"So what's Information Science then?": Do people outside the department know what we do, and if not, does it matter? (by Simon Wakeling)

A couple of weeks ago I was booked to juggle at a small event in Sheffield, along with a couple of other jugglers whom I'd not met before. As I chatted to one of them before we started manipulating our balls, the following exchange occurred:

Him: So what do you do?

Me: I'm a student at Sheffield.

Him: Oh right, I'm a student at Sheffield too. What subject do you do?

Me: Well broadly speaking it's Information Science.

Him: Information Science? What's that then?

Me: [Some stuff about Information Science]

Him (looking suspicious / confused): Oh, OK. I'm a third year computer scientist.

Me: Ah well we're in the same building then.

Him: Really??

So here is someone who works in the same building as our department every day, in a related subject, but who has never heard of Information Science as a discipline, and has no idea what its students and researchers do. Is this representative of a wider lack of awareness and understanding of our discipline? I suspect it is.

Why then this ignorance? Is it a problem of terminology (Information Studies vs Information Science vs Informatics vs Library and Information Science vs Information Schools), or the lack of any such department in most UK universities (or for that matter the lack of an Information Science GCSE)? Is it the inter-disciplinary nature of our field, which defies simple summary? Does the often practical or vocational focus of our research and teaching dilute our standing in academia?

And whatever the reasons, should we be worried about it? Knowing broadly what a Mathematics department "is" hardly gives the non-mathematician any meaningful understanding of modern mathematical research. Similarly it seems unlikely that my juggling friend would have any keener appreciation of Chemoinfomatics for me having introduced him to the concept of Information Science. In a sense then general ignorance of the IS field is merely an annoyance, something that requires an extra sentence or two of explanation during small-talk. But is it also possible that this anecdotal evidence points to a more fundamental challenge for our field? It might perhaps imply that we need do a better job of unifying and presenting the disparate strands of our work within a grander (theoretical?) framework. It's either that or ask Bill Bryson to write a book about us...

Creativity and research: Ideas don't follow timetables.

Liz's recent entry on work-life balance touched on the difficulties of fitting creative activities into the regular pattern of a working week.  It was a theme picked up in Angharad's comment.  Her observation that "casual conversations can also often provide key insights into particular research problems" is one of the reasons why the researchers' discussion group was started, and the freewheeling discussions (especially in the pub) can prove quite liberating.  Topics range from the obscure (eg, the offside rule in Subbuteo) to the surreal (in one discussion on the relative merits of search engines, it was suggested that the only way in which Bing is better than Google is that its name sounds better when read backwards).  Often though, chats in the pub, or in the informal brunches organized by Mark Hall, are the source of ideas for future discussion meetings.

Relaxed conversation is, of course, only one factor that leads to the generation of ideas.   A day dream is said to have played a part in August Kekulé's comprehension of the structure of benzene: he claimed to have been inspired by the image of a snake eating its own tail.  

Most famous though, is the story of the original Eureka moment.  King Hieron (or Hiero) II of Syracuse commissioned a crown and provided the gold for it.  When it was delivered, he suspected the goldsmith of retaining some of the gold and replacing it with silver.  He had no idea how to confirm his suspicion, so he asked the resident court genius (Archimedes).  Archimedes also had no idea how to confirm the king's suspicion and took a bath to help de-stress.  As he climbed in, he noticed the water that spilled over the top of his over-full bath.  He realized that the volume of water displaced was equivalent to his own volume.  Appropriately used, a full tub of water could help to measure the volume of the suspect crown.  That, together with a measurement of the crown's weight, was sufficient to determine its density and thus its purity.

Archimedes was so excited by his realization that he leapt out of the bath and ran down the street yelling "Eureka" (or "I've found it").  Perhaps, therefore, if universities intstalled spas and hot tubs in their common rooms, they would have a similar effect and encourage creative streaks amongst the staff.

Work-life balance: is it possible?

At the April meeting of the researchers' group, Ana Rosa (who has blogged on her thesis topic here) led a discussion on the important and perennially problematic issue of work-life balance in academia.  As the meeting took place during the Easter vacation, attendance was somewhat lower than usual, leading me to suspect that many colleagues were busy having a work-life balance elsewhere - although whether they were working or living remains an unanswered question.

