ebl » virtually a librarian

first planning meetups for online journal club

Feb 242012

Thanks to everyone who responded to the survey and expressed interest in attending a meetup to chat about an online journal club.

To accommodate as many people as possible, there will be two meetups:

Tuesday 6 March at 6pm AEST (Brisbane)
Wednesday 7 March at 7pm AEST (Brisbane)

Because I’m more than a little ditsy, I managed to get on of the dates wrong on the survey. A number of you indicated you could make Tuesday 7 March at 7pm, but of course, 7 March is a Wednesday. So hopefully this will work out for some people.

If you can’t make these dates and times, never fear! We’ll take lots of notes and there’ll be opportunities to volunteer to help out down the track, as well as opportunities to participate in the journal club itself.

I’ll post a short agenda closer to the meeting.

We’ll use Skype for this first call, as that was by far the most popular option.

If you’re planning on coming along to one of the meetups, please indicate which one by choosing an option on the form below, and also enter your Skype username so I can be sure to add you to the correct call.

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towards a research-led profession (or, how to become a practitioner-researcher)

ebl, evaluation, evidence, research No Responses »

Feb 212012

At LibraryCamp Australia 2012, there was a discussion about building a culture of research in library and information practice. Lots of really practical ideas were shared during the session, and I wanted to follow up here with a few of my ideas on how professionals can get involved in doing research. So here goes!

Every project is an opportunity for research

Starting out a new project with clear, measurable objectives is not only good project management, but it also provides you with an opportunity to publish. Setting objectives and putting strategies in place to collect the data you need to measure achievement of those objectives sets you up to evaluate the success of your project once you hit the finish line. Publishing on the results of your project and your evaluation of its success is a great way to help build the evidence base.

Collaborate

If you’re new to research (or even if you’re not!), collaborating with your colleagues can be a great way to break down some of the fear you might have about doing research and getting published. Collaborate within your institution and beyond it. Connect with people that have similar professional interests and just start talking about what interests you. You’ll be surprised by how many ideas you come up with. Also consider collaborating with academics – we’re always looking for opportunities to work with practitioners on real world projects. Your professional expertise and their methodological expertise will complement each other.

Get a mentor

There are many, many active practitioner-researchers in the library and information professions. Find someone whose work you admire and ask them if they’ll mentor you through the process of undertaking your first research project and looking for publication opportunities. You might already have a professional mentor, but your research mentor is probably a different person: someone who has experience in designing and seeing through research projects and getting published.

Can’t find a research mentor? Drop a comment here and I’ll see if I can help you.

Look at alternative channels

Journals and conferences are probably the two most obvious places to publish the results of your research, but have you thought beyond that? Blogging is a great way to document your research journey and a really valuable way to disseminate your research. Academic publishing timelines are laggy and can mean that your cutting edge project isn’t so cutting edge any more by the time your journal article gets published. A series of blog posts on your findings can help you disseminate any time-critical aspects of your research as you progress.

Get lots of traction out of a single project

Remember, one project does not necessarily equal one publication. You can get much more traction than that out of your research! By publishing some of your findings on a blog, for example, you don’t preclude yourself from publishing about that research in a journal or presenting at a conference. There are always a variety of angles you can use for publications about a single research project. A project I led last year has so far resulted in three publications, and I’ll be publishing again out of this project this year (more than once). Each of these publications focuses on a different aspect of the research and was designed for a different audience. Even after five or so publications, there will still be data (and different views of the data) that I haven’t published on.

But that’s okay, because the other thing you need to remember about research is your data has a longer shelf life than you might imagine. When I first made the switch to academia, I was always in a rush to publish while my data was fresh, but I learned very quickly that I actually have quite a big window of time to disseminate the results of my research. Don’t publish one surface-level view of your research in your haste to get your findings out there. Instead, take a narrower but deeper view of your research in a series of publications over a longer period of time. You’ll do your research more justice this way and your publications will be more useful to others.

