Research Seminar Series Archive

It is more challenging to uncover how and why people read than what they read, or when and where they read. Times of political crisis and social change are productive contexts for examining these elusive features of reading, and South Africa during the apartheid era is a useful locale for investigating these features. In this paper, I analyse the roles of professional and non-professional librarians who sourced, circulated, hid and sometimes helped to produce banned reading materials, and who used their libraries as ‘safe’ spaces for readers to debate liberation strategies. I also explain how readers used these materials in clandestine reading networks. I conclude with a critical reflection on the range of methods I used to tell the stories of ordinary South Africans who confronted an authoritarian and racist regime.

Engagement and participation are key concepts framing a large part of the social media discourse across many research domains (Lutz, Hoffmann and Meckel 2014). As quasi-government agencies public libraries increasingly value Twitter as it provides a freely accessible, low-cost structure for improved engagement, relationship-building and communication with a wide spectrum of library followers. The Social-biblio.ca project, initiated in 2012, contributes to this work from the perspective of the public library organization.

As part of the recent massive educational reform, colleges and universities have been training students as active and lifelong learners, and becoming publicly accountable for their performance. In this context, college and university libraries have also been asked to approach their institutions about how they can contribute to these reforms. Building collaboration between faculty members and librarians is one of the main issues in making these contributions. This presentation will explore librarians’ strategies to promote collaboration with faculty members, and intervening conditions inside libraries, and in the university community, based on qualitative case studies of good practices.

Researchers across disciplines have been tracking and promoting impact of their work for decades using various metrics (e.g., citation counts). Today, many alternatives exist for documenting impact of research outputs and building your academic profile. Social media tools and qualitative measures of community-based research, alongside a range of metrics, provide options for researchers who want to enhance their academic and public research profiles. This talk will explore a range of strategies for promoting research and measuring impact in the community.

Compassion fatigue is a serious condition impacting health, quality of life, professional well-being, and work productivity. It manifests in many professional sectors, especially those dealing with people in vulnerable positions such as in healthcare, law enforcement, spiritual settings and social work. Related terms — sometimes used interchangeably — include burnout, secondary traumatization and vicarious traumatization.  Very little research dealing explicitly with information behavior and compassion fatigue has been reported.

This talk explores a novel research partnership and its contribution to community engagement with health promoting information. Indigenous youth co-researchers were recruited for a community-based participatory study investigating concerns about healthy eating and food security in a Cree community. Youth contributed to research planning, conducted interviews with elementary school Photovoice participants, contributed to data analysis and participated in the development of a knowledge translation tool. Hands-on interaction with research findings fostered critical thinking about health information and practices. Findings suggest that a broad understanding of information use may be helpful in the context of health promotion.

It used to be the girls who were thought to be the problem. Until recently, both research and practice in fields like education and library and information science were more interested in uncovering and addressing the unfair, unequal treatment of girls. But times have changed. Everyone agrees that girls have improved on almost all performance indicators at school while boys have not. This presentation reports on an interview study with 43 Canadian boys (4 to 12 years old) which captured the boys’ own perspectives on their reading. Results indicate that boys are reading, but their preferred reading materials (e.g., nonfiction, comic books, and game manuals) are not those usually privileged by librarians, teachers and parents.