Easy stretches to increase reach for research: why I <3 librarians
Over the past month, we’ve been hopping from internal research to external. This involves primary research activities like interviews and co-creation sessions, as well as secondary research including environmental scans and literature reviews of related projects. Primary external research needs a fair bit of scaffolding set up before jumping in, so I’ll save that for another blog post – let’s talk about some of the secondary research we’ve been getting up to. REGDOCSs is a library, and our project is about making it more discoverable and useful to the public. Luckily there’s already a tonne of work being done in this field, notably by public librarians who are champions of public space, service delivery and information systems. This boils down to them being pretty amazing people who do incredible things with eclectic resources for big populations. We’ve identified librarians as a potentially amazing resource, but how do we talk to them? After all, they spend all their time devoted to helping their libraries be fun, useful and welcoming spaces. I turned to the internet to look up a few podcasts I’d previously heard regarding librarians in the hope of getting leads to blogs, forums or wherever else it is librarians share their ideas. As it turns out, librarians love making podcasts just as much as I love listening to them, and they spread across the internet like wildflowers. There are dozens of librarian-run podcasts in which hosts sit down with members of their local branch or a more far-flung visitor to spend half an hour or so talking about topics ranging from virtual senior’s bowling leagues to metadata management, indigenous cataloging systems to Minecraft servers and all sorts of topics in-between. Pretty cool, right? A few of these podcasts have mentioned indigenous-built cataloging systems and have connected us to some incredible indigenous-centered libraries from northern Australia to the west coast of Canada, and there are several more we’re excited to reach out to. These podcasts coming in from all over the world are incredible resources that deeply inform how we consider information systems like that we work with. Data management is a huge and messy topic but miraculously there are experts in technology, information, and engagement right at our virtual fingertips. While we’re still going to do our research in this area, finding the extensive network of librarian podcasters has been a springboard for what is to come for us. They’re also nicely packaged, pre-edited bundles of information we can toss across our organization to get a common understanding of topics we’re working with and from there get the ball rolling on work and conversations. There’s still a lot of work to do, but as per so many times in my life before, librarians helped me jump into research with a solid footing. -Roan ---- ps- podcast playlist to follow!