Start with a literature review

We’re librarians. We know how important it is to review the literature before we start a project. But instead of just writing up a short literature review in a publication on your findings, consider writing a more holistic literature review before you get started on your research, and publish it independently. Our professional literature could definitely use more of this type of publication. The process will help you focus your research on the gaps in the literature and your review will benefit other researchers. You might consider, for example, publishing a literature review in the new review section of the EBLIP journal.

Do a research degree

If you’re keen to get involved in research, you might like to consider getting a research degree. As librarians and information professionals move into research support, research training is going to be increasingly relevant for practitioners. At VALA a couple of weeks back, research support was probably the hottest topic on the program. Increasingly, information professionals are taking a really practical approach to research support and contributing to research in really tangible ways, through activities like literature searching, grant writing, and advising on publication opportunities.

If your professional qualification is a Graduate Diploma, you might be thinking about upgrading to a Masters. Instead of upgrading by completing more coursework, consider a research degree. The benefits of this in terms of your skills and knowledge are obvious, but the benefits for your wallet shouldn’t be discounted. Masters by research programs are fee-free.

We have an awesome research community at QUT… Come and play with us!

Just do it!

Stop thinking about it, and just do it! You’ve probably got at least one project on the go right now that you could be publishing about. So do it! The Research Applications in Information and Library Studies seminar is a perfect venue to publish research in practice, because the focus of this event is on connecting researchers and practitioners and fostering a culture of research in the profession.

Abstract submission for RAILS8 closes this Thursday, 23 February. You’ve got plenty of time between now and then to prepare and submit a 300 word abstract! The Organising Committee eagerly await your contribution!

let's get this professional reading group off the ground!

ebl, professional stuff No Responses »

Feb 182012

If you’re interested in participating in an online professional reading group, please fill out this questionnaire about your availability for a bit of a planning meeting, and we’ll see where we end up!

Please respond by 5pm AEST (Brisbane) on Thursday 23 February, so I can confirm a time the following day.

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interested in participating in an online professional reading group?

ebl, professional stuff 22 Responses »

Feb 142012

Last Friday, one of the breakout sessions at LibraryCamp Australia focused on professional reading and we chatted about the possibility of setting up an online ‘journal club’. This is something I’d love to participate in and I’m definitely keen to help out with some of the mechanics of getting something off the ground, but I don’t really have the capacity to take on a huge amount of work. So it would really be a case of a few of us getting together and seeing what we could come up with. I thought I’d blog about this and see if we can generate some interest, and then we can go from there.

What I had in mind was something like this…

We establish some shared topics of interest in the literature – some topics that a whole bunch of us across the sectors are interested in – and work with these as reading topics. Alternatively, we could have sector-based groups, but I do see a lot of value in cross-pollinating and reading literatures related to other sectors, as well as our own.
Each month, we choose one academic reading (or one academic reading per topic, if we want to break into groups).
Once a month, we get together in an online space like a Google+ Hangout and discuss that reading. As journal club discussions work best with medium sized groups, I would suggest this happens more than once a month, at various times. Individuals can nominate to lead the discussion, say once a year each.
On an ongoing basis, we could all share information about other professional reading we’re doing – including ‘non-academic’ literature, like blog posts or news articles. This could be done via Twitter with a hash tag, or we could consider setting up a WordPress site and use BuddyPress to turn it into a social network where we can share our reading.

This might be something we do just for this year, the National Year of Reading, to profile professional reading, or it could be something that continues into the future.

Ultimately, this should be a lightweight initiative. I’m sure none of us want to get bogged down in administrivia and extra work.

Is anyone interested in joining me in a Google+ Hangout in the next two weeks or so to talk this through further?

redesigning evidence based practice for wicked problem solving

conference presentations, ebl, evidence No Responses »

Jul 052011

I spent the better part of last week at the Sixth International Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Conference (EBLIP6) in Manchester, where I presented a paper co-authored with the wonderful Zaana Howard. Our paper was a conceptual one – it presented an untested model for evidence based practice (EBP), which is essentially a hybrid of design thinking and EBP models. This paper was born out of a discussion (or several discussions really) that Zaana and I had about the instances where EBP doesn’t cut it as a model for dealing with a problem – for example, situations where there is no existing literature, or situations that require innovation. We also had some doubts about particular aspects of the EBP model, including its reliance on published literature.

