Emerging Research in Libraries and Information Science – Institute of Historical Research

I was recently invited to speak at an event organised by Siobhan Morris, the graduate library trainee at the Institute of Historical Research in London. The workshop was called “Emerging Research in Libraries and Information Science,” and was designed to give LIS masters and PhD students a chance to present their research. You can find tweets from the event at #ihrLIS.

Programme for the day – from cataloguing to robots…

For a start, it was a pleasure for me to be speaking to librarians again. As a PhD student, I’m always sad that I may not really count as a librarian any more, although “Library Twitter” is still welcoming. This year I’ve only really presented my work to Arts and Humanities PhD students, so it was nice to be back in the library world.

Digital Humanities

Kicking off the afternoon was Anne Welsh (@AnneWelsh) from UCL talking about how cataloguers can be seen as distant research collaborators (a tricky role to play  when you don’t know what research you’re collaborating on). Cataloguing is an area of librarianship that I am shamefully ignorant about – I did a little bit in my trainee year at the Bodleian, but it’s not a huge focus for the Sheffield MA course. Anne is working with historic collections – specific collections from the homes of individual writers or historical figures (eg. William Gladstone, whose collection can be searched using GladCat). She talked a little bit about how some of these collections are counted as “high value,” with institutions fighting over them, whereas others struggle to “pay their way” for the space they take up. These historic collections sound particularly fascinating from a cataloguing point of view, as the collectors often added marginal notes to their books which provide historical and social context. Anne’s methodology came from digital humanities and involved analysis of huge amounts of catalogue data – very different to my qualitative, interview-based approach. We ended up with an interesting discussion about the level of technical/computational skill you need to be a digital humanities researcher.

The Evolution of the Librarian

Secondly, was Joanne McPhie (@LifeSciLbrn) from Brunel, whose talk was based on her experience working in an academic library, and developments over the last few years, especially around open access. She told us that in the early days of her job it was a struggle to get deposits into the institutional repository, but times have moved on and she feels now that open access is more successfully embedded. She saw Research Data Management as the new challenge, especially persuading researchers to deposit their research data. She also touched on some other changing and evolving roles that her library was taking on. For example, the library had become more involved with providing careers and employability info to students (in my old job at a university careers service, we didn’t have this kind of strong link with the library). Finally, she brought up the TEF, and what it might mean for libraries… watch this space.

Has the Internet changed the way we think?

After a break, Tom Pink (@pinkthom) from City University presented his masters research on “Has the Internet Changed the way we think?” He began with the caveat that there have always been dire warnings about new technology changing the way we think – including with the advent of the printed book, radio and television. He discussed popular concepts such as whether the internet is causing us to be more distracted and have less empathy. As you can imagine, there’s no consensus among academics on these questions (and discussion around these issues is often prone to unhelpful generalisations about technology and the way we interact with it). However, Tom’s presentation was very thought-through and he finished up by talking about the role of libraries in thinking about how people use the internet (whether it has changed the way we think or not) – drawing on ideas of critical information literacy (he cited Lauren Smith’s blogpost about Brexit).

Open Access outside academia

My presentation was based on my PhD research around open access to scholarly research outside academia. I haven’t started any data collection yet, so my thoughts were based on my literature review and research questions. It was useful for me to pull my research together into a presentation, especially as my first year upgrade is coming up at the end of October, where I have to present to examiners from my department. I talked about how open access is situated in the two disciplinary areas I’m focussing on – medicine and education – and outlined some of the debates that are found within the two disciplines, which could engage more fully with a discussion of open access (for example,the Informed Patient, and “evidence-based practice”).

I also briefly introduced the concept of the commons (something I’m in the early days of reading about) – the idea that research is a shared resource which should be open to the community to use and contribute to. I’m hoping to use theories of the commons to talk about open access in my thesis. I know that the use and usefulness of theory is a contentious topic in LIS right now, but I recommended the book Critical Theory in Library and Information Science for those who were interested in reading some accessible theory, and talked about how helpful I had found our “critical theory reading group” at the Information School (if there’s anyone reading this who is about to start the MA Librarianship at Sheffield University, please do join us!)

Finally I talked through some of the interesting complications that arise when you think about open access for the general public? Namely, What do we mean by access? Who is the public (or who are the publics?) What happens when you stop thinking of research as an “objective truth” which needs to be imparted to an ignorant public, but rather as socially situated and partial? How do we explore the complex relationships that non-academics might have with research? I don’t have answers to any of these questions yet, and perhaps never will… Many thanks to a friendly audience and interesting follow-up questions about Sci-Hub and whether academic libraries have become less inclusive over recent years!