The issue had come to the fore when seeking to discover what was considered an 'appropriate' amount of holiday for research students to take.  No guidelines were available from the university or in the research students' handbook; instead, the term 'work-life balance' was used, which some students felt to be a vague and unhelpful term. 

The group felt that 'holidays' and 'work-life balance' were actually quite separate concepts, and that guidelines on the former would be helpful, but that the latter was impossible to legislate for.  Indeed, academic staff in the UK often have a notoriously poor work-life balance, despite having set amounts of annual leave.  Moreover, the issue is complicated by the difficulty of defining what constitutes 'work' in academia.  While some activities are obviously 'work', such as research, teaching and administration, what about checking email, social media, Second Life, or reading a relevant novel?  Am I 'working' while writing this blog?  It could further be argued that the primary role of academics engaged in research is (or should be) to think - an activity which is not measurable, and which cannot be switched on or off at will.  If I sit in the department all day struggling with a thorny research problem, and then the solution comes to me later on in the pub, was I working a) while in the department; b) while in the pub; or c) both?

The group concluded that guidelines on an appropriate amount of holiday would be useful, and that supervisors should talk about this - and about work-life balance more generally - with their research students.  This issue is important to well-being, and the university provides a helpful publication and training days for academics who need to signpost students to appropriate support services.

Quality management in academic libraries in Nigeria (by Halima St Egberongbe)

I am investigating approaches to quality management and quality service delivery in academic libraries in Nigeria.  The Nigerian universities operate an established system of quality assurance which is mainly applied for the purpose of programme accreditation, under the supervision of the National Universities commission (NUC).  The NUC, as an agency of government has an overarching responsibility for ensuring quality assurance in all universities in the country.  This it does through periodic constitution of teams or panels comprising academics in relevant disciplines to visit universities and assess available facilities and resources for programmes seeking accreditation.

One of the parameters for assessment during accreditation is the library and this has to do with facilities and information resources for programmes to be accredited.  The only element of NUC quality assurance for the library is tied around programme accreditation.  That is, the focus is only on information resources for programmes to be accredited. 

The specific aspect of this investigation will be to assess quality management approaches in academic libraries in Nigeria.  The overall aim of the study is to identify how service quality practices in academic libraries affect institutional outcomes in various institutions.  This is with a view to subsequently recommending a quality management model to enhance improvement and sustainability in both managerial and service quality of academic libraries in Nigeria. 

The study is intended as a cross-sectional case study that uses of mixed methods techniques to achieve and address the objectives and research questions of the study.

The project is intended to be in two phases:

     Phase 1 – Involves a Quantitative online pilot comparative survey of a representative sample of academic libraries in Nigeria.  The methodology to be used in Nigeria will first be piloted with a similar population in the United Kingdom.

    Phase 2 – Involves a multi-site case study using semi -structured interviews and documentary evidence. 

Population of study – This will comprise library directors/ university librarians and managers in six university libraries in Nigeria.

The Model

The European Frameworkfor Quality Management (EFQM) Business Excellence Model (BEM) is the model I intend to use.  It is a holistic framework that gives an insight into an organisation and is based on nine criteria:

performance, customers, people and society, leadership, policy, strategy, partnerships, resources, and processes. 

The BEM, being a self assessment model, has been proved to be relatively fast, easy and inexpensive to conduct.  It improves performance, team building, and enhances individual and organisational innovation and learning. It is now the most widely used organisational framework, especially in Europe.  

More on academic writing - Restoration bloggers?

Two recent conversations inspired this entry.  In one, Liz Chapman (who's previously blogged here on the nature of facts and the Warburg Institute) referred to an article which dealt with the problem of assessing the impact of academic literature by considering citations in a range of documents, including blogs.  In the other, I was discussing Paula Goodale's recent blog entry with her and she commented on the value of blogs to research. It's something that's been touched on previously in one of Angharad's contributions to this blog. 

One of the things that was not mentioned in Angharad's entry on blogs was the informality of the language.  The relative freedom afforded by blogs allows ideas and thoughts to be presented without having to frame them according to the strictures associated with academic literature.  However, I often wonder just when, how and why academic literature became subject to so much restraint.  One of the many delights of the Internet is that it provides the opportunity to read documents that, a few years ago, would have been accesible only to hard-core archive addicts.  Amongst these documents are early copies of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

I've reproduced two entries from the first issue.  Apart from showing the breadth of interest of Robert Boyle (best known to GCSE students for his laws relating to pressure of gasses), they are also notable for the nature of their writing.  They read far more like 17th Century blog entries than modern academic articles.