This presentation was a lot of fun to work on, not the least because it gave me an opportunity to get more familiar with Zaana’s field of design thinking, which I think has a lot to offer information practitioners. As always, it was a pleasure to work with Zaana, too!

Our presentation was well received – we got interesting questions during the session, and were pleasantly surprised to win both the delegates’ choice and committee’s choice best paper awards for the conference.

You can see our slides and references over at my other site, katedavis.info. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the hybrid model, too – we plan to write this up as an article, so all feedback is very welcome. You can either leave comments here or email us (davis.kate@gmail.com – I’ll forward feedback to Zaana).

more on reflective practice

blogeverydayofjune, ebl, evaluation No Responses »

Jun 272010

I posted recently about the importance of publishing, and in that post I talked about reflection and how important I think that process is. And in my last post, I focused on evaluation – and reflection is a key tool in the personal evaluation toolkit.

So I was interested today to see a tweet about a new article on reflection and Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP). EBLIP rock star Andrew Booth has just published an article called Upon reflection: five mirrors of evidence based practice.

Whether you’re for or against (or perhaps ambivalent about) EBLIP, this article is well worth a read.

via @dkouf

making time for metrics

blogeverydayofjune, ebl, evaluation 2 Responses »

Jun 272010

I have lots of soap boxes, a number of which I’ve posted about here before. Evaluation (otherwise known as assessment) is probably my favourite soap box of all.

It’s also something that I don’t believe we take as seriously as we should. Librarians are really good at collecting statistics – perhaps *too* good at it. The issue, I think, is that we focus on the collecting with such intent that we sometimes miss out on the analysing. We measure everything that’s measurable, and some other stuff too, but I’m not entirely sure that we work with the data we collect in a way that tells us something meaningful about what we’re doing.

Do we actually change how we do things or how promote our services because of what the data tells us? And on an even more fundamental level, do we even take a considered look at the data we collect, or do we just send it straight up the line to meet our reporting requirements?

Evaluation of what we do on a day to day basis is critical. It’s critical because we owe it to our customers to be offering services that meet their needs and that are used. It’s critical because we are constantly asked to do more with less resources, and we need to be rational and thoughtful in deciding where to invest our energies. It’s critical because without meaningful evaluation, how can we ever improve?

Evaluation is also a critical phase in managing any project, and in my experience, it is a phase that is perhaps undervalued (or at least, under-emphasised) in what some might call 2.0 projects. I have observed that, in implementing online services that make use of freely available web based tools, practitioners tend to focus on agility. I’ve seen this result in a lack of planning, in terms of service design, project management and evaluation, and it’s my contention (and a profound one at that!) that in order to be meaningful, evaluation must be planned and aligned with the aims and objectives of the project. You need to know in advance what you’re going to measure in order to collect the right data along the way, and to ensure that you have adequate time allocated to evaluation.

I’m thinking about evaluation at the moment because I’m working on materials for a new unit that I’m running next semester, and working on a plan to evaluate how the unit performs in terms of allowing students to realise the unit’s learning objectives. I’m also thinking about the two units I taught in first semester, and reflecting on both my performance and how the unit structure and content worked. There are many inputs in terms of data: student feedback on my performance, and my personal scores on the Learning Experience Survey (LEX); student feedback on the units, and the unit scores on the LEX; student performance; informal feedback received from students; and students’ reflections (students write one reflection for each assessment item). Of course, working with all of this data will take time, but I think the evaluative process is critical, so I’m setting aside the time to do it.

