Dr Ally Crockford works as the Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland (NLS). This post is the first its kind in Scotland, and is part of an attempt by the NLS to lay the groundwork to improve open access to the library’s resources.
Last night Ally gave a presentation on her work at an SLA Europe event that was sponsored by Springer and hosted by the NLS. Her focus was the “real facts” about Wikipedia.
Information Science Scotland, the consortium of which my group at Edinburgh Napier University is a member, has partnered with CILIPS to showcase the research carried out by information science researchers in four Scottish Universities. Staff and doctoral students from Edinburgh Napier, Glasgow, Strathclyde, and Robert Gordon will be at a one-day event in Aberdeen on Tuesday 22nd April to discuss a range of research projects and how the findings of this work can help inform practice.
My colleague Dr Eve Forrest and I are currently undertaking a small study into the practices of the members of the online photography community Blipfoto. Last Thursday we met colleagues at Blipfoto’s Edinburgh office to confirm details for two focus group meetings of Blipfoto members (“blippers”). These will take place in Edinburgh next week on Thursday 6th February, with one in the afternoon, and the other in the early evening. (It is anticipated that some members may like to continue the conversation afterwards, so these meetings may well transform afterwards into mini-blipmeets.)
Last Thursday, when word spread across social media platforms that last December’s Online conference and exhibition marked the end of the series, many of us – myself included – were prompted to reflect on what Online meant to us, and share memories of an event whose history stretches all the way back to 1976. Mine are here, and I link to those of others at the end of this post.
As a member of the Information Science Pathway of the ESRC Scottish Graduate School of Social Science Doctoral Training Centre (SGS-DTC) Edinburgh Napier University is currently inviting applications for a funded PhD studentship offered through the DTC’s quota competition.
I’ve recently contributed to a couple of internal workshops at Edinburgh Napier University on using social media to promote research. The purpose these sessions was:
On September 19th I wrote that my colleague Dr Jan Auernhammer and I had just learnt that our article “Organizational culture in knowledge creation, creativity and innovation: towards the Freiraum model” had been accepted for publication by the Journal of Information Science. This work considers established concepts from the domain of knowledge and creativity management, and extends these to deepen understanding of how aspects of organizational culture, including leadership and social conditions, influence organizational performance in terms of (a) improving knowledge creation processes related to creativity, and (b) fostering innovation. It is based on a large empirical study conducted within a large German manufacturing firm.
Today I travelled to Perth to attend the first meeting of Information Science Scotland for this academic year. Information Science Scotland is a consortium of the four Scottish Universities that offer courses and conduct research in Information Science. Representatives from departments of each university meet on a regular basis to plan the group’s activities.
My colleague Dr Eve Forrest and I have just had a paper accepted for Helsinki Photomedia 2014: Photographic powers. The conference takes place 26-28 March 2014 at Aalto University. Our paper will consider some of the ways in which two contrasting online spaces – Blipfoto and Flickr – are both constructed and explored by users, and how the “performance” of photography further extends into different forms of display online. An abstract of our paper is available on the IIDI web site.
An on-going concern of many professions, such as policing, social work, psychology, nursing, and teaching, is the “research-practice gap”, and the corresponding distance between researchers and practitioners within each community. Much of my work with the Library and Information Science (LIS) Research Coalition, and its associated projects Developing Research Excellence and Methods (DREaM) and the Research in Librarianship Impact Evaluation Study (RiLIES), sought to address the gap within LIS between 2009 and 2012.
Hazel Hall 