Seven weeks of dissemination
When Leo Appleton presents the slides for our joint-authored paper on the value and impact of public library services on citizenship development at the 11th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services today, this will mark the end of a busy conference season for the staff and research students in the Centre for Social Informatics. Continue reading
Finland experienced a fresh covering of snow last week
I have examined quite a few PhDs over the course of my career, both in English and in French, but until last week I had not had the opportunity to participate in a doctoral defence at a Nordic university. Last week I travelled to Åbo Akademi University in the Finnish city of Turku to serve as the opponent at the PhD defence of a thesis (in English) entitled Social media and public libraries: exploring information activities of library professionals and users.
Viva in progress
My last work duty of 2012 has been to travel to the iSchool at the University of Sheffield to examine a PhD entitled The use of Actor-Network Theory and a Practice-Based Approach to understand online community participation. The viva went well and I’m pleased that the student will be awarded his PhD subject to minor corrections to the thesis. I was particularly interested in this work because it has parallels with my own doctoral study. In my work I analysed actor-networks that had developed around a knowledge management implementation within a large, distributed organisation to reveal the role of a corporate intranet in knowledge and information sharing.
Hazel Hall 