Earlier in March, I was invited to give a presentation at the “Research Day” event organized by Loyola Marymount University Library and Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC). The purpose of this event was to promote practitioner research and cultivate a research culture among academic librarians. The morning session focused on research methods – I gave a talk about qualitative research methods, and two other speakers talked about quantitative methods and data analysis techniques. The afternoon session showcased librarian research via both posters and 20-minute presentations. The topics ranged from reference service assessment, information literacy evaluation, user behavior on library Website, to medical/health information service. Representatives from publishers were also present and delivered a panel on the journal publishing process.

It was a very fruitful day for me, and I got to have many engaging conversations with librarians about their research work. I was particularly excited to see their interests in qualitative research. For example, one librarian was planning a study to analyze comments posted to The Chronicle of the Higher Education, and she was interested in using a qualitative research paradigm to guide her analysis. I’m not a qualitative researcher by training, but over the years of teaching “Research Methods in LIS”, I have grown to appreciate the power of qualitative methods in capturing nuanced attitudes and behavior. I’m glad that the “Research Day” event offered me the opportunity to talk about qualitative research methods to a large audience of librarians.

A full day immersed in enthusiastic exchanges of research ideas left me wonder if there’s anything I can do to support librarians’ research efforts. Blog seems to be a good platform to continuously share with librarians and other LIS practitioners information they might find useful in consuming and conducting research. I named the blog “Formalized Curiosity” after this quote “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose”, by one of my favorite authors, Zora Neale Hurston.  I hope this blog will contribute to the enhancement of practitioner research in LIS, as we all know, research-based practice is key to the growth of the profession.