An Account of a Very Odd Monstrous Calf, by Robert Boyle Phil. Trans. 1665 1:10

By the same Noble person was lately communicated to the Royal Society an Account of a very Odd Monstrous Birth, produced at Limmington in Hampshire, where a Butcher, having caused a Cow (which cast her Calf the year before) to be covered, that she might the sooner be fatted, killed her when fat, and opening the Womb, which he found heavy to admiration, saw in it a Calf, which had begun to have hair, whose hinder Leggs had no Joynts, and whose Tongue was, Cerberus-like, triple, to each side of his Mouth one, and one in the midst Between the Fore-leggs and the Hinder-leggs was a great Stone, on which the Calf rid: The Sternum, or that part of the Breast, where the Ribs lye, was also perfect Stone; and the outside of the Stone was of Grenish colour, but some small parts being broken off, it appeared a perfect Free-stone  The Stone, according to the Letter of Mr. David Thomas, who sent this Account to Mr. Boyle, is with Doctore Haughteyn of Salisbury, to whom he also referreth for further Information.

An Observation Imparted to the Noble Mr. Boyle, by Mr David Thomas, Touching Some Particulars Further Considerable in the Monster Mentioned in the First Papers of These Philosophical Transactions, by David Thomas  Phil. Trans. 1665-1666 1, 20-21

Upon the strictest inquiry, I find by one, that saw the Monstrous Calf and stone, within four hours after it was cut out of the Cows belly, that the Breast of the Calf was not stoney (as I wrote) but that the skin of the Breast and between the Legs and of the Neck (which parts lay on the smaller end of the stone) was very much thicker, then on any other part, and that the Feet of the Calf were so parted as to be like the Claws of a Dog.  The stone I have since seen; it is bigger at one end then the other; of no plain Superficies, but full of little cavities.  The stone, when broken, is full of small pebble stones of an Ovall figure: its colour is gray like free-stone, but intermixt with veins of yellow nad black.  A part of it I have begg’d of Dr. Haughten for you, which I have sent to Oxford, whither a more exact account will be conveyed by the same person.

Narrative as an element of communication in cultural heritage organisations (by Paula Goodale)

After attending a few of the Information School’s monthly discussion group sessions, and generally being impressed by the talks given by fellow PhD researchers, I foolishly offered to talk about my own less well-developed PhD ideas. I hoped there might only be a small audience, it being the second Thursday in January (just after the Christmas break).  I was wrong, and there were staff too, including the head of my research group. I hoped that I would present my ideas with clarity and conviction and that questions would be benign – not a chance! I hoped I might get the killer insight or advice that has eluded me - instead I came away with more questions than answers, and confirmation (of what I already knew) that there is much work to do, ruthless focusing needed and that it will definitely NOT be easy. With these caveats in mind, I will now describe my fledgling PhD research project and try to summarise some of the points raised.

My core idea is related to the fact that narrative has long been a key element of communication in cultural heritage organisations, as a means of providing access to and interaction with collections, a device for sense-making and informal learning, and a way of approaching social policy goals such as community and inclusion. However, in digital projects (whether they are social media, web sites or libraries) this element of narrative is most often missing or under-developed, thereby missing a key opportunity to engage users. My goal is to look at why this element of narrative is missing online, and to explore ways of addressing this, firstly through the use of the PATHS system (that constitutes my day job), and other online media as appropriate. My research objectives (probably too broad) and methods are to:

• Find out more about general users’ information behavior, using survey and observational methods.
• Establish the current state of play on the use of narrative, using desk research and interviews with museum personnel.
• Explore which are the most promising opportunities for incorporating narrative into user engagement, using open-ended and creative tasks in different systems (including PATHS and one or more social media sites), both individually and collaboratively.
• Evaluate the outcomes of the task-based activities giving consideration to qualitative measures such as satisfaction with the results, perceived outcomes, quality of the user experience, etc.
• Analyze the content of the narratives produced via task-based activities to understand more about the nature of narratives produced by general end users compared with those produced by experts.