Do you give evaluation the time, energy and thought power it deserves?

do we want to know whether library blogs are succeeding in the big, bad web world?

ebl, evidence, library2.0, soapbox 3 Responses »

Mar 142008

There’s been plenty of talk around the Library 2.0 theme on the idea of evaluation or assessment. At Information Wants to be Free, Meredith Farkas says what she wanted to see come out of Library 2.0 was a greater focus on assessment. I certainly want to see libraries have a greater focus on assessment, too, and I want to see them publishing about it. (Particularly public libraries. We just don’t publish enough.)

Why aren’t we (libraries in general) publishing about the success (or failure) of our 2.0 projects? Why is there virtually no data to be found that quantifies some of the outcomes of 2.0 projects? We’ve been on this 2.0 bandwagon long enough for studies and assessments and evaluations to have been undertaken. For a movement that’s intrinsically tied up with quick publishing channels like blogs and wikis, it seems strange that there is a real dearth of published studies on 2.0 projects. Why is that?

Walt Crawford had this to say in a recent post on his two blog survey books:

Maybe there’s a clear desire not to know how library blogs are doing in the real world, other than a few cherry-picked examples. I’d like to think that’s not the case. It would be unprofessional to tell people about how wonderful library blogs are, and encourage them to create such blogs, without giving them honest and broad-ranging information on what’s actually happening with such blogs.

I’d like to think that’s not the case, too. But I wonder. I wonder a few things:

Is the lack of publishing indicative of a lack of success? (And a fear of talking about it?)
Is the lack of publishing indicative of a perceived lack of success, a perception that might be formed because we’re not collecting the right data? (eg. How are we measuring ROI? Do we just count comments on blog posts? Or do we look at exit links, time spent on the page, holds on titles blogged about, impact on online resource usage stats…? I certainly hope all of these metrics and more are informing libraries’ evaluations of their blogs, because if we’re just relying on comments to measure user engagement, then we’re not seeing the full picture.)
Is the lack of publishing indicative of a lack of evaluation? (And if so, why aren’t we evaluating? Because we don’t know how? Because we don’t have time? Because we don’t want to know?)
Or, is it just that we’re not publishing about our evaluations?

I’ve got a blogging project in the pipeline at mpow. It’s germinating quite slowly, because I want to see it well planned. We want a well planned implementation, but also a well planned, multi-faceted evaluation. If it works, I want to know about it, and I want us to be able to reflect on what we did and make links to what worked. If it doesn’t work, I want to know about it just as much (if not more), because I want to be able to reflect on what we did, look for ways we could improve, and ultimately, pull the pin if that’s what we need to do.

Blogs (and all things shiny and 2.0) are just great. They’re fun for staff to work on, and have huge potential to engage our users. But none of us have time to run services that don’t work. If we don’t evaluate, we have no ability to know whether

We know that “because we always did it that way” is not a good reason to keep doing the things we’ve always done, whether they work or not. But neither should a failure to evaluate be the reason we keep on keeping on with our 2.0 services.

If you have evaluated your 2.0 service, publish about it! And if you have published, I’d love to receive some links.

evidence…

ebl, evidence, soapbox No Responses »

Sep 042007

A brief but pertinent post from Lorcan Dempsey today on the use of evidence – or rather, the non-use of evidence – to back up discussions on bibliographic data and catalogues.

I’ve got evidence on the brain at the moment. This area of librarianship is not alone in the fact that its discourse sometimes lacks grounding in evidence. But the future of the catalogue is certainly a dominant topic of conversation at the moment – a conversation that could only benefit from the existence of and reference to a solid evidence base.

[Aside: While I'm talking about the future of the catalogue... I'll be very interested to see the papers from the Australian Committee on Cataloguing seminar that's on this Friday in Brisbane. Aptly titled Promise for the future, or legacy of the past? : cataloguing in a changing world the program includes papers on a range of topics from educating future cataloguers to tagging to RDA. Should be some good food for thought there.]

virtually a librarian

first planning meetups for online journal club

towards a research-led profession (or, how to become a practitioner-researcher)