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.

British Library and Google digitisation project

The British Library and Google yesterday announced a project to digitise a quarter of a million out of copyright texts from the 18th and 19th centuries. A press release has the full details, and the Guardian seems intrigued by the royal hippo angle, with an interesting quotation from a Google representative about the limits of online searching.

PG Cafe Forum

I recently gave a 15 minute presentation about my research to the university's Postgraduate Cafe Forum. These sessions provide an opportunity to meet and discuss with fellow research students from a wide range of different subject areas, so the first part of the presentation aimed to provide a brief overview of the field of information studies and librarianship.

I discussed some aspects of the modern library collection, moving beyond print to digital materials - ejournals and ebooks - and to new types of content, such as research data and online teaching resources. I also introduced the concept of social enterprise, describing how this has developed in the UK since 1997, and why social enterprise makes a particularly interesting area of study in relation to library collections.

Finally, I discussed my three proposed research methods for my project. These proposed methods need to be reviewed by the Information School's ethics board, so they may well change following any recommendations made by the board. However, at the moment I'm hoping:

• to conduct a case study of British Library collections for social enterprise;


• to carry out catalogue searches for social enterprise material on publicly-accessible catalogues for a range of different types of library;


• to carry out interviews with a small sample of people involved in using, creating or maintaining library collections for social enterprise - for example, social enterprise practitioners, academics and researchers, and librarians. This would be followed by a survey of a larger sample of stakeholders, to see if any of these findings can be generalised to the wider population.

Overall, I think the presentation went well - and although my concerns about my reliance on a script still apply, in this case using PowerPoint slides provided an alternative focus for my attention!

Social enterprise and library collections

A comment on an earlier post asked an important question about how I'm connecting social enterprise with library collections. It's a central issue for the project and I hope this post will help to provide an answer.

I think the connection between social enterprise and collections exists on two levels. Firstly, the overall ambition for this project is to draw conclusions about library collections generally, developing a concept of what the library collection is in the digital world. Hopefully, looking specifically at collections for social enterprise will provide a wide-angle lens for identifying and exploring more general issues. Later in this post, I'll go into a bit more detail about why social enterprise seems to be useful field to study, and the ways in which it can be seen as reflecting some of the issues affecting modern library collections.

Secondly, I hope there will be a practical connection: helping to suggest how those involved with social enterprise can benefit from library collections, and helping to explore how libraries can optimise their collections to meet the needs of these potential customers. I should say that this practical connection isn't an explicit research objective - but I do hope that it suggests the possible practical value which this research could have, both for the field of social enterprise and for the library and information profession.

When considering how library collections for social enterprise may reflect issues for modern library collections more generally, I have found it helpful to think about the following aspects of the field:

• Social enterprise has a wide range of stakeholders - people who may be interested in information about the field potentially include social enterprise customers, students, and people working in the public or private sectors, as well as social enterprise practitioners, people thinking about starting up a social enterprise, policy makers, and academics and researchers in the field.


• The social enterprise community seems highly networked - there is a lot of information available on social media and networking websites, or located through personal networks: how do libraries find out about, and meet, the needs of communities which connect online or through networks?


• Social enterprise is an interdisciplinary field - there may be some general business information which is relevant to social enterprise, but the purpose of a social enterprise is crucial, and may involve finding out about specific topics in any of a range of different areas (health and social care, education, social exclusion etc).


• Social enterprise information may be found in a range of different types of library - information may be found in the collections of a range of libraries - such as health, government, business or voluntary sector libraries, or the libraries of professional associations - as well public, academic and national libraries. This means that the project can try to provide a genuinely cross-sectoral view of issues in library collections.


• Types of information for social enterprise - the types of information which may be most useful - such as information available from social networking websites or blogs - may not be the types of information traditionally found in a library collection.

There are more issues to explore here (I'm sure I'll return to this topic again), but I hope this helps to begin to answer the question posed earlier - any comments about this would be very welcome...

Sheffield iSchool researchers informal discussion session

Yesterday I gave a very brief informal presentation about my research as one of the speakers at a Sheffield iSchool researchers informal discussion session. You can read a summary of what I said in a post on the Sheffield iSchool researchers' blog. This covers some of the ideas emerging from my reading of the literature so far and some initial ideas about possible research methods. I wonder whether this might help to clarify how the collections and social enterprise elements of my research fit together; I'd welcome any comments about the ideas I discussed.

Although this was a very informal session, with a pleasantly relaxed atmosphere, I did feel slightly apprehensive about speaking about the project to a small group of colleagues and fellow researchers for the first time. In these situations, I tend to feel either very overprepared (as yesterday, reading from a script) or underprepared; although I do feel that with a little work what I said could form the basis of my elusive "coffee break pitch". The talk was followed by questions and discussion, providing useful feedback.

The research topic

First of all, a few words about my research topic: "Conceptualising the library collection for the digital world: a case study of social enterprise". I'll go into this in much more detail over the coming weeks (months, years...) but essentially the project involves looking at how the library collection is changing, using the example of collections for social enterprise to explore current issues in collection development, management and exploitation. I also hope that it will provide an opportunity to explore perceptions of "the collection", from the perspectives of customers, librarians and other stakeholders. Is this (still) a meaningful term for all or part of the information resources a library offers its users?

The project will also involve getting to grips with the theory and practice of social enterprise - a new field for me, but very fascinating. There are a number of different approaches to defining social enterprise (definitely a potential topic for another post or several) but for present purposes I'll be using the definition provided by the Department of Trade and Industry (2002) Social enterprise: a strategy for success:

"A social enterprise is a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners."

According to this definition, a social enterprise operates as a business serving a social purpose. Other definitions place varying degrees of emphasis on the different elements alluded to here - for example, there is a hint here that the ownership structure of a social enterprise might be different to that of other business types; other definitions may place a more explicit emphasis on this difference, focussing, for example, on the role of democratic decision-making within a distributed ownership structure.

Another useful introduction to the social enterprise field, from the practitioners' perspective, is available from the Social Enterprise Coalition website.