Research you have always wanted but never had

Suzana Sukovic

For this workshop, LARK will take you to a wonderful new creative space -- UTS Gehry building (the Dr. Cau Chak Wing Building). It will provide a unique setting for us to move away from our daily grind and think creatively about future realities. We will take a serious play approach to this workshop that will help us imagine models in which research is integrated with our profession, while getting to know each other better. After the fun hands-on workshop , we will continue conversations over dinner.

Attendees are free to come early and explore this distinctive building — the information desk is very friendly and some LARK members will be there at 5 pm to welcome and direct you. Many thanks to Bhuva Narayan for providing this opportunity!

When:

Monday 20/04/2015, 5.30 pm gathering for 6 pm start till 7.30 followed by dinner (optional)

RSVP 17 April

Where:

14 Ultimo Rd, Haymarket, University of Technology, Sydney

Room CB08.03.004 (UTS Building 8, Level 3, Room 004)

UTS Campus Map http://maps.uts.edu.au/map.cfm

Bookings http://tinyurl.com/LARK20April

At the door: gold coin donation for ALIA members,

$5 for non-members

Everyone interested in LIS research is welcome. We take pride in being an open group. This is what people said about our meetings:

 · “welcoming and thoughtful”

· “People are interesting and interested”

· “I feel inspired to do something now”

Picture of the UTS Gehry building: 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Frank_Gehry%27s_Dr_Chau_Chak_Wing_Building_%284%29.jpg

LARK meeting @ EBLIP8

The Eighth International Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Conference
Suzana Sukovic

LARK @ EBLIP8

The EBLIP8 draft program is ready now with workshops galore. Check it out and start planning a wonderful mid-winter/mid-summer break in Brisbane! Three days talking about evidence-based practice – what else can a LARK wish for? A LARK meeting, perhaps. 

8 July at 8.30 am  If you are in Brisbane, here is the date and time for your diary. It is very exciting because this is the first time a LARK meeting is organised outside Sydney. As the meeting description says,  EBLIP8  is  a  unique  opportunity  for  people  outside  Sydney  to  extend  their  research  circle  by connecting  with  LARK.  This  meeting  will  be  an  opportunity  to  network  and  discuss how we  can  work  together  across  geographical distances. 

Birds of a feather flock together.

 

Picture above Rufous-naped_Lark_Bare_07_03_10_5.JPG

Quality assurance improvements in Australian university libraries

By Janine Schmidt

Karen Tang, Quality assurance improvements in Australian university libraries
Performance Measurement and Metrics vol. 14(1) 2013 pp.36-44

The need to reduce costs and maintain or extend services has led to an increasing focus on continuous improvement strategies within libraries. The libraries of the Australian Technology Network, LATN, comprising Curtin University, RMIT University, QUT, UTS, UNISA and the Auckland University of Technology have collaborated for some years on various projects. This paper describes the maturing of service improvements by the group from 2005 – 2010.

In 2005, a study reviewed quality assurance practices at the member libraries through examination of websites, a questionnaire and interviews. In 2010, the findings were revisited using the same questionnaire to determine further actions undertaken. This paper focuses in particular on the responsibility for quality assurance, the use of appropriate performance frameworks and the extent of involvement of individual training and work planning, to determine growth in line with a framework developed by Wilson and Town in the United Kingdom. This framework establishes five levels of quality assurance from an ad hoc approach at Level 1 to an advanced approach at Level 5, where all activity and the organisation culture are focused on continuous improvement.

What is quality assurance? It includes performance measurement, planning and benchmarking against others to ensure that services provided are “fit for purpose”. Who determines the quality? It is the customer. Notions of TQM, balanced scorecard, the Australian Business and Service Excellence guidelines,  ADRI (Approach, Deployment, Results, and Improvement) and LEAN (have expanded on the approach. The paper notes the changing emphasis on quality, referring to AUQA (Australian Universities Quality Agency), whose activities have since been transferred to TEQSA (Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency). We aim to create a smarter future for Australia - by upholding standards for students.

The paper notes the growing sophistication of approaches to quality assurance within the libraries studied. All have a documented quality framework; most allocation responsibility for quality improvement to a specific staff member; and almost all provided training programs at the individual level and emphasised individual performance as part of organisational performance. Planning, performance measurement, client surveys, documentation, systematic reporting and analysis of findings and encouragement of best practice have all become part of the organisational conversation. Most libraries have undertaken continuous improvement strategies as part of their overall institutional framework.

Libraries continue to operate under significant pressures for accountability. The tertiary education changes mooted add to the importance of ensuring that library services meet client needs effectively and provide value for money. All libraries must operate within a quality assurance framework. Collaborative activity, an appropriate organisational culture, training of staff and an emphasis on performance measurement from the client perspective will assist libraries in ensuring they deliver services cost-effectively.  Libraries who wish to win awards and plaudits from their customers must manage their quality assurance processes effectively.

