Cross cultural willingness and the nature of collections

Many thanks to Alex and Angharad for giving us an insight into their projects. 

One of the joys of working in a department with a lot of foreign students is the glimpses that we get into other societies.  Shahd's views on collection management were a useful reminder of the fact that books that are seen as a waste of space in one library can be of great value elsewhere. 

Of course, even if that is the case, it sometimes takes a lot of effort to match the discards of one library to the spaces of another.  Some time ago, when I was working at a UK Government research institute, a new librarian was appointed.  Within months of his arrival, skips were hired and were soon filled with books and papers.  The librarian responsible still recalls with frustration the outcry that ensued.  Those documents, some of his critics argued, went back decades and were part of the institute’s long tradition.  His response was to point out that he had gone to great pains to offer the documents to other places that might be interested, and nobody was prepared to pick up the cost of moving them.  He was well aware that many of the discarded documents went back decades since they had layers of dust to prove it. 

Interesting Challenge of the Month arose during Alex's talk.  Firstly, how does one define willingness to share?  Secondly, in a study that focuses on willingness to share information, how can a researcher compensate for the fact that, by agreeing to participate in his/her study, volunteers have already demonstrated a willingness to share, thereby (possibly) biasing the sample.  I'm sure Alex will be up to the challenge.

Further discussion revolved around what to do next.  It was agreed that meetings should be set for a regular slot of the second Thursday of every month at 16.30.  Future sessions will focus on the role of blogs in research; JISC's "Researchers of tomorrow" project; approaches to research (based on Father Brown); and journal reading groups.

I hope to see you on Thursday14 April in room 324.

A cross-cultural case study on the degree of knowledge sharing openness and externalisation methods in the financial services industry (by Alex Schauer)

Purpose
The study examines the degree of knowledge sharing willingness of staff in a single organisation across different national cultural backgrounds.

Positioning of research
Several studies have investigated specific factors that affect staff willingness to share knowledge; however it seems that none have embarked on a cross-cultural study encompassing individual, team, organisational and
national influences.  The aim of this thesis is to address this gap and provide a consistent framework that can be applied to future research studies.

Research design
The research design has not been finalised as yet, however a mixed method approach is anticipated.  This involves using both interviews and an online survey questionnaire.

Interviewees would be selected based on differing departmental categories and hierarchies in order to obtain a broad spectrum of data.

The questionnaire would be distributed to all participating national company subsidiaries to either obtain initial results or confirm qualitative findings.

Anticipated outcomes
From an academic point of view, this research will be the first study to develop and test a formative scale of knowledge sharing willingness. In comparison to a reflective latent construct, this study aims at incorporating all validated indicators into this study to form an index score.

From a managerial perspective the study allows practitioners to objectively measure the current situation in regards to staff willingness to share knowledge in a particular country subsidiary.  In addition to obtaining an
overall measure, this tool allows managers to obtain readings on the individual factors that affect the overall score.  With this, managers can concentrate their efforts to enhance these low-scoring factors to boost
overall knowledge sharing willingness.

Conceptualising the library collection for the digital world: a case study of social enterprise (by Angharad Roberts)

Collections have historically been central to a library’s purpose. However, the term ‘collection’ seems surprisingly ill-defined in library literature. Collection-focused sub-disciplines of librarianship only emerged relatively recently: the concept of collection development appeared in the 1960s, followed by collection management in the 1980s. In more recent discussions, it has been suggested that concepts such as content management or knowledge management may provide more appropriate frameworks for considering the changing role of library and information services within organisations. New digital formats present new challenges and opportunities for library collections as demonstrated by electronic journals and e-books, projects to assist with data management or open access publishing for research, and by initiatives such as the Library of Congress’s tweet archive. The digital environment also has the potential to improve access to content from traditional printed materials, through digitisation projects or increased information sharing about library collections through online catalogues and collection data mining. New technologies also provide new ways of working, enabling greater customisation or personalisation of information about resources and facilitating greater user interaction and involvement with collection development and management processes through, for example, patron-driven acquisitions or tagging and commenting.

Social enterprise is an emerging interdisciplinary field, focusing on businesses with a social purpose. Information relevant to social enterprise may potentially be found in the collections of a wide range of different types of library. Social enterprise stakeholders include practitioners and academics and come from a wide range of different backgrounds, professions and organisations, potentially having access to a number of different library collections.

A case study of collections for social enterprise should therefore provide a valuable opportunity to explore broader issues relating to the development, management and use of library collections in general. The research will take a mixed-methods approach, using interviews, questionnaires and collection data to explore these issues.

iSchool researchers meetings - What next?

Many thanks to the nine research staff and students who joined me in the Wilf Saunders room last Friday.  I think most of us enjoyed the discussion (and chocolate marshmallows).

Thanks in particular to Mark, Simon and Liz B for their talks.  From my perspective, the most interesting part of the ensuing discussion took place on the intellectual ground between Simon and Liz's research.  Simon (as can be seen from his contribution to this blog) has been researching recommender systems for a digital library catalogue.  Liz's research is in bibliotherapy, and it occurred to me that there might be a role for recommender systems there.  However, according to Liz, use of ICT amongst the people she is researching is very low, regardless of their age group.  I was left wondering whether this is an artefact of the selection process or whether it was more significant.

We also discussed the future of the group.  There was a suggestion (which received general support) that it be moved to a late afternoon spot so that those who wished could adjourn to a still more informal setting. (The Red Deer wasn't specifically named but I got the impression that it was being considered).   With that in mind, I've booked the Wilf Saunders room for 16.30 on Thursday, 10 March.

