LIS DREaM Report, Part 1: The Morning

I had a great day last week at the launch conference for the LIS DREaM Project. DREaM stands for ‘Developing Research Excellence and Methods’ within the field of Library and Information Studies, and the conference was subtitled ‘Out of the Comfort Zone’.

I was one of 5 lucky new professionals who won funded places (sponsored by TFPL, Sue Hill Recruitment and Glen Recruitment – thank you!), along with Paula Goodale, Ray Harper, Shreeti Rajyaguru and Charlotte Smith, as well as International Award winner Colm Talbot. The other delegates were a great mix of experienced and newer researchers, academics and practitioners.

My report has turned out quite long, so I’m going to split it into two posts: this one, dealing with events Before Lunch, and the next one, dealing with events During and After Lunch.


Welcome & Introduction from Hazel Hall

The day kicked off with Principle Investigator Hazel’s warm welcome. She gave us an overview of the aims of the DREaM project, which are, briefly...

• to raise the quality of LIS research through improved research training and practice
• build up the communities’ research capability and volume
• to put a foundation in place to start long-term collaborations within LIS research and with other disciplines.[1]

Hazel also told us about the other DREaM events, comprising three workshops and a final conference. This event was really worthwhile, so I’d definitely recommend going to one of the others if you’re interested in research. These events will be part of developing a cadre of ‘professional revolutionaries’, which has already started online:

• Twitter list of DREaM participants
• Lanyrd page for the conference
• Spruz page

Hazel showed us screenshots of the various online communities developing, one of which turned out to be rather surprising. As usual, one of the ways people can connect is good old Twitter – and she’d decorated her slide with #lis_dream1 tweeters’ avatars, including mine![2] There was much giggling as people spotted themselves.

A £500 award for a practitioner (or group of practitioners) excelling in LIS research was also announced: the award will be for making a ‘substantial contribution’ to the field since 2009. If you know someone you’d like to nominate, then further details are available on the 19th July press release.

Opening Keynote: Blaise Cronin, ‘...And into the Zone of Quasi-Rationality’

Professor Cronin’s tour of past LIS research was a particular highlight for me as a non-researcher, because it helped me understand the background of his own review of current research, and how the rest of the conference sessions fitted into the wider body of the field.

In some ways, Professor Cronin’s overview of the current state of LIS Research was rather depressing; he identified some key problems -

• ‘Cookie cutter research’, in some part caused by the demands of US academic libraries’ tenure systems. The audience laughed and grimaced in equal parts in recognition of his fill-in-the-blanks research titles: “Information Needs Of...”, “Authorship Trends In...”.[3]
• Not enough meta-analysis: researchers need to do more to widen and generalise research, both by performing topical meta-analysis and introducing relevant research from other fields (the example he used was the inclusion of French Theory [4]).
• Weak methodology and a lack of ‘hard’ research skills in areas like statistics. (This is a particular personal worry for me: rigorous training in historical research might leave me capable of reading abbreviated medieval Latin [5] but it’s not much help when faced with a big pile of questionable questionnaire data and a copy of SPSS!)

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom: there are reasons to be cheerful, not least because of conscious improvement efforts like the DREaM conference. He pointed in particular to...

• The recent reversal of trends in LIS citations [6] - over the last 10-15 years LIS papers and articles have been increasingly cited outside the LIS field, rather than just within it.
• The introduction of non-LIS academics from allied areas into LIS departments, and their influence on new LIS researchers.
• The growth of networking: social media both as a growth subject in LIS research and as a means of collaboration and dissemination for the community and across subject lines.

The conclusion I took from the keynote was positive as well: we can make the most of connections, both physical and virtual, and work out where best to concentrate our research, in order to benefit the LIS profession as a whole and improve the field.

One Minute Madness

This was the first time I’d seen a One Minute Madness session, and I was astounded by how well everyone kept to time - poor Stella Wisdom, officiating, hardly got to use her car horn to shush the participants at all.

The slides with details of the Madnessers’ projects are available on the LIS DREaM website; I particularly enjoyed hearing about Frank Huysmans’ look at Dutch public libraries, especially after Elaine Fulton had just spoken about Digital Reference Services in Scotland. Watching everyone do so well at explaining their complex research in just one very short minute was very inspiring: who knows, next time there’s a session like this, maybe I’ll have something to say?


Proceed to Part Two: The Afternoon, And Lunch.


1. See slide 8 of Hazel’s Welcome Slides.
2. Slide 18 of Hazel’s Welcome Slides. It made me very glad I’d changed from my previous avatar to a nice professional-looking one - despite hoping they well, it’s always a bit of a shock to me when I realise that people are actually looking at the information I put on the Internet! It’s a shame that this professional look did not follow through onto Slide 24, really – Hazel had managed to catch a screenshot the Twitter list of DREaM participants just when I was banging on about Harry Potter. Again. 
3. See Slide 13 of the Opening Keynote.
4. See Slide 12.
5. Confession: I’m not actually sure I can still do this. I could do it once, promise! *Looks longingly at Pipe Rolls*
6. See Slides 22-24.