Digitalist life in the library

BLA Conference 2010

From the 7th - 9th July I attended the annual Business Librarians Association (formerly the British Business Schools Librarians Group) conference. A week on I have finally had a chance to reflect on the three day event.

Both Kirsty Taylor and Andy Priestner have already blogged in detail about the conference and I would encourage you to read their posts and also to check out the tweets from the event.

The overall theme, and title for the event was The Research Agenda and under that there were three main areas covered:

• open access
• practitioner research
• the library's role in supporting researchers

Rather than take you through and outline each presentation in detail I'm going to carve things up using these themes.

Open access
Phil Sykes, Librarian at the Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool, was the first to tackle the topic of open access. He stated that in order to increase the impact of research output, publishing papers in open access repositories was essential - and this was an area where libraries had a key role to play. In the Q&A session after Phil's presentation Keith Walker opened up a discussion on the morality of open access by stating that as academics are essentially publicly funded they have a moral obligation to publish the results of their research in open access repositories. There was overwhelming support for this amongst the audience, and presenters - however, in her presentation, Mary Betts-Gray identified three barriers that prevented academics feeling the same way; lack of awareness, copyright concerns and a perceived threat to their ability to publish their research in the future.

Practitioner research
In the first keynote of the conference, Hazel Hall, IWR Information Professional of the Year, spoke about practitioner research. Her presentation is available on Slideshare. She hit us with a shocking statistic - in 2 years of issues of the top 2 LIS peer reviewed journals not one article was written by an LIS practitioner! As far as I can see there are three possible reasons for this:

1. We're not doing the research
2. We're not writing our findings up for publication
3. We're publishing in other places

I'm prepared to bet that number one is not the problem and this view is supported by the One Minute Madness session which ran at this year's Library and Information Science Research Coalition conference. The idea behind the session was to get LIS practitioners talking about their research for one minute each. Luckily for us the session was filmed:

One Minute Madness: LISRC10 from LIS Research Coalition on Vimeo.

In the most perfect display of conference programme planning Lydia Matheson's members' sharing session followed on perfectly from Hazel's keynote. The session entitled 'Research into practice: how evaluation and feedback have informed library service development at Aston University' was a showcase for the research projects Lydia has been working on with the support of the Centre for Learning Innovation and Professional Practice at Aston. The projects included the development of an information literacy module to be embedded into the VLE and the implementation of a consistent approach to reading list management.

Supporting researchers
When discussing this topic it is impossible not to refer to the Researcher Development Framework which is due to be published by Vitae later this month. This is intended to be used as a tool for "planning, promoting and supporting the personal, professional and career development of researchers in higher education".

Moira Bent of the University of Newcastle delivered a keynote on the library's role in the research lifecycle. Her presentation focused on five 'I's:

• Information
• Integration
• Innovation
• Impact
• Information Literacy

Her emphasis, and what she views as the key to our success, is information literacy. This is something that was picked up by Stephane Goldstein of the Research Information Network in his keynote referring back to the RIN's Mind the Skills Gap report on training for researchers.

Finally, we had the view of support for researchers from a members' perspective in the form of Carolyn Smith's presentation on PhD support at Cass Business School. Her focus was on how to engage a community that appears hidden and distanced from the library. She presented a few ideas they are using at Cass including focus groups and a research seminar series, but encouraged the group to share their experiences.

One thing I've taken away from the conference (there are some more to follow in a later post too) is a long reading list and so to finish off, here are couple of links to further reading for you too:

• Mingers, J., Watson, K., Scaparra, M. (2009) Estimating Business and Management Journal Quality from the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise in the UK. Kent Business School Working Paper no.205
• Swan, A. (2010) The Open Access citation advantage. School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
• White, S. and Stone, G. (2010) Maximising use of library resources at the University of Huddersfield. Serials, 23 (2)