When I should have been writing my dissertation in 2009 I wrote a few articles for publication, but in the last 12-18 months my writing has pretty much stalled apart from blogging which I continue to do on a regular basis, and occasional articles for regional newsletters (because I’m on committees and sometimes get asked to write something up for the newsletter). Most of my publications have been in newsletter and magazines – I’ve only been through the peer-review process once and it was an event report so not as rigorous as a research article.

Writing is one of my focus areas for my Chartership, and something I’d like to improve, particularly with publishing my research in peer-reviewed journals (or professional journals). There have been some interesting discussions on the value of peer-review recently on Twitter and blogs, and it’s something I am still deciding my view on – I see the value in sharing via a blog (mainly for the currency and immediacy factor), but for research articles the longevity and kudos of a peer-reviewed journal make it far more appealing. I’m keen to support Open Access and would rather publish in an open access publication that I could also link to via my blog, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

In order to try to get back on track with writing, last week I attended the first of a two-part workshop on Writing for Publication. Below are my notes from the day (probably only of use to others who use lists – sorry!):

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I found last year’s resolutions useful in helping keep me on the right track last year, and am pleased to say I kept most of them – here’s a review:

• Complete my MSc dissertation – finished in July
• Attend more conferences – I attended lots of great conferences and events in 2011
• Implement the Getting Things Done system at home and work – I seem to have this sorted for electronic information, though need to work on physical organisation of paperwork and notes
• Participate in Library Day in the Life – I took part in both rounds of Library Day in the Life in 2011
• Continue to blog – I posted 44 times on this blog in 2011, and also blogged for Evidence Base and for projects I’m involved in

As it was a useful exercise for helping me focus last year, so I’ve decided to set myself more resolutions/goals for this year. In common with Erin, these are general aims so cover all areas of my life.

1. To work on CILIP Chartership (reflecting on achievements and updating wiki on at least a monthly basis)
2. To improve physical organisation, particularly in home office – notes and paperwork etc.
3. To achieve a more productive balance between different parts of my life ensuring I make time for professional, personal, and social activities
4. To continue to blog about professional issues and ideas as well as reflection on activities
5. To publish at least one paper (preferably peer-reviewed)

Bring it on!

My MSc Econ dissertation titled ‘Strategic marketing in academic libraries: an examination of current practice‘ is now available on Aberystwyth University’s open access repository.

I know a number of people said they were interested in viewing it so I’ve included the details below. I have also added it to my publications page.

Strategic marketing in academic libraries: an investigation of current practice

Purpose
The purpose of the research is to investigate strategic marketing in academic libraries, incorporating elements of organisational orientation, strategic planning, and processes and procedures to support these.

Aims and objectives
The aim of the research is to build on existing literature, extending the knowledge of current practice in a relatively unexplored area within UK academic libraries. The objectives of the research are to identify key considerations for strategic marketing in academic libraries; to critically evaluate current theory on the subject; to explore current practice; and to formulate recommendations of best practice.

Methods
A mixed methods approach was chosen, using survey and case study strategies. An online questionnaire was used identify trends in current practice, whilst telephone interviews enabled more detailed exploration. A geographical sample, university libraries in the West Midlands, was chosen due to convenience. All nine libraries were invited to participate; one chose to opt out whilst one did not respond. This resulted in seven libraries participating in the questionnaire, with five of those also participating in an interview.

Results
The key considerations for strategic marketing in academic libraries emerging from the literature included market orientation, marketing planning and customer relationship management. Results showed that though market orientation is seen as a useful approach for libraries, the topic is relatively unfamiliar to librarians. Responsibility for marketing
planning varied across the libraries interviewed, though all but one utilise groups to bring experience from different areas of the library. All participating libraries have some form of marketing plan and engage in customer relationship management activities, however formal procedures and embedding into service planning was not evident.

Conclusions
Strategic marketing in academic libraries is of clear relevance to today’s economic situation, and the research highlights the need for raising awareness of such issues and considering implications and barriers to practice.

The item record is available in Aberystwyth University’s Cadair repository with the full text PDF linked from the item record.

EDITED TO ADD: This is likely to be my final blog post before Christmas this year, so I’d like to take the opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas! If you feel like doing something fun over the festive period, why not enter the Festive 24 Things 2011 quiz?

I’ve recently written a couple of guest blog posts for Kiyomi Deards, who I keep in touch with via Twitter but whom I haven’t actually met in person yet (I think she kept avoiding me at ALA Annual in June, I’m hoping to track her down at ALA Midwinter in January!).

