A summer of interviews

The last few months I've fortunately been fairly busy with interviews. I say fortunately, because I was a bit uncertain about how willing people will be to participate, when I first started sending out invitations to take part. I'm really grateful to all the people who have been willing to give up their time to speak to me.

I've now carried out 11 interviews - with librarians, people working in social enterprises, people supporting them, and academics working in the subject area. I feel I've learnt so much more about social enterprise just by meeting with people from a range of very different organisations. Although the interview process can be challenging, I've found it very rewarding. So much of the research I'd been doing previously had been self-directed individual reading, it's great to meet and engage more with people and to visit organisations. The practicalities deserve a mention: I've travelled between four different towns, worked my way through three sets of AAA batteries for my voice recorder (none have yet run down mid-interview, luckily), and transcribed about 9 hours of recorded material (just over 68,000 words).

Each hour of interviews has taken me two to three days to transcribe. This has probably been the most challenging part of the process for me - background noises which seemed insignificant at the time drown out speech when listening to the recording, additional words and phrases emerge as I listen again. Most importantly, though, the process of transcribing has brought home to me just how sketchy even the most detailed of notes will be, compared to a proper transcript.

I'm hoping to do more interviews later, but for the moment I'm concentrating on analysing the information I've collected so far. I will be using this data in my upgrade report - this is the process which enables me to transfer from MPhil status to being a fully-fledged PhD student and usually takes place around a year after the start of the course (so that's about now for me).

Project research methods

Some time ago now I said I'd post in more detail about the research methods I'm using for this project. Fortunately my actual use of these methods has been developing at a better pace than this post explaining them!

The plan I've devised has three main strands:

1. a case study of social enterprise material in the British Library's collections;


2. searching other library catalogues for materials relating to social enterprise;


3. a series of initial interviews with a small number of people involved in social enterprise and relevant library and information services, leading to the development of a questionnaire for a larger group of people.

1. Case study of social enterprise material in the British Library collections
This project is funded and supported by the British Library, so I'm very fortunate to be able to link my research quite closely to the British Library's collections. I've carried out a search of the British Library's resources for social enterprise, using a small selection of relevant keywords and phrases, and I hope to be able to track the amount of use of some of these materials, both printed and online - always remembering the British Library itself is a very valuable information resource. I'm also keen to explore and use information about a range of different collection-related projects at the library.

2. Library catalogue survey of materials for social enterprise
I am using the same search terms used on the BL catalogue in strand 1 to search for similar materials in other libraries across different sectors (eg public, academic, health or other special libraries). I'm planning to search around 120-150 catalogues in total.

I will be interested to see how results from different libraries relate to the results from the BL - this might include:

• identifying works which frequently appear in different collections;


• identifying works not located in the BL search;


• comparing the level of detail provided by different types of information services (for example, which collections may include details of journal articles alongside books);


• comparing different collection approaches to web-based grey literature - such as PDFs of reports or policy statements.

3. Interviews and the questionnaire
So far I've carried out eight interviews - some with people involved in social enterprises, some with academics and researchers and some with those involved in providing library and information services relevant to social enterprise. I'd like to thank everyone who has taken part in these interviews so far - I've had some very helpful and insightful conversations. I hope to interview between thirteen and fifteen people in total, including more library and information professionals. I will use some of the inital results from my catalogue searching in strand 2 to identify library and information services with particularly interesting collections for social enterprise to approach for interviews.

I will blog in more detail about the interview process and about transcribing interviews, which is currently the major focus of my work outside time spent interviewing.

This interview data will enable me to draw initial conclusions about issues regarding information and library collections for social enterprise. To test whether the ideas emerging from the interviews can be generalised more widely across the field, I will then develop a questionnaire to send to a much bigger group of people some time in late 2011 or early 2012.