DREaMy meanderings – research excellence

This week I have been reading a lot about social policy, for a specific reason but actually it’s tuned me in to stuff on t’Internet beyond what I normally read and that’s a good thing. For a librarian to only read library stuff is not so good. In fact, bearing in mind what Prof Blaise Cronin said to us last week at the LIS_DREaM conference it’s vital to know our place in the wider world.

When East Coast deigned to allow us to arrive at Kings Cross, Simon Barron and I hotfooted it round the corner to The British Library conference centre just in time for Hazel Hall to get started; (was there ever a better way to let people know you’re running late than tweeting that fact with the conference hash tag?) This conference was the beginning of a project whose noble aim is to develop a nationwide network of top quality LIS researchers. Prof Cronin got things off to a good start with a nicely provocative keynote, part of which was some fairly robust criticism of current LIS research and that’s what I’d like to think about here.

One of my fears about my MA research was that I was just taking a snapshot of public libraries’ online activity and that it’d be out of date instantly and therefore pointless. That it was just me prodding around online looking at library websites and and scribbling something down to fulfill my degree requirements. From my experience of being related to PhD researchers, once being married to one and having loads of friends doing one, it seems to me that a healthy feeling of fear is pretty much a constant for researchers. Sometimes it’s a good thing: it keeps you keen, relevant and scrupulous in your reading and current awareness. Sometimes it pushes you over into generalised anxiety, sleeplessness and misery. But underlying all of that you hope against hope that it has some point, that you’re putting yourself through the mill for The Greater Good. Well Prof Cronin has called us all on that one and pointed out how some LIS research is ivory tower, narcissistic twaddle. Stuff that gets published and keeps the researcher in academia but contributes nothing to the canon. That’s what I was worried about and I’m glad it’s been voiced because it leads on to something that Prof Nigel Ford said just the week before at Umbrella: that research and practice need to be a lot closer to one another.

Prof Ford’s lecture was called “Technology, Personalisation and Librarians: Research & Practice”. Nigel’s lectures are always entertaining and I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to relive my MA days so went along to hear him speak. The thrust of his opening was that we can leverage the different information needs and information processing styles to provide personalised information services, this personalisation is the way we do our jobs in future, it’s how we prove out worth. But in order to do this we need far more interplay between LIS researchers and practitioners. So when Prof Cronin called for meaningful and rigorous research I immediately doubted my own efforts.

However, when I’ve reflected I think I’ve managed to convince myself that my snapshot was useful. I had a huge response to my initial questionnaire, so much so that I had to scale back what I could achieve with the data. So, practitioners who I surveyed clearly cared about what I was asking. There were some very strong feelings expressed. One of my initial hopes was that in casting my net to capture UK public libraries’ participation in Web 2.0 I would be creating a list, a resource, that others who wanted inspiration could turn to. I think I achieved that in some measure. I think that because after I published that research on my blog last year, I immediately got asked to write a guest blog post for UKOLN Cultural Heritage Blog, off the back of that I was asked to write an article for Ariadne magazine. I was asked to speak at a Oxford University Press Panel Day on Discoverability for Public Libraries. I wrote an article for CILIP’s MmIT group newsletter and have just had another article published in CILIP’s ISG group journal, Refer. So I’m thinking that people did give a damn about what I wrote, what I found and what I was able to point them towards. I think I’m pretty much done with it now, it’s ancient history really and I can’t sustain follow-on research (see my Chaos postings for why not!), plus I want to move on to whatever’s next now.

So all that meandering has led me to draw a line under my MA research, it’s time to move on. But I look back on it fondly, it got me some great opportunities and I think I’ve decided that it was good, solid research that did fulfill my ambition to be of actual use to practitioners.

The tyranny of tupperware

further to my earlier 2 posts I would like to add that I don’t think I’m particularly different in the demands of my life, I just think I could be a whole lot better at organising myself. I’ve been meaning to rearrange my kitchen cupboards for over a year now, every time I open one door, a cascade of tupperware falls onto the floor; I’m determined there’s an ergonomically-pleasing way to store storage but I’ve never given myself the time to work it out.

And just in case anyone wonders how it’s possible to write a master’s dissertation with a 7 month-old baby, I attach a photo in explanation. And now it’s time to relax for a couple of hours, safe in the knowledge that I have blogged today, although not impressively or meaningfully, but I can tick that box.

Collating and presenting results from Excel, nourishing my mind whilst nourishing my child.

and now I need to learn how to use Google +

Jesus H, I need a holiday.

“No amount of spider diagrams will sort my life out.”

