Introduction

In this chapter I consider the role of the supervisor in the life of a doctoral student, and the early stages of the research journey. I cover the research process from getting started through to designing the process, including the topics of induction, working with a supervisor and getting started. Chapter 4 continues the research journey and explores the following stages: the literature review, methodology, fieldwork, writing up, the viva voce examination, amendments and completing the doctorate.

In this chapter I include examples from my own doctoral research experience and from colleagues who have been willing to share their experiences with me.

Starting points

The starting point for potential research students is a desire to continue their studies, e.g. to progress from a taught Master's degree to a research degree, or to return to academic life and complete a doctorate on either a full- or part-time basis, perhaps after a number of years in the workplace. As with students who want to join a taught degree programme, potential research students start their search for a suitable university and department on the basis of their field of interest, the reputations of individual researchers, departments and universities, the availability of funding (some universities provide bursaries and sponsored research studentships) and their desire to study in a particular city or country. There are many sources of information to provide them with advice, including websites such as those provided by the Research Councils (see Chapter 1) and sites such as:

www.findaphd.com/students/life.asp

www.vitae.ac.uk/

www.professionaldoctorates.com/

Useful textbooks on the subject, include: Gina Wisker's The Postgraduate Student Handbook (Palgrave Study Guide, 2001), and Estelle M. Phillips and Derek S. Pugh's How to Get a PhD (Open University Press, 3rd edition, 2000).

Once a student has identified an appropriate university, department and supervisor, he will be required to make a formal application to the university to become a research student. The application process varies from university to university, e.g. in some it is managed centrally by a graduate school or equivalent administrative unit, while in others research student applications are dealt with at faculty or department level. If the student is applying to undertake a PhD, it is likely that he will be required to write a research proposal as part of the application process.

In this book I have explored different aspects of supporting research students. My starting point in Chapters 1 and 2 was researchers and research processes. This was followed by a description of the typical learning, development and research processes experienced by doctoral students in Chapters 3 and 4. I then considered the skills required by doctoral students and discussed them, in Chapter 5, in the context of initiatives in the UK to improve not only research skills but also the employability of people with doctorates.

In Chapter 6, I considered different approaches to supporting research students, including induction, workshops, one-to-one support and electronic support. This was followed by a discussion about different approaches for targeting and communicating with research students. An increasingly important means of supporting research students is through a virtual graduate school and this concept was explored in some depth in Chapter 7 and illustrated with case studies. Virtual graduate schools often support communities of researchers. Research communities are important because they support knowledge creation and exchange, scholarly publishing, and the development of networks. Two different types of community, communities of practice and communities of interest, were explored in Chapter 8 in the context of their relevance to research students. Membership in a research community is important for research students because it helps to provide them with access to information, ideas, networking and career support. Library and information workers who are knowledgeable about such communities and networks can signpost students towards them.

Finally, in this chapter I have considered different approaches to professional development for library and information workers. These include support offered by professional organizations and networks, provision by higher education institutions and research degrees.

Supporting research students is currently high on the agenda of universities in the UK. Research skills training for research students is seen as vital to successful completion of their degrees, as well as having an impact on their employment prospects. Developing strategic and targeted support for these students is an important element in the role of library and information workers.

Introduction

Any book dealing with the future of digital information would be incomplete without considering the issues of intellectual property (IP). Although the internet casts a new light on these issues, the principal problems are not new. In the 19th century the American publishing industry was quick to recognize that in sharing a language with the UK, it was easy to share its literature too. English texts were open to piracy, and it was easier and more profitable to appropriate an English text than to pay an American author. This had a depressing effect on the US publishing industry, and for decades American authors expressed their frustration at being underpaid because of the availability of cheap pirated copies of UK publications. Equally, renowned British authors such as Charles Dickens were paid nothing for the many thousands of copies of their books sold in the USA. Indeed, Dickens, while on a reading tour of the USA, made many pleas for international copyright laws. His fans, enjoying access to cheap copies of his books, were not impressed; for example, they paid the equivalent of 6 cents per copy for a book such as A Christmas Carol, which cost $2.50 in the UK (Vaidhyanathan, 2001). It was not until the 1890s that international copyright agreements began to resolve the situation.

Arguably, since the late 19th century copyright law has evolved to protect the intellectual property of authors and creators, to cultivate a vibrant creative arts industry, and to allow for fair dealing on the part of the buying or reading public. Fair dealing is the ‘right’ to make a copy from an in-copyright work without permission from or payment to the rights holder, if that copy is for non-commercial research or educational purposes. The only requirement is to acknowledge the source of the copied work. Most individual copying by researchers at universities for academic purposes is done under the fair dealing provisions.