Kiyomi asked me to write a guest blog post and complete an interview as part of her leaders of tomorrow series on her blog. I decided to write from an international perspective about my experience at ALA Annual, and share my top tips. Hopefully they will be relevant to anyone attending a large conference for the first time, whether it’s ALA, SLA or any other library/tech conference. The blog posts are now both available on Kiyomi’s blog:

• Leaders of tomorrow: Jo Alcock
• 10 Top Tips for attending an ALA Conference by Jo Alcock

Apologies in advance for the shameless self-promotional nature of this post. I like to use this blog as a personal record (I’m also hoping this will come in handy when I do my Chartership), so I’m just sharing a few things I’ve been up to lately elsewhere in the blogosphere. I spent some time last week writing blog posts for various places, and some of these have now been published and may be of interest. I also want to share a new project which I’m really excited about. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick post – my event report from LILAC 2010 has now been published in the latest issue of Journal of Information Literacy – go directly to the article or view the journal issue. As always, there are some really interesting articles in the issue; I particularly enjoyed reading Jane Secker‘s article about information literacy education in US libraries (I had many interesting conversations about this at LILAC so was good to read about it from someone who has visited – I’d love to do that some time!).

Also, a brief mention about the publication process – as it is peer-reviewed and all handled online this was a new experience for me (previously I’ve mainly dealt with the process through e-mail communication with the editor). It seems to work well – there were a few issues with the system in that it doesn’t alert the reviewer/editor when updates have been made, but it wasn’t too arduous to send a quick email to let them know. I really liked the ability to track the progress of the article, and online storage certainly helped in terms of version control to ensure the most up-to-date copy is being used. I know this approach is used by a number of peer-reviewed journals now and I can certainly see why – I can also see the opportunity to use this sort of system for any document control which needs to go through a similar reviewing and updating process (project documentation, theses and dissertations, and dreaded reading lists!).

Anyway, enough about that – read the article if you’re interested in what LILAC 2010 was all about, and you may also wish to read my blog posts from LILAC. Hopefully it won’t be the last LILAC conference I attend; I really did get a lot of value from it and would recommend it to all researchers and practitioners interested in information literacy.

The day after the Librarians as Teachers event was a similarly themed event focusing on a different element of the librarian role – Librarian as Researcher.

I wasn’t able to attend this event, but I followed it via Twitter thanks to @LISResearch and @lenocsor. You can see the tweets in relation to the event at the TwapperKeeper archive. Obviously, I didn’t get the benefit of attending the day’s events but I did get a flavour for the discussions and could follow up links mentioned and view presentations online.

I’m a keen advocate of research, making evidence-based decisions wherever possible. I’m involved in my own research as a librarian (for work-based projects and to inform elements of my job role), and I also spend my free time researching areas of interest -sometimes for articles, presentations or blog posts; sometimes just to increase my understanding.

One of the things I was really impressed by at LILAC 2010 was the emphasis on research-informed information literacy teaching, using both existing research and conducting original research to help make decisions about the approach to teaching.

Commitment to research by librarians is something I’d love to see more of, but I think all too often it’s overlooked as other activities take priority. Read the rest of this entry »

So, as I may have mentioned (I think it’s taking over my life at the moment!), I’m currently writing my dissertation for my MSc Information and Library Studies course. I’ll be doing my research over summer, but in the meantime I’m actually writing it in the correct order rather than leaving the literature review until the end, which I may have been guilty of when writing my undergraduate dissertation (on gender stereotyping in sport, bit of a change of subject!). I’ve noticed during this process though, that it’s incredibly easy to get out of the habit of writing in a more academic style.

I initially set up this blog to record my studying progress, although it developed into something more reflective and practical. Most of my blog posts either report on events I’ve attended, discussions I’ve had, books/articles I’ve read, my experiences… etc. There is usually some reason to my blog posts (although I appreciate at times it may not seem like there is!), and I usually refer to these reasons throughout the post. Most of my posts refer to background information, although these are primarily other websites or blogs to allow ease of follow up for anyone reading the post. I do think that most of my thoughts emerge through consideration of research and evidence, and although in a practical sense my blog posts might not be as detailed as my assignments and I don’t always seek out the opposite point of view, I do generally try to consider other points of view to help develop my own.

