Research mania

Meredith Farkas asks, in a thoughtful response to my post about research courses in library school:

If you do research studies or write for publication, where did your passion for writing and research come from?

My initiative for pursuing a research project this summer came more from the writing and potential publication than the research. Since I’m reading Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives by Anna Fels (at Dorothea Salo’s suggestion), I will admit that I’m ambitious about my writing. One path for a professional with writing ambitions to follow is to publish in a peer-review journal. There are other paths. Unless I end up at an institution where the tenure process limits my alternatives in the next few years, I’ll probably follow every path toward writing and publishing that is available to a practicing librarian.

Assuming this current research project is a reasonably satisfying experience, I imagine that I would do more in future. Any future research projects would have to have a bit more motivation than the writing (there are easier ways to pursue writing, after all). I would likely be pushed to do research by the desire to learn an answer to a question that has cropped up in my work and to share the results with other librarians. Plus, I suspect I would be motivated by a desire to push forward a new solution or technology, like Sherri Vokey's IM study that Meredith mentions at the end of her post.

Meredith mentions two studies that have been interesting to her--neither in a peer-review journal and both easily available on the web (now that Library Journal saw the error of its ways). I wonder if the peer-review process will prove to be too slow for a rapidly changing information world. And I wonder if the articles in journals will be too much of a black box, given the arguments that Jenny Levine made for Library Journal to keep their articles open to the Web.     #

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