elements to the symposium. In the morning, staff and students will gather to hear a keynote address from Chris Mullin, the author, journalist and former MP who served as a minister in three departments of British government and was chairman of the Home Affairs select committee. Chris Mullin’s books include three highly acclaimed volumes of diaries, “A View from the Foothills”, “Decline and Fall”, and “A Walk-On Part”, along with the novel “A Very British Coup”, which was made into an award-winning television series. His “Error of Judgement – the truth about the Birmingham Bombings” led to the correction of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, and was made into a drama documentary by Granada Television.

After lunch, delegates will be able to attend round-table discussions on the theme of Justice as it relates to their specific subject area, be that History, Literature, Creative Writing, Publishing Studies, Journalism, or Archives and Information Sciences.

The CIS strand of the BGP Consortium Symposium invites staff and students from Strathclyde and Stirling universities, who are working in CIS related areas, to present position papers of no more than 10 minutes on a CIS specific topic that is closely related to the overarching symposium theme of justice. Due to time constraints the number of presentations will be limited to four.

The structure of the CIS specific event is designed to break down into two broad sections. The first section will consist of the position paper presentations. This will be followed by a discussion session that relates the specific topics covered within each of the presentations to broader issues within the justice theme that are relevant to the CIS discipline.

The justice theme of the BGP Consortium symposium is particularly relevant to the CIS discipline and can be approached from multiple perspectives.  It is not the intention here to produce an exhaustive or exclusive list of topics that participants may discuss, but a range of potential topics are offered below that that may or may not be taken up by participants.

Social Justice

• The public financing of public libraries and information services; the nature and consequences of privatisation of public libraries and information services and the consequences of specific treaties such as GATS.
• The extent, nature and consequences of neoliberal and neoconservative policies on publicly funded information services.
• Information poverty and the digital divide(s). This could be related to other broad concepts such as equity of access and information literacy or more specific areas such as the way individuals access healthcare information or political knowledge to engage with democratic processes (or the role information providers play in providing this information).

Censorship and bias

• An examination of the way information was/is provided under totalitarian regimes: can social media undermine certain aspects of state sponsored censorship?
• What are the implications of search engines censoring results and in the case of Google, closing certain AdSense accounts?
• The extent and effects of self-censorship: what were the effects (actual or potential) of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1998, which stated that local authorities “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality”, on library collection policies.
• What are the effects of internet filtering software on the ability of public library users to search for information online?

Citizen Involvement

• What impact is the ‘guerrilla librarian’ movement on social justice having and can the profession learn from it?
• What role did social media and citizen journalism play in the Arab Spring uprisings?
• Does unmediated content delivery on the internet constitute a fairer platform for discussion or are the traditional publishing avenues still necessary to ensure provenance and reliability?

Legislation and Privacy

• Does Freedom of Information legislation make public bodies more accountable and improve social justice?
• In what way has legislation such as the PATRIOT Act in the United States had an impact upon data mining and data protection?

View over Airthrey Loch, University of Stirling (cc Astacus on flickr)

Recommended Listening

Just a bit of a plug for Leeds Playlist, which I’m really enjoying taking part in – my first playlist (on the assigned theme of ‘colour’) went up this afternoon and I’ve been getting my ears around the other ones up there. It’s serving as a great introduction to things I’ve not listened to before and a nice reminder of things I’d forgotten about! My current fave is @fearfulpenguin’s colours one because she introduced me to Metric and she loves The Hot Puppies. Winner!

Image CC by volantra on Flickr

Library Day in the Life: Day Five

Mostly a day of study and preparing for National Libraries Day tomorrow!

• Went to Buchanan Street station with two CILIP/CILIPS members to have some photos taken for the Subway’s intranet and publicity, and to collect my ‘shoogle‘ bag to take round on the Glasgow Subway Librarithon tomorrow. Many thanks to Anabel for doing all the organising, I’m really excited about it!

• Tweeted a bunch of #NLD12 and #savelibraries related stuff, and tackled my email mountain (by tackled, I mean ‘put red To Do labels on things and deleted whatever I could’…)
• Found that some of the stuff I was reading for study was probably worth sharing so tumbled it as I went along.
• Listened to this EP by Golau Glau (who are amazing) which they made specially for National Libraries Day.
• Instructed Ian on how to update the Voices for the Library website.
• Gazed in wonder at his handiwork!
• Got an answer from the library about the EBSCO problem - OmniFile Full Text Select from Wilson isn’t and won’t be until next week. There’s a way round it though, hurrah!

I also spent a few hours with my finger splint off, which is quite a big thing for me because I ruptured a tendon six and a bit weeks ago and I didn’t know if it had healed properly. It looks like it should be fine, albeit a bit less straight than the rest of my fingers, and it’ll take a while for it to get moving again, but I’m really glad it doesn’t look like I’ll need surgery.