Background

For the future of digital information to be orderly, that information must be discoverable, accessible, structured, interoperable, linked, semantically tagged and well identified; it must have clear provenance and good version control; and it must be preserved and curated. There must also be a means of bestowing authority on the corpus of literature in order to give the readers a quick but effective way of assessing the importance or likely importance of anything that they come across. Nowadays it needs to embrace both formal and informal scholarly communications (to include not only scholarly journals and monographs but also blogs, wikis, tweets and whatever else web users throw at it). And, of course, all this needs to have a sustainable and robust funding mechanism behind it and to be scalable to deal with the ever-increasing outputs from scholarship.

There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the future of digital scholarly information will be orderly. Research efficiency depends on it and is something that will be increasingly scrutinized as funders and research establishments look to maximize the impact of the research that they are associated with. For the most part, the academy will also demand organization, although there are currently widespread instances where academics act in their individual interests rather than for the collective benefit of scholarship, for example by storing data only on un-networked computers in their labs. The question, then, is how we get to this orderly future. What barriers are in the way and what obstacles need to be overcome? How can we get to that future as quickly as possible, taking the best of the present with us instead of destroying something now only to reinvent it later?

I am going to restrict myself primarily to a discussion of scientific journal publishing since that is what I know best, but much of what follows is, or will become, applicable to other disciplines. Indeed the issues of discoverability, digital curation and preservation, version control, provenance and trustworthiness are applicable to all online content, including scholarly e-books, research data, audio and video files, news content, etc. In the discussion that follows, I will use the NISO Journal Article Version recommended practice nomenclature for article versions, a full explanation of which can be found in NISO (2008) .

We are delighted to have been given the opportunity of editing this book on the theme of ‘Digital Information: order or anarchy?’. In the early stages of preparation, when discussing the outline and selecting the contributors, we were anxious to ensure that we covered all the major aspects of the digital revolution that is taking place across our industry. Thus we not only chose contributors from a number of different countries to ensure the widest possible perspective, but we were also keen to include publishers, non-traditional information workers, and even a lawyer, in pursuit of our goal.

The theme of order and anarchy permeates the chapters. As editors we were intrigued by the possibilities (and uncertainties) of future developments in our digital universe and we wished to explore the potential impact on libraries, publishing companies and all the other players in the marketplace. Will the present relatively orderly system of scholarly communication survive into the future or will the possibilities that technology affords, create disruption and anarchy? And what is being done today that will help an orderly transfer to the future?

The chapters by Rick Anderson, Colin Steele and Ian Russell essentially focus on the process and evolution of scholarly communication in the digital age from their own individual perspectives. Anderson identifies three ‘crunch points’ for libraries and publishers: searching and finding information; library collections; and pricing. In a world where Google has effectively taken over the document-finding role from libraries, there is one area that it has not yet fully invaded (but is making some progress). That is the role of third-party broker for expensive high quality documents such as scholarly journals and monographs. But how will libraries respond as more and more scholarly material becomes easily searchable and increasingly freely available on the internet? The final crunch point is pricing and business models – a dilemma that many would maintain that has been around for decades. Anderson works through various future scenarios around these topics and points to essential mission change for academic and research libraries.

As seasoned information professionals it is easy to think that we have a reasonable understanding of the way in which the world of information and associated technologies is moving. However, the world is changing fast and many of our core beliefs and understandings will, without doubt, be impacted by these changes. In the words of Clifford Lynch:

Take, for example, the way in which users search for information. Only a few years ago, librarians would advise that the starting point for all literature searches should be an abstracting and indexing (A&I) service, or a reference publication such as a handbook or encyclopedia. While this advice is still given in appropriate circumstances, all librarians know that everyone (ourselves included) uses an internet search engine such as Google, Google Scholar or Yahoo! as a first port of call. We know this by talking to, and observing, our users, and recent research by the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER, 2008) has validated it.

In 2009 the UK Serials Group (UKSG) ran a student competition. Entrants were asked to write a short submission on how they used libraries, electronic resources and the internet; the winner was then invited to run a workshop at the 2009 UKSG conference. The winner was Claire Duddy, and her workshop was a runaway success. Duddy wrote in a subsequent article for Serials:

However, she went on to say:

Introduction: the impact of the digital revolution

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in the 21st century we are witnessing a revolution in communication unparalleled since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. As in the 15th century, however, there is a time lag between technical innovation and the impact on society of changes in the distribution and publishing of scholarly knowledge. Initially, the first printed pages of incunabula replicated the physical layout of manuscripts, and in the same way digital journals and books have remained influenced by historical print and research assessment frameworks.