This article was first published in Incite, Jan/Feb 2015

Janine Schmidt, AM FALIA

Director, Mukurta Solutions

Learning to stand on your own two feet

This article was published in Incite, Jan/Feb 2015

By Alycia Bailey

In conversation with an older colleague, Alycia Bailey was informed she was no longer a new librarian, but a librarian toddler: still learning to walk on her own, but no longer likely to slump into a ‘death position’ if left unsupervised. Now, having completed her fifth year as a library professional, Alycia has found herself compelled to reflect on the things she learned over those short years, and to share some of her lessons learned with new librarians who are only just learning to walk.

Collect evidence

In the past two and a half years since I started at my current position, I have joined LARK (Library Applied Research Kollektive) and completed a master’s research project. In the process I’ve learned the value of data. Even if you’re not studying formally, you should always be collecting data. Not just circulation statistics and door counts, but qualitative data as well. Get patron feedback about programs, write stream of consciousness notes after events or get a colleague to observe your practice and give you feedback. No matter how well you’re doing, it can always get better. Reflect on what you’ve done and how it can be improved.

Make programs interesting for you

If you’ve got to run a program while smiling and engaged for at least an hour, then it may as well be something you enjoy. My thing has been gaming. I’ve used games to encourage students to engage in critical thinking, word play and story-telling. In my master’s project I also used video games to get students interested in coding, mathematics and science. My participants could see that I was excited to be there, with them, sharing something amazing. My enthusiasm has infected them with a love of learning and makes them come back for more.

Smarter planning makes better programs

Even for regular lunchtime club meetings, I have learned to always make a short, reusable session plan. Sometimes it’s nothing more than dot points and I usually don’t bring it with me to meetings, but I find that the act of writing out a plan cements in my mind the purpose of the program and keeps me on track. Writing plans also helps you to focus your energy on what really matters and means your participants get the most out of the experience.

Get a life

When I started as a librarian, I would work all the time. I’m talking twelve hour days, skipped lunch breaks, late nights, early mornings, planning programs on my days off and checking work emails in bed. I was unhappy, tired and my work was suffering. I still work late occasionally and sometimes I skip lunch, but life is a lot more balanced and I’m better at work for it.

Alycia Bailey is librarian at St.Vincent's College, Potts Point and LARK's Treasurer.

Happy Festive Season!

 

INKE Sydney gathering

Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age: E-merging Reading, Writing, and Research Practices
An INKE-hosted Birds-of-a-Feather Gathering
8 December 2014, State Library of New South Wales

By Suzana Sukovic

A Birds-of-a-Father Gathering hosted by the Canadian group INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) turned out to be a beginning of the festive season for me. Really. This seminar was a summer rain for my brain parched by the heat of end-term rush, administrative duties and noise of building works. It had all the elements of great gatherings – good organisation, nice people with fresh ideas, thoughtful insights and shared interests, lots of time for discussion and pleasant surroundings.

The organisation of the gathering required a great deal of preparation to create time for discussions during the day. After a selection of abstracts, authors were asked to write long papers, which were collated into a nearly 300 page long document and shared with participants. During the seminar, each paper was allocated 10 minutes – strictly 4 minutes for a presentation and the remainder for questions and discussions. Keynote addresses had a more generous time allocation, still with ample time for discussions. In this blog post, I will share some of the ideas presented during the day, keenly aware that a brief overview can’t do justice to the richness of arguments and conversations.

The first keynote speaker was Christian Vandendorpe (University of Ottawa) with the paper Wikipedia and the Ecosystem of Knowledge in which he shared his insights into the inner workings and reception of the encyclopedia. Vandendorpe presented a model of Wikipedia as a glasshouse in which everything is visible. He explained rigorous editorial process and invited scholars to contribute by writing articles and to consider its use in research. Teachers at all levels are encouraged to use Wikipedia’s educational spaces in class. An interesting question from the audience was whether the creation of a ‘world brain’ could lead to the homogenisation of knowledge and a loss of diversity.

Reading Technologies, Digital Production, & the Social was the title of the first session. John Maxwell (Simon Fraser U) argued that the WWW is the publishing paradigm of our time. He promoted the possibility of hacking scholarly work by adding value to it (for example, adding index to a publicly available work). Tully Barnett (Flinders U) discussed young people's social reading enabled by the Kindle social highlighting feature. Transliterate reading was my paper in which I considered how scholars, community members and teenagers search, read and create in a transliterate manner. I will present my 4 minute argument on the LARK blog shortly.

Session 2: Collaboration: Tools, Platforms, & Examples was marked by discussions about engagement with users and readers. Jon Bath (U Saskatchewan) presented a multi-authored paper describing an experiment to employ a plug-in for the Zotero bibliographic management system in collaborative projects. The users’ reluctance to try the software during the experiment prompted us all to reflect on the values of sharing negative research experiences. On behalf of his group, Bill Bowen (U Toronto) discussed his experiences with the Iter community, pointing out that ‘build it and they will come’ often doesn't work. Ellen Forsyth talked about the efforts of an international group of librarians to engage readers in online discussions on blog and Twitter. Ray Siemens (U Victoria; INKE) presented his team’s work on setting up an environment for collaboration in consultation with scholars in the humanities. He pointed out a quiet, but fast shift towards collaborative digital tools and behaviours, and need for an inclusive environment for an academic and ‘citizen scholar’.  Daniel Powell (King’s College London) and Lynne Siemens (U Victoria, INKE) discussed approaches to collaboration from a historical and organisational perspective. Powell argued that culture and knowledge production have always been collaborative while Siemens shared her experiences with establishing conditions for collaboration and emphasised the importance of establishing a common understanding among collaborators before the  project commences.