Dragon and Fionn spent a good hour or so outside, too – and came home – which is great because we’ve only been here for three weeks, and before we moved Fionn hadn’t been outside since he was rescued as a tiny kitten by daveyp and librarygirlknit.

Library Day in the Life: Day Four

I wish I’d taken my camera to work with me today because I met a fox, a magpie and a crow at the top of the steps down to the train station. Aw well. Imagine a scene a bit like this:

The main events of today were:

• Being interviewed by a lecturer from a library and information studies department in Japan about my involvement in library campaigning and advocacy as part of Save Doncaster Libraries, Voices for the Library and CILIP.
• Giggling all the way through my lunch break whilst looking at The 25 Most Awkward Cat  Sleeping Positions.
• A meeting with my supervisor to see how I’m getting on – basically, it’s okay that I’m not really sure what approach I want to take and I have a better idea than I think about the area that I want to research. And, it’s okay to keep on reading!
• Compiling a big reading list for the next couple of weeks.
• Struggling to make EBSCOHost work. What’s going on, guys?
• Publicising the fact that I’ve set up a Google Calendar for my CILIP Vice President activities (I’ve only added the lobby for libraries at Westminster so far, but there are things I’m doing that don’t have a set date yet).
• Promising Colm that I’d put the report from last year’s Fallacy of Footfall Workshop online. Here it is!
• Having a wander round town – I’m trying to learn my way around bit by bit (I’ve only lived here for three weeks and have been in Amsterdam, Doncaster and Leeds for some of that!) – so I managed to get lost, but I did also manage to find a rucksack that my laptop will fit in, so I’m counting that adventure as a win.
• Learning how to use a waiter’s friend with the help of youtube videos and diagrams from my housemate.
• Watching Channel 4 News just to watch the report about National Libraries Day.
• Planning when my friends from Leeds can come up and visit me in Glasgow – yay!

Library Day in the Life: Day Three

Bit of a photoblog today…

Pictures (top left to bottom right): my whiteboard diagram of Giroux’s ideas about transformative libraries and radical democracy; my desk; my lunch (Scotch Broth); my dinner (red lentil, mushroom and roast pepper bake); Fionn; Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science and Gorman’s Eight Central Values of Librarianship on the whiteboard; the view of Glasgow from my office in Livingstone Tower; Dragon.

Fionn woke me up at five o’clock when he put his claw through my lip. Thanks Fionn. That meant I slept through my alarm when I nodded back off, so I got off to a bit of a late start. Headed into the office, did some reading, responded to emails and tweets and things, some more reading, then scribbling all over a whiteboard when I got really excited about finding a critical theory that seems to have really good potential for applying to my research area, lunch, then spent the afternoon in a really interesting training session about how government policy-making processes work and how academics might be able to influence policy with their research and evidence. I was supposed to be doing some more reading this evening, but I’ve struggled to find some articles (I think EBSCO’s playing up), and cooking and playing with cats was far more appealing than faffing about with databases.

Library Day in the Life: Day Two

Today was a horribly early start to get from London back up to Glasgow, but the four and a half hour train journey meant I got to finish off Cory Doctorow’s brilliant Little Brother, which I read in print, but you can download under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license from here.

I presented at the BOBCATSSS Conference in Amsterdam last week (blog post forthcoming!), and a lot of privacy and data security issues were raised in other sessions there that caught my interest, so I’m really glad I read this because it’s a good (and genuinely riveting) introduction to some really important themes that I don’t know half enough about.

The rest of it looked mostly like this, just in my bedroom rather than the library:

I’m trying to find a hook for my research topic, but the more I read, the more lost I get. I’m hoping to tie something down a bit more over the next couple of weeks. My supervisor recommended this book because he thinks it might be a good idea for me to ground my research in a critical theory (here’s a link to the introduction in Google Books for the interested…). My reading for the rest of the week is going to include Giddens, Giroux, Gramsci, Habermas and Mouffe. And then I think my brain might melt.

LIS DREaM Workshop 2: London (and Library Day in the Life Day One)

Note: This is Day One of my Library Day in the Life (#libday8) activities – I’m unlikely to blog the rest in such detail, but we’ll see!

On 30th January I attended the second workshop in a series of three in the LIS DREaM Project (my blog post about the first is here).

The format was similar to the first, with a combination of presentations about different innovative and unusual research methods people might want to explore, short delegate presentations about their own research projects, and a research ‘practicality’ – this time, about research and policy (which is particularly relevant to the aims of my own research!)