As an academic librarian, I spend quite a lot of my time working on an enquiry desk (almost half of my working week!) helping others find research. I’ve learnt to use different databases and use different techniques when searching specific research databases or search engines. I’ve become pretty good at tracking down research, and knowing the best places to start researching different topics (although there’s always more to learn!). So once I’d finalised my dissertation topic (strategic marketing in academic libraries), I was able to go off and find loads of really useful research relating to lots of different aspects of my topic.

Now that’s it’s actually time to write all this research and knowledge I’ve learnt from it up as a literature review, I have to confess I’m struggling a little. It’s not that I find it particularly difficult (although there are times I struggle to get my head around some of the more complicated research analysis despite having a Statistics A Level!), but moreso that the style of writing just doesn’t come naturally to me anymore. I think my time blogging, writing reports at work, and short articles for journals had changed my writing style to be more practical in nature and less formal (I guess more like conversational English). I’m now having to pad out my writing with extra points which I probably wouldn’t usually if they don’t add a lot to the purpose of the article/report/blog post.

I know which I’d rather write, and I know which I’d rather read (give me practical, experienced based advice any day over purely theoretical information), but for academic purposes I have to adapt my writing to prove that yes, I do always research my sources and try to discover alternative points of view, and yes I can critically evaluate research.

I can see the importance of demonstrating these skills, but I’m really beginning to appreciate why I find it easier to blog than to write assignments – of course there is also the fact that I can blog about whatever I choose to, but mainly the issue for me is adapting my writing style to use language I wouldn’t ordinarily use and include more of the theoretical rather than a focus on practical and experience-based information. Don’t get me wrong, I do actually love researching and am really looking forward to starting my data collection for my dissertation, but I’d be a whole lot more enthusiastic if I could write it in a more informal, reflective way.

What do you think? Do you think we may see a shift in the future to more assessed work being written in a similar way to blogs, or is it important to ensure academic writing standards remain the same? Do you struggle to adapt your writing style or is it just me? Am I just lazy and need to kick myself into shape?! I do recognise the irony of procrastinating by writing a blog post about how I’m struggling to write my literature review – almost 800 words added to my blog, zero to my literature review! I’d appreciate other people’s thoughts on my ponderings though.

I’ve recently co-authored an article with Christine Rooney-Browne for Refer, the journal of the Information Services group of CILIP, which has now been published in the Autumn 2009 issue. Refer offer some of the material from their journal online at REFERplus, and our article is available in pdf format, please feel free to read and let myself or Christine know what you think.

The article, “Blogging: an opportunity to communicate, participate and collaborate on a global scale”, is written primarily for reference librarians, although the majority of the material is general in nature. It was an interesting article to write; much of the material we already knew through our research interests and the fact that we both already blog ourselves, but it was interesting to research further into blogging and particularly some of the blogs written by, or for, reference librarians. We found blogs used internally for teams of reference librarians to assist each other in their work on the reference desk, reference blogs written about library services for the general public, and I also mentioned a personal favourite of mine, Swiss Army Librarian, which features a “Reference Question of the Week” – I always enjoy reading the enquiries he has had and how he answered them.

The process of co-writing the article was a new thing for me – we used e-mail and a wiki to communicate, and bought it all together towards the end in a Word document. I’ve also been trying out Google Wave recently though (feel free to get in touch if you’d like to add me as a contact), and I imagine something like Wave would make it even easier in the future to collaborate in such ways. It was good to bring our different knowledge and interests together in the article and I’m really quite pleased with the result. Many thanks to Christine, whom it was a pleasure to work with.

The latest issue of CILIP West Midlands journal, Open Access, is a special edition on Web 2.0. It contains articles from librarians throughout the region,and I was pleased to be asked to contribute. The editor, David Viner, asked if I could write about professional networking using Web 2.0 tools and I was happy to oblige – a similar article from the viewpoint of Amelia Luzzi, an information professional currently working outside a library is also presented which gives an interesting comparison. There are also practical guides for using Web 2.0, overviews of Web 2.0 projects within the region, and a look at the Semantic Web and Web 3.0.

CILIP members living in the West Midlands will receive a print copy of Open Access soon with their CILIP Update, but it is also available online for anyone to read from today. You can visit the website (previous editions of Open Access are also available from the Issuu account), or view the embedded version on here (trying out a new plugin!). Comments on the issue are welcome, although you do need an Issuu account first.

Hope you enjoy the special edition, I found the other articles really interesting and it’s great to highlight work going on in the region.