The User-Centred Design of a Recommender System for a Universal Digital Library Catalogue (by Simon Wakeling)

For this AHRC-funded PhD project, I am working closely with OCLC (the Online Computer Library Centre), a not-for-profit computer service and research organization focusing on library services. Membership of OCLC is open to libraries of all types around the world. One of OCLC's key services is WorldCat - essentially an aggregated catalogue of the holdings of all their member libraries. This currently holds more than a billion individual records. This catalogue is accessible to the public via a web front end (www.worldcat.org), allowing users to search for titles and locate the nearest available library held copy. Users can also view and add content such as reviews and tags.

The ultimate goal of my research is to produce a prototype recommender system that can be added to the WorldCat web interface. A recommender system is an information filtering system that presents users with suggested information items from within a collection. The most widely known examples are probably Amazon’s “people who like this also like…” and the MovieLens film recommendation service. Key to our approach is the adoption of a user-centred methodology. Much of the growing body of recommender systems research is based around technical developments – particularly the algorithms that power recommendations. Our approach will instead attempt to first identify more precisely how a recommender system can best align itself with the needs and circumstances of users. We hope to integrate current models of Human Recommender Interaction with more general theories of Information Behaviour through a series of qualitative studies and observation experiments to be run later this year. The second year of the project will be more technical, and involve analysis of WorldCat query logs and other feedback generation methods. OCLC have committed to providing a software engineer to assist with the production of a prototype system based on our findings, which can then be fully evaluated through user testing.

PATHS - Personalised Access to cultural Heritage Spaces (by Mark Hall)

The PATHS project aims to provide improved access to digital Cultural Heritage collections. Currently access to the digital offerings provided by archives and museums is primarily built around search-based interfaces. This works well if you are interested in something very specific and know the correct keywords to use when searching. What it does not enable is a more exploratory approach or allow the users to be guided or guide themselves through the digital Cultural Heritage collection. It is this issue that the PATHS project addresses with its aim of providing personalised tour guides through the digital Cultural Heritage collection.

The PATHS system will allow curators, educators, and the general public to create tour guides through the Cultural Heritage collections that other uses can then follow. The research will focus on three aspects:

·         Investigating user interfaces that support both the tour guide creators and consumers;

·         Investigating methods for automatically adapting the consumer's interface to support their cognitive learning styles;

·         Investigating methods for recommending tour guides a consumer might be interested in.

Throughout the project a user-centred approach will be taken to ensure that the results match the potential users' needs and desires. This user-centred approach will include aspects such as interviewing domain experts to gain an understand of the methods used by curation experts when creating a collection, using a range of usability experiments to determine how people interact with digital tour guides, and evaluating the success of the various algorithms and systems that will be developed in the project.

Things I wish I’d known before I started my PhD (by Liz Brewster)

Be utterly systematic

In your file names, keywording, referencing – this means you won’t spend hours later on in your PhD looking for what you need. Also, set up alerts on all your relevant database searches, get the tables of contents of relevant journals emailed to you, and keep up with the field as it continues.

Do things other than your PhD 

Go to conferences, do some teaching, write some journal papers, submit bids to get funding to go to conferences. It’s all part of building your skills and profile, and disseminating your research.

Make contacts

Ask for help – it’s your PhD but you can’t do it in isolation. If you’re working with research participants, you need to talk to the people who might provide access to them – the gatekeepers.

Offer something in return

Reporting on your research to participants is good practice. They might be interested in what you’ve learnt and how it can impact on service provision or innovation

Time management

Everything that you think will take five minutes will take an hour, and everything you think will take an hour will take five minutes. Unless it takes two hours.

Academic journals operate in eons, not weeks

The academic journal peer review process is one of the slowest things in the world. When you’ve finally written a paper, you send it off, and wait… and wait… and wait. A journal have had a paper of mine for three months now, without a word. If there are corrections, it can take even longer to get it through the process. My last paper took nine months to go from finishing the first draft to online publication. And about three months before the end of your PhD, someone will say to you that it’d be a good idea to have a paper out before your viva. Be prepared.

Good supervisors help make the PhD

Mine are excellent. I also like having a team of supervisors – they have different skills and different perspectives, and the PhD is richer for it.

The amount of work you think you can do in three years is totally different to the amount of work you can actually do in three years

When you start, there’s a tendency to be over ambitious. You will almost certainly need to refine your proposal. A lot.

Confusion is normal

You won’t really know what you’re doing for the first year, and that’s OK. You’ll just spend the first year planning and thinking and probably quite confused and that is utterly normal. At the end of your first year, something will click and you’ll know what you’re doing.

So is hatred

At some point, you will be bored by your PhD, or hate it, or both. It’s such a common phenomenon that the counselling service at Sheffield run a workshop entitled ‘On hating your PhD.’ These two phenomenon link with the next…

Keep going

You’ll get through it with perseverance, self-motivation and sheer bloody-mindedness.

No one expects you to change the world

Your PhD is not a paradigm shift – and no one expects it to be. It is a training process, and the most important thing you will learn from it is how to be a researcher

Be realistic

It is not necessary – or possible – to read everything ever written on your subject. You’ll never get anything else done.

Be friendly

Your fellow PhD students will be an important source of support, humour, biscuits, information and may just help to keep you sane throughout the whole process.

Liz Brewster

(with thanks to Liz Chapman, Mark Hall and Juliet Harland for sharing thoughts…)