LIDA 2012: part three

Wednesday morning began with two presentations on the topic of information seeking behaviour. Colleen Cool presented the findings from a study of information behaviour associated with frustration while searching digital libraries. This study used social interaction theory to explore the behaviour of 20 searchers in help seeking situations involving digital information resources and their self-expressed levels of frustration, with digital libraries seeming to inspire greater frustration than other types of online resource. Particularly interesting were the findings showing different behaviour patterns depending on whether the frustration took the form of participants blaming themselves or blaming the system (participants blaming themselves seemed to be more likely to persist with their searches, despite their frustration). In the second presentation, based on a paper by Polona Vilar, Tomaž Bartol, Jan Pisanski and Primož Južnič, asked the question "Are librarians familiar with information seeking behaviour of teachers and researchers in their respective institutions?". Two Slovenian studies have explored the information behaviour of scientists and librarians' perceptions of these information behaviours. The survey of researchers suggested that people are not enthusiastic about library services, and have difficulty identifying the services provided by the library. There was an interesting observation about the role of the library as a social space, rather than a storage space - this is something which I might have thought was more associated with undergraduate level students, but which seemed to potentially apply to the career researchers and academics, too.

A panel discussion about curriculum design for LIS courses involving digital content in library services followed - a video of this discussion is available here. This included presentations giving a genuinely international perspective on curriculum design in this area. Makiko Miwa described a revised LIS curriculum in Japan (I thought the summary of core curriculum areas on pages 5-7 was particularly clear and useful), Ron Brown from the University of South Carolina, who described the use of cutting-edge technology, such as 3D scanners, and the role of relationships and partnerships in developing courses and Yin-Leng Theng from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore dicussing her university's MSc in Knowledge Management course and research work on reuseable learning objects.

In the afternoon, Christine Borgman introduced the second part of the conference programme, setting out some of the key challenges for libraries in the digital world, including the "data deluge", the need to develop local and global infrastructure for managing digital objects, challenges in identifying and preserving access to digital objects and determining who should lead in developing policy in this area (funders, publishers, data repositories, or universities...). Alyssa Goodman Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University offered a acientist's perspective on crowd-sourcing, data sharing and data citation tools (such as Harvard's Astronomy Dataverse) and using social media in astronomy. Particularly impressive was the example of a photo posted on Flickr of a cluster of stars which were then accurately located using Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope tool, and the positive impact of using this tool to enthuse school students about astronomy.

A poster session took place in the evening - this included some really interesting work including a poster by my superviosr summarising results from a study of innovation in research support services in academic libraries in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand; a poster summarising research into belief in a just world and online piracy; the grey literature typology described in Monday morning's workshop session and a summary of the Croatian experience of both thematic and domain wide web archiving - which aims to make archived content available over the web (a big difference to the proposed UK regulations in this area).