I’m working on some research with Kathryn Greenhill. It involves a self-administered questionnaire in which we need to establish the depth of participants’ technology knowledge and skills. We’re aiming to establish which of the respondents are technology specialists and which of the respondents have a general interest in technology as it applies to their broader non-technology job. I guess you could say we’re trying to determine which respondents fit into the category of “library technologists” and which could be described as “librarians who have a general interest in using technology to enhance service provision”.
We could simply ask participants which category they see themselves falling into, but there are two inherent issues with this approach.
Issue number one: objectivity
While the nature of surveys as data collection instruments means that data is necessarily reflective in nature, my feeling is that, rather than asking participants to classify themselves, it would be more appropriate to have participants rate themselves against a series of competencies, and to rate the importance of each competency to their current position. It makes more sense for us to classify all participants from our objective viewpoint, based on what we know about participants’ perceptions of their level of technology skill and the relevance of these skills to their current position, and based on our conception of the categories. This seems to me to be a slightly more objective framework within which to undertake the categorisation.
This approach does not, however, solve the issue of objectivity – both because we’d still dealing with perceptions, and because the approach is not really viable. Certainly, there are many models in the literature that we could use to inform the design of a series of questions that would measure respondents’ level of competency across a number of skills and knowledge areas within the umbrella of technology competencies. However, the problem with all of these models is that there are a significant number of skills and knowledge areas that we would need to ask about. And that would make this small section of the survey unreasonably lengthy. This is not the primary focus of the research, but rather, represents a characteristic of participants that we need to know about in order to facilitate a particular view of the data we’ll be gathering. As such, we don’t want to weigh the survey down with too many questions on this topic.
So we’re back to asking participants to tell us which category they belong to, which brings us to the second issue.
Issue number two: what exactly is a library technologist?
I may just be looking in the wrong places, but I’m yet to discover a robust definition of the term “library technologist”, although there are plenty of instances in which it has been used to describe a type of professional. (And I have to confess that I haven’t completed a full literature search – just some quick and dirty trawling.) This makes me question my own conception of the term, which is in essence based around what you might call a “propensity to tinker with tech”. In a nutshell, my personal definition of “library technologist” does not exclude people who don’t possess highly technical skills (like sys admin type skills, for example). But I’m conscious that the term is used to describe professionals with far more technical expertise than is possessed by many of us who exhibit a willingness to tinker.
We need a definition of “library technologist” because, before we ask people if they *are* something, we need to define that something. We need to ensure there is a shared understanding of the term. In the absence of a definition in the literature, establishing a shared understanding sounds like a research project of its own. There are certainly other avenues to explore (like, for example, whether we can work with definitions for similar terms – for example, “education technologist”), but for now, I guess I’m just a little surprised that we don’t have a definition yet.
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