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Many thanks to Hazel and crew for a thoroughly enjoyable couple of days at the DREaM conference and the RiLIES workshop (so yes strictly speaking the title for this post should be DREaMing the RiLIES but that didnt have quite the same ring.
Yesterdays DREaM conference was a great conclusion to the DREaM series of events. Hazel began by providing an overview of the project. I was suprised and flattered that she included my artwork in her presentation, as I always knew I had hidden talents. Hazel was followed by an interesting presentation about measuring value and impact by Professor Carol Tenopir from the University of Tennessee, she covered a lot of ground - on a subject pretty close to my heart and it was good to hear about lots of different ways and projects tackling the difficult subject of measuring impact. She mentioned a website which I must remember to check, as its got lots of tools to help measuring impact. She talked quite a lot about the use of the critical incident technique and how some types of people (myself included) like the "softer" kind of impact data that this techniques produces. She also talked about return on investment (ROI) and other statsy type things - but I'll need another DREaM workshop with statistics on before I'm convinced about giving this one a go.
Carol was followed by the "Minute Madness" slot. I was on first - but managed a near perfect minute (just shows what preparation over a Belgian beer can do) on how Evidence Summaries in the EBLIP journal can impact on library and information practice. All the other minuters gave me lots of ideas, watch out I may be following some of them up!
Lunch was followed by Louise Cooke presenting her results of the social network analysis and it was great to hear that the network had developed, according to a spirograph type diagram, to the extent that it was no longer reliant on just a couple of people - good news for the future of LIS research networking. The dots and lines also showed, that academic librarians are really good networkers - I dont know why - but I did find it interesting.
The panel discussion gave four participants an opportunity to consider "what next" as well as for members of the audience to participate and ask questions or add comments. For some reason, much of the discussion seemed to focus on public libraries and how we can engage them in research. Important - but I think we all need to be engaging in research not just public libraries. One of the key things to come out from DREaM participants was the importance of face to face networking. I'm not sure how we'll resolved this one in difficult financial times. The "what next" question was revisited in the RiLIES workshop today - more below.
The Researcher Practitioner Excellence Award followed the panel discussion. Moment of glory and excitement for four of the team of Clinical Librarians from the North West who have conducted a systematic review and evaluation, two linked projects which have been going on for the last four years. I was really proud of the team (and suprised to be going up on the stage myself) who I have worked with and mentored. The whole project has been hard work but really enjoyable (I think for everybody) and has been a true team effort. I didnt get chance to say it on stage but it wouldnt have come to fruition if they hadnt got involved and done the work. The project is a good example of what a group can achieve, with group motivation, if time is put aside (both inside and outside work hours), some academic input and on pretty modest funding.
The grande finale was Ben Goldacre, Charles Oppenheim said he needed no introduction, but as someone who doesnt read the Guardian I'd had to look him up before the event! He did, however, give an excellent talk about drug companies and trials information and how the majority of it is withheld and not published in the academic literature (the second time I'd heard that fact in a week!). His observations on publication bias, were astute and although he presented them in an entertaining way - it was very thought provoking that people can die because information about drug trials isnt published because of negative findings. His ideas about publishing data tables instead of essays on randomised controlled trials were also pretty sensible - but not if you teach critical appraisal skills and are looking for articles to review! One of the problems with information from trials, is that the important, unpublished stuff is all over the place (something else I'd heard at the EAHIL conference the week before), trials registers havent really solved the problem and his solution is a website - Alltrials which harvests information about every trial and puts it in one place. His problem is that it needs some (librarian) input to pull it all together. If you want to volunteer - and I'm sure there will be no shortage after that plea - email him - was his suggestion.
As with all the DREaM events there was a great buzz about the whole day, I just hope that a way (or ways) can be found to keep this enthusiasm and interest going to support future LIS research. ... which brings me nicely on to todays event - the RiLIEs workshop.
RiLIES was another project run by the LIS Research Coalition - which we found out today hadnt received as much attention as DREaM - but this may be about to change! Today's event was held in collaboration with LIRG - the Library and Information Research Group, sub group of CILIP (a potential candidate for carrying on some of the DREaM work).
Hazel talked about the initial RiLIES project which conducted a survey of librarians, asking for research projects which had had an influence on their practice and then 5 of these projects were followed up to see what lessons could be learned. Another moment of glory - as my clinical librarians project was one of the followed up projects! Feedback was then received from focus groups in different sectors before final recommendations were made.
You can read more about the recommendations in the project report and on the RiLIEs site, but the ones which I found particularly interesting was that research is better disseminated face to face than in an academic journal article. For written pieces about research, to get to practitioners then it needs to be in a practitioner journal. This poses a tricky situation for researchers - who are usually employed by academic institutions whose research "quality" is measured by the volume and quality of academic papers it produces (amongst other things). Contrary to (some peoples beliefs) researchers are usually time pressed too, and are often juggling multiple research projects or teaching commitments and sometimes find it hard to write multiple outputs from a project. Still I think its a tricky situation that we (as researchers) need to overcome. Answers - on a postcard (or tweet BrettleAli) please!
Another way of overcoming this problem of research being published in academic journals and not being read by practitioners, is Evidence Summaries (see my minute madness presentation above). For those who didnt see my madness (I'm sure it will be on the video), Evidence Summaries are structured abstracts and critical appraisals of research articles that are of interest to library practitioners. They are published quarterly in the Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Journal (open access!), unfortunately one of the other findings of the RiLIES project was that although the EBLIP journal was a source used by quite a number of librarians, quite a few more meant to look at it - but havent yet got round to it! Another problem for me to work on then...
No workshop would be complete without interaction and discussion - and this was no exception. The question given - was "what next" - how do we carry on the work of the LIS Research Coalition and RiLIES? Lots of resources exist - where should they be brought together and located? We were given some suggestions - a health related example which I hadnt come across was the ALISS.org project which works on open source software and has user generated content for consumer health information. Our group concluded that this looked a bit teccie and a wiki (along the lines of the HEALER toolkit) where volunteers (lots of them) are responsible for keeping particular bits up to date. This was a conclusion drawn by the other groups too - and leads us on to the next thorny issue - where? Who should host it and who should be responsible for it? Suggestions included LIRG, CILIP, British Library and BAILER.
Hazel and co were off to a meeting of the LIS Research Coalition - I'll look forward to hearing their thoughts on the future - and if the experience is going to be as rewarding as these that I've been describing I'll be happy to participate.
Phew... that turned into an essay...back in Yorkshire now I can finish!
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The results are in from the survey carried out by the RiLIES2 project in April, the purpose of which was to find out which of the existing resources that support librarians and information scientists when they consume and/or conduct research are (a) well used and/or (b) respected. We also asked respondents where they would go to access advice online on how to set up a new research project of their own.
See the blog posting - RiLIES2 project poll: findings
The post is an update on the progress with the RiLIES2 project which
highlights the pressing need for a centrally-funded community-maintained directory of LIS research resources, held in a known location, with (crucially) a long-term commitment to maintenance.
We would like to thank individual practitioners for publicising and taking part in the poll.
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