Robots!

Finally, we heard David Phillips (@dpp202), also a Masters student from City University, talking about robots, which was an excellent way to round off the day. He posed the question, “Will the robots take our jobs?” and then went on to outline some examples of robots being used successfully/unsuccessfully within libraries. There was Bob, the security robot (manufactured by G4S!), which was used in a University Library, and a Chinese chatbot designed to give advice to students which had to be taken off the library website when its chat got a bit risqué.

Bob the Robotic Security Guard

More seriously, there was a discussion of which information work was “safe” from being taken over by robots, and the fact that the more manual work (eg. book sorting) is often taken first, resulting in low paid staff losing out on work. On the other hand, it was suggested that it was a positive step for robots to take on work that was too dangerous for humans to do. Finally, there was a video of two cute child-size robots called Vincent and Nancy that teach kids coding at a public library. Or that’s what they’re pretending to do anyway…

 

Thanks to Siobhan for organising such an interesting workshop, and good luck to all the researchers, especially those finishing their masters dissertations.

 

 

 

Open Access and the “Informed Patient”

This blog post has been adapted from a short paper I gave at “Thinking Critically about Society: Perspectives from the Arts and Humanities” . The audience was mostly other PhD students from arts and humanities disciplines.

In 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative was written and signed by a gathering of librarians, academics and publishers. It is seen as one of the foundational texts cited by those who are working towards open access (OA) to academic research. The initiative has the utopian aim of providing access to research for “all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.”

Open Access badges – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0/photo credit biblioteekje

Currently hidden behind paywalls and accessible only via institutional subscriptions or expensive one off payments, a great deal of research is not designed to be accessible to the general public. Those involved in the OA movement debate fiercely about the best way to open up research, from different definitions of “open” to different funding mechanisms. It is fair now to say that OA has entered the mainstream with institutional, government and funder policies mandating that researchers make their work OA, leading some to warn that the movement risks being co-opted into neoliberal structures – enabling publishers to continue to charge extortionate prices to publish OA, and favouring the sciences over the arts and humanities (Lawson, Sanders, & Smith, 2015). My research engages with these debates, but is principally interested in the “curious minds” cited in the BOAI; how do we conceptualise the “public” who will potentially access research?

Health research is one of the key areas which has been identified as useful for non-academics – Willinsky, a key advocate of wider public access, writes:

“Nowhere has the democratic quality of the open access question played itself out more dramatically than in the doctor’s office (Willinsky, 2006)“

When you’re reading about open access to medical research, you quickly come across the concept of the “informed patient” –  the idea that as a patient, you can become empowered through access to information, and are therefore able to manage your own health more effectively, challenge the dominance of medical practitioners and make shared health decisions (Kivits, 2004).

I see the informed patient invoked in discourses around open access. Sites such as the US Alliance for Taxpayer Access, and UK site “Who Needs Access: You Need Access” use patient narratives to powerfully demonstrate the need for increased access to research.

In no way do I wish to deny the lived experiences and perspectives of these patients – qualitative data from my MA dissertation suggested that participants (talking about their experiences of accessing medical research) often felt they reached a greater understanding of their conditions and the treatments available to them, gained an ability to negotiate with their doctors, and were able to share information with others who were not able to read the research. Nor am I denying the effectiveness of using these narratives as a tool for advocacy.

However, I also think it is helpful to critically analyse how discourses of the informed patient in OA advocacy may work to obscure other competing perspectives. Take the narrative of Josh Sommer, found on the Alliance for Taxpayer Access site, which is a good example of how a research informed patient is presented:

1. It is a narrative of hard work and dedication from an individual patient in a situation where the odds are stacked against them
2. Despite initial bafflement from doctors, the informed patient later receives co-operation from the medical and research establishment, who are interested and grateful for their input
3. The patient’s access to research leads to not only a significant difference in their health and wellbeing, but also has a wider public benefit to society

Looking critically at a patient narrative like this, we could first question the perceived interest and cooperation from health practitioners and researchers. The transformation of the doctor’s office into a democratic space ignores power relations still at play. What happens when doctors dismiss the research you have carried out? What happens when doctors make a judgement on how “informed” you are depending on your perceived abilities, educational level and social class? What happens when you are not able to perform your expertise effectively in the clinical encounter?  And what about when your “expertise” challenges the dominant view of health? Do you risk being labelled as ‘non-compliant’ – a problem to be dealt with rather than a partner in healthcare decisions? (See Fox, Ward & O’Rourke, 2005 for some critical discussion).