Again, I don’t want to duplicate content that will be provided on the LIS Research site itself, so I’ll just cover the sessions and information that I found the most useful and pertinent to my own work, which now that I’m three weeks back into being a student, I feel far more able to absorb and apply in a meaningful way than I did back in October.

I think first it’s important to mention what is quite possibly the greatest librarian t-shirt I’ve ever seen. Nice work Michael.

Anyway. Onto Conference Report Proper…

The first thing that really struck a chord with me was the minute-long presentation given by research student Ella Taylor-Smith as part of the Unconference Half Hour. Her topic is e-participation. She’s conducting case studies using ethnography and discourse analysis and applying resource mobilisation theory to develop hypotheses about social movements,  which she’ll then use to build technology pilots to test the ideas she’s developed, to see if they’re pointing in the right direction. (Phew, that’s a lot of concepts I’d never come across before…I hope I made them make sense…!)

Ella and I had a chat during lunch and she was kind enough to tweet me some recommended reading afterwards:

• Klandermans, B. and Staggenborg, S. eds., 2002. Methods of Social Movement Research. University of Minnesota Press.
• Flyvbjer, B. (2006). ‘Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research‘. Qualitative Inquiry, 12 (2), 219-45.

I gave a short presentation about my research topic too:

You can watch the video of the session below:

Another session I found really interesting and potentially relevant to my research topic was Professor Mike Thelwall’s Introduction to Webometrics. It covered a few different techniques and he explained how they could be applied to LIS, including using altmetrics instead of/as well as traditional citation index searching, for a number of reasons, including the fact that results can be up to two years more up to date. Initially I didn’t quite understand why this kind of search would be useful, and tweeted that I wondered if it was a more in-depth equivalent of googling yourself, but Professor Hazel Hall explained that this it’s a way of discovering how much impact your work is having, which is important if you’re under pressure to demonstrate your impact for funding or promotion, for example.

Mike also talked about the uses of sentiment analysis and how computational linguistics can be used to explore aspects of online communication. This was really interesting and far more complex than I can do justice, so I’d recommend having a look at the presentation and exploring it for yourself if you’re interested! I think I’ll dig a bit deeper into it in case my methodology does involve analysing online political discussion, but one problem with the method that Mike raised was that exchanges and discussions of a political nature can be problematic to effectively analyse because computers aren’t great at picking up on sarcasm!

The final session of the day was Professor Nick Moore’s presentation Making the Bullets for Others to Fire, which looked at how research can inform policy. He gave a really thorough account of his experiences within the Policy Studies Institute, and great advice about how to understand information policy, not getting too positive too early on, responding to comments and criticism, and planning what you want your research to achieve from the start. It was reassuring to find that the way Nick presented his Information Policy Matrix and described how information is socially important (to understand policies, how to vote and participate) fit in with the way my reading is taking me at the moment. I need to go away and explore the potential ‘gap in the matrix’ in the ‘information and society’ / ‘legislative and regulatory’ box.

Nick raised some really important issues for planning research, including the importance of seeking to inform future policy rather than looking back at policies of the past, and being aware of political agendas in research projects that have been set up by other people/organisations. He also provided a perfect, but difficult to achieve, sign of success:

Express your research aim in one, clear, unambiguous sentence.

Challenge accepted! I might be some time…

The general lessons were these:

• Critical comment is really important and researchers mustn’t be afraid to do it. There’s no point doing the work if you don’t express your views and provide critical comment. This can be a scary prospect, but in Britain we’re lucky because we have a big enough mass to enable critical comment to be heard. We’re not as huge as the US, for example, so aren’t invisible. We’re also big enough, however, to not damage our entire career by being openly critical in our research findings and publicising them.
• Interest and passion are essential, especially if you want to inform policy. You have to be able to keep going, because it’s not a short term thing and takes time! You need the motivation to keep powering on.
• You need to be able to try to work out what is the next big issue and what will be important in 2, 5, 10 years time. Consider what small issues haven’t yet been addressed.
• However, it’s important that you don’t get too far ahead of the curve and find that nobody’s ready to look at the work you’re doing.
• It’s important to consider role of universities – you need to be in a department that has a reputation and is geared up to informing policy if you want to do that yourself.
• You need to be able to retain your independence in order to be listened to.

Nick’s key tips were:

• Focus and specialise - pick your area of specialism and become a real expert
• Carry others with you – make use of professional and academic networks
• Pick your allies and find ways of working with them
• Don’t look too far ahead – elected politicians seldom look beyond the next election

A very informative day with lots to take in. So, in the style of true library and information scientists, we hit the pub.

I left early to sneak in a cup of tea with a friend based in Oxford who’d been lecturing at Middlesex University and then to go for dinner with some London friends. If you like Mexican food, have a go on Wahaca – awesome! I’m going to get hold of the cookbook so I can try it out at home.