Tag: iSchool

A challenge of interdisciplinary research

Last year I presented a paper at the IFLA satellite meeting “Global Collaboration among Information Professionals”. My paper was about iSchool faculty’s interdisciplinary engagement in teaching and research. You can read more about my IFLA trip here. In this paper, I did two-stage study to examine iSchool’s interdisciplinary approach in education and research via the lens of iSchool faculty members’ background and experiences. At the first stage, a content analysis of faculty online profiles was conducted to examine faculty members’ rank, PhD field, teaching and research descriptions. At the second stage, a survey study was conducted to investigate faculty’s interdisciplinary experiences in teaching and research.

After I came back from the trip, the editor of LIBRES invited me to publish my paper in his journal. In the process of preparing the manuscript for publication, I read many articles about interdisciplinarity that were written by researchers and educators in other fields. They all seemed to share one of the findings in my own study – it is difficult to publish interdisciplinary research, and it’s challenging to identify the appropriate publishing venues. Now, it’s not just something I found in my study – it has become a reality for me.

Last year, my colleague Van from the Department of Health Science and worked on an interdisciplinary study that elicits input from health care professionals regarding how librarians can better help the public with their health information needs. In the summer, we finished the study and completed the manuscript. Then, we started the long journey to get it published. So far, we got rejected by every health science journal/conference we submitted it to because they didn’t think it fit their scope/focus. We have exhausted all the possible publishing venues in health sciences and failed, and now we will turn to journals in library and information science and see if we will have better luck.

Apparently, as interdisciplinary research becomes more and more popular, this is something that needs to be addressed. In the upcoming iConference in Berlin, there’s going to be a workshop on interdisciplinarity in information science. Hopefully they will cover this topic about publishing interdisciplinary research.

2013 IFLA

image

Last week I went to Singapore to attend an IFLA satellite meeting, titled “Global Collaboration among Information Professionals”, where I presented my paper about iSchool faculty’s interdisciplinary engagement in teaching and research. It was a great meeting hosted by Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Thirteen papers were presented at the meeting, and I was particularly interested in the ones about a particular LIS school’s effort in collaboration:

1. Shigeo Sugimoto (dean of the LIS school in University of Tsukuba, Japan) gave a talk about CiSAP, which stands for the Consortium of iSchools in Asia-Pacific. CiSAP is like a regional iSchool caucus, except that their schools don’t necessarily meet the iSchool criteria. There is no membership fee, and any LIS school in the Asia-Pacific region can join if they have five or more full time equivalent academic staff members. CiSAP was formed in 2008, and they host an annual meeting every year.

 2. Rae-Anne Montague from Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gave a talk about their schools’s recent efforts to advance international collaborations in teaching, research and service. She also highlighted the lessons learned in establishing and cultivating fruitful international collaborations.

 3. Wooseob Jeong (interim dean at UW Milwaukee) gave a talk about their school’s international collaborations, such as the 1+1, 2+2 degree programs, summer internship programs, study abroad programs, and other active student recruitment efforts. He also talked about the challenges based on their experience with international collaboration.

4. Caroline  Haythornthwaite (dean at British Columbia) gave a talk that outlined the aims and experiences at their school in joining the iSchool caucus.

5. Tom Denison from Monash University gave a talk about how they developed the masters of Information and Knolwedge Management degree at their school, and how it is informing further community engagement, collaboration, and innovation in curriculum development and delivery.

6. Gayner Erye from Aberystwyth University in UK gave a talk about the development of “Pathways to Information Leadership”, which is a professional development program to appeal to information managers in all sectors globally, by combining coverage of traditional library areas of expertise with courses covering subjects such as information governance, information strategy, risk management and information law and ethics. This program is completely online.

Among them, #4, #5 and #6 were most insightful – they gave me much to think about regarding the direction of the LIS field and the kind of education we should provide for future information professionals. As the number of jobs in the traditional library setting is decreasing, we need to seriously broaden our purview of what it means/takes to be an information professional in this day and age. I think we have to go through some sort of transformation to redefine the roles of LIS schools in preparing talents to meet the evolving needs of the society. Much is to be done, and it would be great if we could have more meetings like the IFLA satellite meeting in the future to exchange ideas and have a discussion about this important topic.