Jennifer Roberts Smith (U Waterloo) opened Session 3: Analysis & Experimentation challenging the audience to think about power and ‘book as the monument’ as a context for experimentation. Stan Ruecker ((Illinois Institute of Technology, INKE) described his team’s thinking about the development of several interfaces for the same programming background while Jon Saklofske (U Acadia, INKE) considered modularity and narrativity in the development of New Radial. Claire Timpany (U Waikaito) presented results of her doctoral research into users’ perceptions of visual markers of headings online. Images of strong men and infatuated women illustrated Jack Elliott’s (U Newcastle) talk about analysis of romance as a genre.

Session 4: Multimodal Knowledge Environments & Communities included a stimulating discussion about a range of topics. Jason Ensor (U Western Sydney) presented his and Belinda Barnet’s (Swinburne U of Technology) paper on experiments with post-print, bi-directional linking based on Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu. They used Barnet’s work to showcase Nelson’s approach to establishing textual connections. The next two papers addressed issues of representing Indigenous Australian culture. Michael Walsh (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) discussed challenges of cultural transfer when Aboriginal stories and songs are presented for a Western audience. It was interesting to hear that contemporary Indigenous musicians use Walsh’s old tape recordings as a basis of composition on synthesisers. Hart Cohen and Rachel Morley (U Western Sydney) presented their work on linking archival records and media to relevant passages of Strehlow’s book Journey to Horseshoe Bend. Finally, Brent Nelson (INKE) discussed museum as a knowledge environment and the implications for digital presentations.

The closing keynote address From Storythinking to Storymaking: Reimagining Narrative in the Academy by Sydney Shep (Victoria U of Wellington) invited the audience to consider the line between creative and analytical in the academy. Her reading of tweets from the #INKESydney14 was a masterful display of weaving analytical and performative in an academic discourse.

Conversations continued later in the evening over dinner with frequent references to analogue rain and a digital flow across the globe. Thanks, INKE, for freshly watered ideas.

See Twitter feed https://storify.com/suzanasukovic/inkesydney14.html OR https://storify.com/suzanasukovic/inkesydney14.pdf 

What’s the Point of Theory?

By Michael Olsson

https://www.flickr.com/photos/askpang/3269557195/sizes/o/

It’s fair to say that this is a question I’ve heard more than once in my career, sometimes from a student gazing in dismay at a reading list which includes Castells, Dervin and the occasional dead Frenchmen – but also on occasion, in from the occasional senior member of the profession disgruntled that my students don’t spend their every waking hour learning the Dewey Decimal System. While those asking this question usually intend it to be rhetorical, I thought I’d spend this column answering it.

Let’s start by clearing up one of the more common misconceptions: the world is not divided between airy fairy academic theorists and sensible people with common sense. Whether we’re aware of it or not, the kind of information professional we are is a product of our conceptual framework. The way we view our job, the way we interact with our clients, the decisions we make are the product of our existing beliefs, understandings and preconceptions. This personal worldview for all of us is invariably limited and contradictory so by engaging with different theories we open up the possibility of looking at the world in different ways, we can gain insights that transcend our personal experience. Systems and services are also built on assumptions, many of them so long standing that we’ve stopped noticing them.  Theory provides us with alternative lenses through which to evaluate their effectiveness.

Let’s consider, for example, one of the most common assumptions in information practice. Whether we’re looking at Dublin Core or Dewey, almost all classification schemes are still based on the 19th century documentalist idea that the role of the cataloguer is to ‘capture’ the intrinsic meaning in the text. Theory can gives the tools not only to see the flaws in this assumption but also the ways in which it can lead to systems that discriminate against, even actively exclude many information users.

The work of many theorists in the second half of the 20th century, from Roland Barthes to Brenda Dervin have pointed out that meaning isn’t intrinsic to documents, nor is it determined by authors, rather it is constructed by readers. Nor, as Michel Foucault or Birger Hjorland, would point out, do we make sense of texts in a random or ad hoc way. We are each of us connected, via language, education and experience, to our own particular social context – which is how we all know without thinking about it that we should interpret Miss Moppet in a different way from On the Origin of Species or Goldfinger! Once we take these theories on-board, we can start to conceive of our professional practice in a different way: one focussed on an understanding of the conceptual framework of the individuals and communities we engage with.

So can I suggest that the next time you’re considering a spot of professional development, that the most useful thing you could do, the one that might ultimately have the greatest influence on the kind of information professional you become, might just be to spend some time with the work of a dead Frenchman or two?       

First published in Incite, October 2014

Dr Michael Olsson - Graduate Coordinator, Information & Knowledge Management,University of Technology, Sydney