Last week I travelled to Turku to spend some time with colleagues at Åbo Akademi University. This was my first visit to Finland since my appointment last February as Docent in Information Studies within the Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics at the University. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Bruce Ryan
Exploring Information Literacy through the lens of Activity Theory: CSI at ECIL 2017 #ECIL17 #ECIL2017
The 5th European Conference on Information Literacy takes place in St-Malo, France this week between Monday 18th and Thursday 21st September 2017. My colleague Dr Bruce Ryan is travelling to France to join the conference and deliver a presentation on a recent project that he and I completed with our Centre for Social Informatics colleague Peter Cruickshank.
Our paper Exploring information literacy through the lens of Activity Theory will be presented alongside three others in session entitled Information Literacy Research chaired by Dr Jesús Lau on Wednesday 20th September between 11:10 and 11:35 UK time (12:10-12:35 in France). The slides are already available on SlideShare and below.
Defining the UK information worker: the CILIP/ARA Workforce Mapping Project #lib_research17
Yesterday I delivered a presentation about social media research undertaken by staff and students within the Centre for Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University (slides available on SildeShare) at McMaster University.
Today I am returning to campus to contribute to the McMaster Library Research Symposium 2017.
At this event I will be relating the main findings of the CILIP/ARA Workforce Mapping Project completed in 2014/15, and the impact of the work to date. The slides for my presentation are available on SlideShare, and below. Continue reading
Information: interactions and impact (i3) 2017 review #i3rgu

Centre for Social Informatics colleagues Peter Cruickshank, Dr Laura Muir, Professor Hazel Hall & Visiting Professor Brian Detlor gather at #i3RGU
This blog post was updated in March 2018 to include links to the full text of seven manuscripts of articles developed from nine of the papers presented by CSI staff at i3 2017. These articles will be published in the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (JoLIS) later in 2018.
Information: interactions and impact (i3) 2017 took place at Robert Gordon University at the end of last month from Tuesday June 27th until Friday June 30th 2017, with a packed programme for delegates who had travelled to Aberdeen from across the world. As in previous years, staff and research students from the Centre for Social Informatics (who didn’t have too far to travel) enjoyed participating at the event. We delivered a total of nine papers, as summarised in the table below. Continue reading
Looking forward to the European Conference on Information Literacy #ECIL2017
With my co-authors Peter Cruickshank and Bruce Ryan, I am delighted that our paper Exploring information literacy through the lens of Activity Theory has been accepted for the 5th European Conference on Information Literacy in St-Malo, France. The conference runs for four days between 18th and 21st September 2017. Continue reading
Centre for Social Informatics at the Edinburgh Napier University research conference 2017 #NapRes17

Centre for Social Informatics colleagues Frances Ryan, Hazel Hall, Iris Buunk, Brian Detlor, David Jarman (Business School), Bruce Ryan, Peter Cruickshank, Lyndsey Jenkins and Lynn Killick at the Edinburgh Napier Research Conference 2017 (Photo credit Bill Buchanan)
It’s currently conference season in academia and over the past couple of weeks the staff and research students from my research group have participated in a number of events, both in Edinburgh and beyond. Indeed PhD student Alicja Pawluczuk is still on the road this week, flying the flag for the Centre for Social Informatics at the 2017 British HCI Conference, organised by the HCI research groups at the University of Sunderland and Edinburgh Napier University in conjunction with the Interaction Specialist Group of BCS. Continue reading
Looking forward to i3 and iDocQ 2017 #i3rgu #iDocQ2017
Every other year the Information: interactions and impact (i3) conference brings an international community of academic and practitioner researchers together in Aberdeen to explore the quality and effectiveness of the interactions between people and information, and how such interactions can bring about change. In the years in which it takes place, i3 is one of the highlights of the conference season. (For a flavour of the event please see my review from two years ago, and the others to which I link in my 2015 post.) Continue reading
Information Literacy for Democratic Engagement (IL-DEM) project: findings
Peter Cruickshank, Dr Bruce Ryan and I recently completed the Information Literacy for Democratic Engagement (IL-DEM) project. This work set out to investigate levels of digital and information literacy within Scotland’s Community Council system. It was supported by a grant from the CILIP Information Literacy Group.
We explored how community councillors develop the skills required to inform and engage with the citizens that they represent, and how libraries support this work. In doing so have extended further two established research streams within the Centre for Social Informatics: (1) Cruickshank and Ryan’s work on digital engagement in local democracy (such as our DigiCC workshops), and (2) mine with Christine Irving on information literacy and life-long learning. This work also builds upon our group’s track record in library and information science research. Continue reading
Information Literacy for Democratic Engagement: project update #IL-DEM
The Centre for Social Informatics is currently undertaking a project entitled Information Literacy for Democratic Engagement (IL-DEM). Supported by a grant from the CILIP Information Literacy Group, our work investigates levels of digital and information literacy within Scotland’s Community Council system.
Specifically Peter Cruickshank, Dr Bruce Ryan and I are exploring how community councillors develop the skills required to inform and engage with the citizens that they represent, and how libraries support this work. In doing so we’re extending two established research streams within the Centre for Social Informatics: Cruickshank and Ryan’s work on digital engagement in local democracy (such as our DigiCC workshops), and mine with Christine Irving on information literacy and life-long learning. This work also builds upon our group’s track record in library and information science research. Continue reading
Watching the workers: keynote presentation at #siguse16 #asist2016
Today I’m giving the opening keynote presentation in Copenhagen at the SIG USE Information Behavior in Workplaces. This is one of a series of workshops taking place as part of the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST2016). It has been organised by the SIG/USE Symposium Chairs:
- David Allen, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- Katriina Byström, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway
- Nicole A. Cooke, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Luanne Freund , University of British Columbia, Canada
The title of my presentation is ‘Watching the workers: researching information behaviours in, and for, workplaces‘. The slides are available on SlideShare and below.


