The public library and pubic sphere: a longitudinal analysis is now available as a full paper (HTML or PDF) from the Journal of Documentation as an EarlyCite publication. This is the final output from Dr Leo Appleton‘s part-time doctoral study, completed in 2020 within the Centre for Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University. Continue reading
Actor Bethany Ray, pictured here with the original Diary of the war, plays her great-great aunt Lorna Lloyd in the podcast series
After several weeks of preparation, on Tuesday 24th May 2022 we launched the Diary of the war podcast series at Great Malvern Priory. This blog post provides a review of the launch. It also provides links to materials related to this event, and to the wider Platform to platform (P2P) project. (Please scroll to the bottom of the post for the full list of resources.)
The content of the podcast series episodes centres on 25 year old Malvern resident Lorna Lloyd‘s chronicle of the first 16 months of World War II, complemented with contemporaneous news coverage related to the events and issues that she discusses in her writing. A further four ‘bonus’ episodes that comprise a selection of Lloyd’s poetry are included in the series. Continue reading
Centre for Social Informatics PhD student Marina Milosheva has recently learnt that both of the submissions that she made earlier in the year for Information Seeking in Context (ISIC) 2022 have been accepted. Marina will participate in the doctoral workshop, and present a full paper co-authored with her PhD supervisors (myself, Professor Pete Robertson, and Dr Peter Cruickshank) as one of the contributions to the conference programme. Continue reading
Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS) 11 opens today in Oslo, Norway. Hosted by the Department of Archivistics, Library and Information Science at Oslo Metropolitan University, the conference runs until Wednesday 1st June. Continue reading
With colleagues Dr Paul Gooding (University of Glasgow) and Amina Shah (National Library of Scotland), Dr David Brazier of the Centre for Social Informatics has been awarded an Applied Research Collaborative PhD Studentship by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH). Continue reading
The public library as public sphere: a longitudinal analysis has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Documentation. I recently co-authored this article with Dr Leo Appleton (Senior University Teacher at the University of Sheffield).
In the article, Leo and I discuss the role of the UK public library as a public sphere, and the ways in which this role relates to the epistemic, community, and political functions of public libraries. The article is a major output from Leo‘s doctoral research, which he completed part-time in the Centre for Social Informatics. The findings presented in the article derive from the analysis of empirical data that Leo collected in 24 focus groups with active public library users over a period of four years. Continue reading
Selected papers from the European Conference on Information Literacy 2021 (ECIL2021) are now available in a set of conference proceedings published by Springer. Amongst these is the conference contribution co-authored by Edinburgh Napier University colleagues Marina Milosheva, Hazel Hall, Pete Robertson, and Peter Cruickshank on career information literacy (CIL), and distinctions between CIL and the concepts of workplace information literacy (WIL) and employment information literacy (EIL). Continue reading
The two-day ASIST 24-hour Global Conference opens today across all time zones. Five members of the Centre for Social Informatics (CSI) will be presenting their research completed within the Centre in four presentations as part of the the Europe/Africa programme tomorrow (27th April 2022). They are: Continue reading
There has been some great progress over the past month on our AHRC Creative Informatics project Platform to Platform (P2P), particularly in respect of gathering content for the main output of the project: the non-fiction narrative podcast series based on the World War II diary of Malvern resident Lorna Lloyd, previously published online as the Blipfoto journal ‘LornaL’.
Actor Bethany Ray with Platform to Platform student team members Andras Peter, David Graham, James Eddowes, Michael Suttie, and Alex Gencs
Rachel Salzano
Centre for Social Informatics PhD student Rachel Salzano is looking forward to travelling to Oslo at the end of May to present a paper accepted for Conceptions of Library and Information Science CoLIS 2022.
Co-authored with her supervision team (myself, Dr Gemma Webster and Dr David Brazier) Rachel’s paper is concerned with the findings from an element of the empirical work that she has undertaken for her doctoral study: an analysis of documents gathered from Scottish local authorities on strategies to support the integration of newcomer populations who have entered the country as a result of forced migration. The specific focus of this piece of research is the perceived role of Scottish public libraries in such efforts. Continue reading
Hazel Hall 