In the monastic scriptorium, the dissemination of knowledge was limited by the productivity of the output of the scribes and by public accessibility to appropriate libraries or personal collections. Books generally impacted little on the general public, for whom oral transmission (perhaps now called social networking) was the norm for conveying knowledge and gossip. With the introduction of movable type, these access limitations were overcome quantitatively, although it was probably not until the second half of the 19th century that the mass of the reading public and the print world significantly coincided. By the 19th century, books were no longer individually crafted works of art, but products of industry in a variety of formats (Battles, 2009).

E-books, by which one means the text rather than the device, are another significant variant in the evolution of book publishing and distribution. As Siracusa (2009) contends, an issue ‘is right there in the name: e-book.

Introduction

Many academic library and information workers are involved in supporting research students. This chapter explores different approaches to supporting research students, including induction, workshops, one-to-one support and electronic support. Approaches to targeting and communicating with research students are also considered. Towards the end of this chapter, a self-assessment inventory is provided which will enable you to identify your approaches to supporting research students. It will be a tool for reflection and for the identification of potential areas of development as well as areas of good practice which might be shared across the information services sector.

The information presented in this chapter is based on research into current practice through visits (physical and virtual) to a range of academic libraries, and also informal discussions with colleagues who have attended my workshops on ‘Supporting Research Students’ at CILIP. The range of support offered to research students varies, depending on the type of university, the focus of the library and information services, the numbers of research students and the development plans of the institution. Many institutions are now focusing on developing and expanding their research activities and increasing their numbers of research students. For these institutions, enhancing the support available to research students is high on their agenda.

While the levels and types of support for taught students appear to be fairly similar across different universities, it soon became apparent to me that there is much less uniformity in terms of provision of support for research students. The self-assessment inventory at the end of this chapter brings together all the different ways in which library and information workers are supporting research students. As this is a constantly developing field, the different ways in which these students are supported will continue to grow and develop.

Information needs

Barry (1997) argues that research students have the greatest information needs and therefore, of all students, the greatest need for information skills. She suggests that their information needs are even greater than those of established academics, as they need to provide comprehensive and up-to-date literature reviews in their theses.

Where we are now: two crises for libraries, one crisis for Publishers

Our current situation is highly unsettled. Three primary factors combine to threaten both the ongoing viability of scholarly publishers and the traditional position of academic libraries as information brokers and intermediaries. The first two, the crisis of searching and finding, and the crisis of the collection, stem from radical changes in the information environment, fostered by the advent of digital technology in general in the 20th century, and the emergence of Google in particular. The third, the crisis of price, has been looming for decades (Panitch and Michalak, 2005), and has been discussed and debated at length for almost as long.

Libraries – the crisis of searching and finding

Google's stated reason for being is to ‘organize the world's information’. However, its actual modus operandi is much more ingenious than that. In fact, what Google's search engine does is interrogate the world's information – not all of it, but a far larger portion of it than any single library could ever hope to own, let alone index. Having interrogated the information, Google then organizes the search results by relevance. The company is notoriously (if understandably) cagey about its exact methods of relevance ranking, saying only that relevance is assessed ‘by considering over a hundred factors, including how many other pages link to the page, the positions of the search terms within the page, and the proximity of the search terms to one another’ (Blachman and Peek, 2007). Google's use of external links to assess relevance is particularly noteworthy, and while it is far from a foolproof system, it is much more effective than traditional relevance ranking, which is usually based on the prevalence of search terms. To illustrate the difference: when processing a search for the terms ‘westminster’, ‘abbey’ and ‘london’, a search engine using traditional relevance ranking will identify as many websites as possible containing those terms, and will place at the top of the result set those websites that contain the most repetitions of those three words. Google will also gather as many websites as possible, but will place at the top of the result set those sites to which many other sites have linked.

Introduction

In this chapter I consider different approaches to professional development for library and information workers who are supporting research students. These include support offered by professional organizations and networks, provision offered by higher education institutions, and research degrees. The chapter ends with conclusions relating to the book as a whole.

In Chapter 1, I noted that although the library and information profession is a graduate one there are relatively few practitioners who have obtained a research degree. This means that most LIS practitioners will not have experienced and internalized the processes involved in gaining a doctorate. However, many will have experience of undertaking research activities, e.g. a dissertation as part of an undergraduate or postgraduate degree, or an investigative project as part of normal professional activities. What are the differences between an investigative workplace project and academic research of the type done by doctoral students? Some authors, e.g. Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2000), summarize the differences between academic research and investigative work-based activities, which they label ‘evaluation’. Some of these differences are outlined in Table 9.1.