What is very clear from the comments that followed is that ‘narrative’ is a confusing and multi-faceted construct, and that a tight definition of my interpretation is needed. I’d been challenged on this previously by one of my supervisors and another staff member, so this was no surprise. Aligned with this is whether narrative is data or method – my current thinking is that it might well be both, in that I am analysing the content of narratives, I’m interested in it is a phenomenon and I’m also investigating ‘narrative inquiry’ as a research method.

Further discussions with fellow researchers last week at the second LIS DREaM (Developing Research Excellence & Methods) workshop in London (which I’ve blogged about here) provided greater clarity and perhaps a degree of focus. One angle that I am interested in following is the development of narrative use for engagement in cultural heritage over time, particularly the changes in ownership (and content) of narrative from experts to end-users, and onto more collaborative approaches to interpretation. I recognise that this is still a mammoth task, but hope to make it more PhD-sized following plenty of grilling by my supervisors, extensive deep thought (perhaps supported via rich pictures or some other mind-mapping technique), and occasional more serendipitous tangential conversational encounters.

Surveying online survey tools (by Angharad Roberts)

Following on from Andrew's blogpost about online surveys, yesterday's session provided an excellent opportunity to discuss people's experiences of different online survey tools. I presented a document (which can be viewed below or here) describing a range of online tools, evaluated according to four criteria which seemed important to me: compliance, compatibility, clarity and cost.

Compliance relates in part to the important issue of data protection, raised at the end of last month's meeting. EU Data Protection laws say data shouldn't be transferred to countries outside the European Economic Area, unless the country it is transferred to has equivalent laws. US laws are not regarded as providing the same level of protection (9 countries which do are listed here) but it does have some of the biggest data storing servers, including Google and SurveyMonkey. There is something called the US-EU safe harbor framework, which enables US-based companies to show that their data protection procedures meet EU standards. Google complies with this, as do many big online survey companies. Another compliance issue is to do with the accessibility of the survey - for example, does it work with screen reader technology which may be used by people with visual impairments?
Compatibility relates to the options a survey tool provides for how data can be exported - can it be downloaded directly into SPSS, or would it be available as an Excel spreadsheet?
Clarity - for me, this mostly relates to question types and particularly so-called skip logic questions. I have a number of different potential target audiences and although I want to ask most of them the same questions, there are some questions I only want to ask one particular group. Skip logic allows for different pathways through the same survey, depending on answers to particular questions.
Cost - there lots of free versions of survey tools but these often have very limited functionality. I've set these out in the limitations column of my document. For example, SurveyMonkey just allows 10 questions and 100 responses in each free survey. Export options may be limited in some free tools as well. So I may need a paid for survey tool, which means it's helpful to know what the range of potential costs could be, including potential discounts for academic / research use (SurveyGizmo offers a free student account, but badges these surveys with a SurveyGizmo student research logo - which may not be the image I want to project). It also raises the question: are there survey tools in use within the department which it might be useful to know about?

This was followed by a very valuable group discussion about some of these issues. In response to a question from Alex Schauer, I clarified that most of these survey tools allowed for surveys in "all languages" or 40+ languages. I'm not sure whether these terms are used interchangably, with no survey tool appearing to list more than 59 supported languages - these figures seem to be related to the Unicode standards for supported language character sets. Bristol Online Surveys only supports 10 languages in addition to English (at extra cost); the free version of QuestionPro has no multi-language support (a point omitted from the version of the document I presented yesterday, but included in the copy linked to from this post). Barbara described problematic experiences with attempting to export data from survey tools, and suggested experimenting with the export process before choosing a tool to run the actual survey. Liz Chapman described the different approach to data protection displayed in one recent US survey ("we can't promise anything about your data...") and some of the limitations of SurveyMonkey, which may be addressed in one of the more expensive subscription versions. Mark Hall talked about his experiences of using Lime Survey, and the exciting prospect of an in-house survey tool, developed in the iSchool, which would potentially give iSchool researchers complete control of their survey data. Paula also described some of the more powerful features offered by QuestionPro.

You can view, download and print the summary document here or view this on Scribd:

Online Survey Tools - summary sheet