Straight away I have to credit that title, Lauren Smith tweeted it last night, I read it on my way home from Umbrella 2011, the CILIP conference & expo, as my brain was still fizzing, my feet aching, my writer’s and tweeter’s cramp throbbing and information overload level surpassed for the umpteenth time this year.

I never even blogged all my exploits last ruddy Summer, I send myself emails from work to home, from home to work, from work to my Kindle, from my phone to work and occasionally accidentally to my dog. I might be an okay librarian professionally, but personally I’m information addict with a real problem. My approach to information gathering is hit and run, haphazard and with a barely-controlled level of information anxiety much of the time. I’m trying so hard to develop my career and get my first post as a professional (at my age, pah!), I’m trying to help set up a trial for donor breastmilk to be used on the special care baby unit at my local hospital, I’m researching health information for myself and my family, I’m teaching my partner how to use the social web, I’m balancing debts accumulated getting my master’s degree, I’m constantly battling with my hardware (I don’t want to have to know how to fix it and cobble it together all the time, I paid hard-earned cash, I just want it to ruddy work) but most of all I’m doing my best to be a good mother – and of course, researching the hell out of every possible parenting method I like the look of. And loads of other things I just can’t keep in my head all at once.

I was so lucky to win a place at the Special Libraries Association annual conference in 2008, so lucky. But I never really capitalised on my experience; I made some contacts and I learned loads and loads but I wasn’t so wise to how you have to follow up on those leads, write reflectively and make the most of everything straight afterwards, not let the vitality of the experience fade before you act. As soon as I got home I had to finish my dissertation which I couldn’t because I got ill, then I got pregnant, then I got ill when I was pregnant, then of course I had my baby. Which is the single most focussing experience of my life. For a while everything professional fell away as I immersed myself with my beautiful child and how having her made everything worthwhile. Then when she was 5 months old I started writing my dissertation up, submitted when she was 7 months old. I have to say, I can’t really recommend that as the ideal way to write up but I sure as hell started to manage my time ruthlessly, and it worked. Thinking all along that I just wanted to do a “good enough” job, get it finished, submit it then never think about it again, it seemed that I was incapable of doing a bodge job of it and ended up with a distinction from the University of Sheffield. Bloody hell! I surprised myself there, and slightly irritated myself for not being able to leave well alone, not switching off, letting my brain get carried away with itself again. I remembered why I’d chosen this profession, because I love it and I can’t switch off from it, I love to learn all the time and connect with all the great folk I’ve met in person, virtually and now both. I realise that I spend most of my time outside my comfort zone, that’s who I am and I need to accept that, embrace it and move on.

So here’s what I’ve decided to do. This idea fully crytallised this evening when I was watching our customary pre-bath, pre-bed episode of Come Outside (yes, inspiration strikes at the strangest times), Auntie Mabel and Pippin the dog were moving house and packing everything up in boxes, big boxes, little boxes, boxes for everything (you think I’m watching too much children’s television? I’m inclined to agree). She had boxes full of the crap you drag around your life, a box of buttons because you never know when you might need it. You know the kind of thing. I recently read a Lifehacker post that suggested having a box to put in all those little things for which there’s no home but which you can group together until it’s full then you can sort it out. Well that’s my house, that’s my brain, that’s my files and crap on my various devices. Conclusion: that day is never going to dawn. There will never be a time when I can sit down and review, categorise, sort and generally get all my shit together. Not going to happen. Life seems to be permanently set at breakneck speed, so it’s time to stare reality full in the face.

I’m going to draw a line in the sand, that line is going to be Monday 10th July. Anything that I set aside before that date, set aside to do later, read, think about, get to grips with: in the bin. Away with it. No keeping stuff in case it comes in handy one day. What’s the point in keeping gazillions of pdfs of academic papers from my master’s degree? If I ever need to refer to them, I’ve got my bibliographies and oh yeah, I’m a librarian – I will find it if I need it.

I’m drawing the line pre-Umbrella cos it’d be churlish in the extreme to cast that aside. I’ve got shedloads of notes and things to follow up on from that; current, relevant, bang-up-to-date LIS gold. So, in order to maximise the usefulness of all that splendour, I’m going to blog every day until I’ve milked it for all it’s worth. Not for some imagined reader who’s going to trawl through my drivel, for myself. I owe it to myself to let up on my perfectionism and just crack on with this.

I need to create a research strategy for myself, a way to move my other projects forward. I need to write everything down. I need to get that massive piece of paper and draw that spider diagram, extract priorities from it, devise strategies for addressing them and throw the rest in the bin. Leave it alone, move on.

A bold promise, perhaps rash, but I’ve got to give it my best shot.