Thinking about this reminded me of Charlotte Cooper arguing in her recent book Fat Activism: a radical social movement, that medical research dealing with “obesity” dehumanises and exploits fat people. She describes her emotional reaction to reading this research as fraught with powerlessness and anger that her experiences are being represented in this way. Cooper argues for alternative ways of knowing and talking about fat. She critiques journals “hidden behind expensive paywalls”, but instead of calling for access, she argues for the creation of new knowledge outside those paywalls based on embodied and community understandings of fat.

It also made me think of the activists who have criticised the organisation Autism Speaks for its exclusion of autistic people’s voices and stated aim to advance the “prevention, diagnosis, and treatment” of autism through biomedical research. It’s clearly hugely problematic, but it has an explicitly public-oriented open access policy on its website – including families, patients and educators as key readers of its research. If we were judging it solely on its open access credentials, it would be great!

Would Cooper and the activists who challenge Autism Speaks count as “informed”? Theoretically, their rejection of at least parts of the biomedical literature could risk labelling them as problematic and non-compliant, especially if the challenge took place in the doctor’s office rather than in writing.

To add another layer of complexity, Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma has raised concerns about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the production and dissemination of biomedical research (I don’t agree with Ben Goldacre on everything, but it’s definitely worth a read ).  What is more, it’s easy to see how pharmaceutical marketing can seize on the concept of the “informed patient” – I recently read a report which made me uneasy, advising the pharmaceutical industry that patients wish to work more closely with industry, bypassing the advice of health professionals to read research about drugs and treatments. Whilst on one hand I can see the benefits of changing power relations between patient and doctor, in this situation I worry that the informed patient is transformed into a consumer, risking being implicated in a market-driven system which aims to increase the profit margins of big corporations.

Willinsky writes in The Access Principle that he believes the public would experience “shock and consternation over the level of disagreement and conflict that marks scholarly work.” However, this level of disagreement is not usually articulated in discourses of the informed patient used in OA advocacy. In my research I want to talk about OA from a starting point that scholarly literature is socially situated and contested, and the “public’s” orientation to that literature is necessarily complex. The narratives of the “informed patient” are powerful tools to advocate for open access, but should be critically analysed in order to have a discussion around open access which is inclusive, allows the space for critique, and recognises that access is influenced and constructed by power relations and social structures as well as by paywalls.

Thinking Critically About Society – York, 5th May

My PhD is funded by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH) – which means that although I’m based in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Sheffield University, my research sits at the borders of the two disciplines. With my Arts and Humanities hat on, I’m co-organising (with James Hickson) a workshop which will take place on  Thursday 5th May at the University of York.

It’s called Thinking Critically About Society: Perspectives from the Arts and Humanities and it aims to provide a friendly space for doctoral students in the arts and humanities to share critical research and to explore the idea of social impact whilst still questioning the current “impact agenda” within HE.

We sent out a call for papers, and we’ve now got some (what I think are) really interesting speakers on various topics – representations of Islam, censorship, animal rights, and precarious work among others. The full timetable can be found here.  We hope that the speakers will spark discussion among attendees so there will be lots of opportunity to contribute.

For people from library and information studies, I am going to be presenting on my research, focussing on open access to medical research and how  the concept of the “informed patient” is used in OA advocacy, and there is also a talk by Jade French on the political potential of inclusive curatorship.

The tickets are free, and can be booked via our Eventbrite page. At the moment, all the tickets have been taken, but there is a waiting list, and you will be allocated a place if people cancel their tickets (which, in my experience of free events, some people are bound to do).

The twitter hashtag for the day will be #thinkcrit16

 

 

Should we trust Wikipedia?

Should we trust Wikipedia? This was the question debated on 11th November as part of Academic Book Week 2015  by a panel put together by the University of Sheffield Library. As you might imagine, no one came to any firm conclusions.

