Rachel Salzano at the Usher Hall just before the start of the graduation ceremony
Congratulations to Dr Rachel Salzano, who was awarded her PhD at the Edinburgh Napier graduation ceremony at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh last Friday 7th July.
I supervised Rachel’s doctoral work alongside Dr Gemma Webster and Dr David Brazier. Given that Rachel was only five and a half months into her doctoral study when the UK went into the first of the COVID19 lockdowns* in March 2020, we consider it a real achievement that she managed to complete her empirical work, write it up, and submit her thesis in October 2022, exactly three years after joining our research group.
Rachel’s doctoral study is entitled The influence of culture on perceived use of public libraries by forced migrants in Scotland and England. Her research findings extend knowledge of the information practices of forced migrants in public libraries, with a focus on the perceptions of those who support this community. The findings were generated from the analysis of empirical data collected in three ways: (1) an audit of formal Scottish local authority documentation on the welcoming and integration of forced migrants in their new receiving country; (2) interviews with service providers who act as gatekeepers for members of forced migrant communities in the UK; and (3) community validation interviews with forced migrants.
The main contributions of this research are: the development of understanding of the relationship between cultural factors and use of public library resources by forced migrants; the identification of the need to consider the culture of service providers (as distinct from service consumers) in explorations of culture; and a demonstration of the role of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs in respect of the information practices of specific communities. Rachel’s work also extends earlier doctoral research completed by Social Informatics researchers at Edinburgh Napier University on the epistemic role of public libraries, as reported in Appleton, Hall, Duff & Raeside (2018), Appleton (2020), and Appleton & Hall (2022).
The photos in the slideshow below give a flavour of the celebrations of Rachel’s success on graduation day.
The full text of Rachel’s thesis will be added to the Edinburgh Napier repository in due course. In the meantime, those interested in Rachel’s doctoral work can consult the following interim outputs from her study:
Salzano, R., Hall, H. Webster, G. & Brazier, D. (2022). Is the public library included? An analysis of local government documentation on the integration of forced migrants in Scotland. Information Research 27 (October 2022 special issue). [Full text freely available from the publisher; full text available from the Edinburgh Napier repository.]
Salzano, R., Brazier, D., Hall, H., & Webster, G. (2022). What are public libraries for? Culture as a determinant of conceptualizations of public library services for forced migrants. In Proceedings of the 85th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 58(1). (Awarded 2nd place ‘Best long paper’). [Full text freely available from publisher; abstract available from the Edinburgh Napier repository.]
Salzano, R., Hall, H. & Webster, G. (2020). Investigating the ‘Why?’ rather than the ‘How?’: current research priorities on the influence of culture on new-comer populations’ use of public libraries. Information Research, 25(4). [Full text manuscript available from the Edinburgh Napier repository; full text freely available from the publisher’s web site.]
Salzano, R., Hall, H. & Webster, G. (2020). Corralling culture as a concept in library and information Science research. Poster presented at 83rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Pittsburgh, USA (virtual conference), 23-28 October 2020. [Full text available from the publisher; full text available from the Edinburgh Napier repository.]
Salzano, R., Hall, H. & Webster, G. (2020). The relationship between culture and public library use: non-Western students in Scotland. Poster presented at Information Seeking in Context (ISIC) 2020, Pretoria, South Africa (virtual conference), 28 September – 1st October 2020. [Abstract available from the Edinburgh Napier repository; slides available on SlideShare; full text of published version of poster freely available from the conference proceedings.]
Rachel is now developing her profile as a new lecturer and early career researcher in the Applied Informatics Group within the School of Computing, Engineering, and the Built Environment (SCEBE) at Edinburgh Napier University.
*In the period that the University was closed, our formal supervision meetings took place on Microsoft Teams. In addition, when possible Rachel and I also met in person for socially distanced walks. I love the way that Rachel refers to these outings in her thesis acknowledgements: the act of literally walking her through the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Matching tops and hairstyles for exploring Edinburgh on foot in June 2020
Hazel Hall 