However, the distinction between research and evaluation is not as clear cut as is suggested by Table 9.1 and there is overlap between the two concepts. An important distinction between the two is that research is concerned with adding to theory and contributing to academic knowledge, while evaluation is often concerned with judging the quality and impact of an activity or initiative and then using the findings to inform practice, often at a very local level. After reading the foregoing, some readers may identify that they have been involved in evaluation activities, e.g. evaluating student satisfaction with library services, measuring part-time students’ use of library and information services or exploring the impact of a new online service for distance-learning students. These types of activity provide a good basis for developing further knowledge about research and the research process.

Professional organizations and networks

A number of organizations provide access to professional development activities relevant to library and information workers who wish to support research students. In the UK these include generic professional associations such as the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), with its specialist groups. Many other professional associations and networks exist, and the following are indicative of the types of organizations that are active in the field in the UK.

Introduction

This chapter considers the importance of research communities in the context of supporting research students. The research process resulting in the publication of new knowledge was described in Chapters 1 and 2. As part of this process, academic researchers may be members of a number of different research communities, including communities based on specific research interests, those that come together around specific activities, e.g. publication of scholarly journals, and online communities. As part of their research development process, doctoral students have the opportunity to join different research communities. This is important because it provides them with access to up-to-date information and ideas, and enables them to network, and it may also have an impact on their future employment.

This chapter covers the following topics: introduction to communities, including communities of practice and communities of interest; research communities; information sharing in research communities; professional associations; academic conferences; online networking; and implications for library and information workers.

What are communities?

Membership of one or more research communities, involving either groups of academics and research students, or groups of academics, research students, practitioners and other stakeholders, offers doctoral students an opportunity to come together and share ideas and experiences, tackle professional and work-based problems and issues, and engage with their future professional communities. Research communities are often established to enable like-minded people or individuals with a common interest to work together and share ideas or develop new knowledge within a specific subject. Sometimes communities develop within or across organizations as the result of a particular organizational structure, e.g. a graduate school or postgraduate society or research centre. They may also develop as a result of the need to accelerate research in a particular subject or because of the interests and enthusiasm of a group of individuals who want to work together.

Introduction

Following the death of Augusto Pinochet in December 2006, Michelle Bachelet, the current President of Chile, reacted to the news. Herself a victim of torture from the Pinochet regime, President Bachelet stated, ‘I'm not going to deny, in this moment, that I have a very fixed concept concerning a painful, dramatic and complex period that our country lived through … What we learn from the past ought to help us confront the future’ (Reel, 2006).

Records became a powerful resource during this process of ‘learning from the past’. In the US, the 24,000 documents produced by the Chile Declassification Project became strong evidence of the role of the US government during the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the establishment of the Pinochet dictatorship. In Chile, the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation presented a report documenting 2279 cases of human rights violations. Organizations of victims’ relatives and human rights groups along with the human rights programme of Chile's Ministry of Interior have played an important role in establishing memorials. Additionally, the Archbishopric of Santiago de Chile established an archive that is considered the main repository of materials documenting the repression during the Pinochet years. Pinochet's death also displayed the profound divisions among Chileans over his legacy. While one sector went into the streets to celebrate, others gathered to cry over the death of one whom they saw as Chile's saviour from communism. A fragmented and divided memory of the Pinochet years is still present in Chilean society.

This essay discusses the role of archives and records in Chile during its transition to democracy, with a focus on the work of the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation. In addition, I will discuss the concept of memory from the Chilean experience, and the role played by archives in the shaping of the country's collective memory.

Transitional justice in Latin America

The period from the 1960s to the 1980s saw an unprecedentedly high level of violence and political repression in Latin America with the establishment of dictatorships in South America and civil wars in Central America. In the midst of the Cold War, Latin America went through a polarized and traumatic period during which gross atrocities took place.

Introduction

As the quotations opening this chapter suggest, the act of recovering, telling and then preserving one's own history is not merely one of intellectual vanity; nor can it be dismissed – as some still seek to do – as a mildly diverting leisure activity with some socially desirable outcomes. Instead the endeavour by individuals and social groups to document their history, particularly if that history has been generally subordinated or marginalized, is political and subversive. These ‘recast’ histories and their making challenge and seek to undermine both the distortions and omissions of orthodox historical narratives, as well as the archive and heritage collections that sustain them (Hall, 2005, 28). Archivists and others concerned with exploring archives and their power are beginning to examine the significance that engaging with archival materials – and the history created from them – can have for individuals. Rather less has been written, in the UK at least, on the impact that creating archives and ‘making histories’ can have on the development of subversive and counter-hegemonic social or public memories (Johnston, 2001; Flinn, 2007; Hopkins, 2008).

This chapter seeks to add to the literature by examining independent community archives as social movements (or as elements of social movements) and by identifying individuals involved in community archives as political and cultural activists campaigning for equality and cultural recognition and against racism and discrimination.