My focus group toolkit

One of the things I’ve learnt to do in my job as a researcher is to facilitate focus groups. I’ve attended a number of focus groups with colleagues now, so last week it was time to be responsible for facilitating one myself. Encouraged by my chartership mentor, I decided to reflect on this on my blog as I know many librarians are involved in focus groups and it tends to be a key area people are interested in advice on. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently completed a survey for an MSc dissertation project about academic librarians and their involvement in reasearch.

Details of the survey (taken from the website):

Whilst academic librarians have as a core responsibility facilitating the research of others, not as many conduct their own. The purpose of this study is to understand more fully the motivations and barriers for UK academic librarians to conduct research and to publish. This study will take place during the autumn and winter of 2008. This study will form the core of a dissertation in support of an MSc Information and Library Management at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

The researcher has asked for the link to be passed on to other academic librarians and would like your views on research even if you are not actively involved. If you are an academic librarian in the UK, please help by completing the questionnaire.

It’s an interesting topic to me as an academic librarian with a research based background (my undergraduate degree included a lot of sports based research). As I become involved in more projects at work, I am really enjoying the research side of things (i.e. researching user needs, evaluating our services). I’m reading about other’s research to help me think about the way I work and how that can be improved, or what we can do within the department to improve our service. I’m also doing my own research and this is something I hope to develop further in the future and share with others in the profession via conferences and papers (and blogging no doubt!).

I need to be starting my own MSc dissertation soon, I’m still not 100% sure what it will be on but I’m gradually narrowing it down and hope to submit a proposal in the next few weeks.