The panel was made up of:

Andrew Gray – former Wikipedian in Residence at the British Library

Anne Horn – Universty Librarian at the University of Sheffield

Bob Shoemaker – Professor in the History Department

Michael Pidd – Director of HRI Digital, Humanities Research Institute

Hannah Robbins – PhD student in music at the University of Sheffield

The panel started off by talking about the “facts” that you find on Wikipedia and whether they are “true” – that is, as far as truth goes, whether they can be verified by other sources deemed more reliable. Former Wikipedian in Residence at the British Library, Andrew Gray, talked about his research into the content of Wikipedia and commented that although there were places where the error rate was very low (apparently you’re probably OK if you’re reading about physics in German) there were other places more riddled with errors. Hannah, PhD student in music, gave some examples from her own subject area where the Wikipedia entry about a certain composer contained facts that directly contradicted her archival research. She did admit that maybe she ought to edit the Wikipedia page with her findings, and link to the archival sources that she had used, but so far hasn’t given it a go…

As we were at a university, conversation soon turned to undergrads who cite Wikipedia in their essays – and it seemed that the general feeling was that a sweeping “don’t use Wikipedia” was not that helpful and ignored the fact that:

1. pretty much everyone uses Wikipedia a bit
2. Wikipedia can give you a  good overview of a topic, including jumping off points for further research.

We compared the different ways knowledge is created – crowdsourced through Wikipedia, built up empirically through scientific observation, put together by historians through archival records, reported for various reasons by media outlets. All of these ways of knowing have their own flaws and biases – you’re never going to get to an absolute truth. I’m sure that if you look at entries from traditional encyclopedias of the past, some would now seem horribly out of date due to changing social attitudes.

People need the skills, the panel argued, to evaluate Wikipedia alongside all online information, including academic sources. It all came back to information literacy (there were lots of librarians in the room!)

As this librarian commented on Twitter:

Librarians should teach the skills of how to trust, we're not (and never have been) about telling them what to trust #AcBookWeekShef

— Kate O'Neill (@KateFONeill) November 11, 2015

An audience member argued that students aren’t the only people who need to critically appraise online sources, and that it was even more important to teach this in schools. Which was great because it led on to a discussion on the importance of strong school librarians. [hopefully schools will soon realise this by paying them the same as teachers, giving them some support staff, and funding the library more…]

Hannah on the panel told us that when she was at school, Wikipedia was actually banned on the school computers!  She thought this was to do with “inappropriate” content – which raises a whole other hive of questions relating to censorship that could be discussed another day.

One thing I hadn’t really considered was the power of the Google search algorithm for pushing Wikipedia entries to the top of every search. It does mean that a lot of online information is hidden from searchers, as they automatically go to Wikipedia. This caused me to ponder on more radical information and ideas – are they hidden because the consensus based knowledge on Wikipedia steers it towards the middle ground? Or is it easy to get these alternative perspectives onto Wikipedia? I don’t know…

Another worry was that Wikipedia would be ‘lured’ into lucrative deals with big corporations to promote the kind of knowledge that they want promoting. The panellists thought this hadn’t happened yet, but it’s definitely worth watching out for.

Wikipedia and Open Access

One of the panellists argued that publishing on Wikipedia isn’t really very attractive for academics as it is too anonymous, and doesn’t welcome original scholarship –  instead we should always try and publish open access, and then our open access articles can be cited as sources on Wikipedia. As my own research is on OA outside the academy, it would be interesting for me to find out more about what people’s experiences have been accessing OA research articles through Wikipedia.

The conversation then quickly moved from Wikipedia to a general push to make everything more open.

Everyone was very positive about open access (as am I), which was really heartening. However, there wasn’t much in depth discussion about its complexities, and why people may have problems with it.  For example, this  Cambridge academic is very much against it, and even people who agree with it in principle can be doubtful about whether it’s useful for anyone outside the academy.  For example, see the commenter on this article who says:

“Assuming there are thousands of working-class citizens out there wishing they had access to articles on how post-colonial theory can inform resistance to neoliberalism in the the university is an exercise in academic vanity, not social justice.”  (Seth Long, commenting on an Inside Higher Ed article by Barbara Fister)

I don’t agree with the above commenters, but I do think it’s important to engage at a  more critical level with debate around current funding structures for OA – the pressure to publish everything Gold OA has been criticised for not challenging the neoliberal higher education system in this 2015 article by Stuart Lawson, Kevin Sanders and Lauren Smith. There’s also been some interesting discussion from a postcolonial perspective to the claims that open access is ‘good for developing countries’ – for example, this 2007 article by Jutta Haider.

So it’s a pretty disputed topic,and would have been good to see some more in depth discussion of some of the current debates.  

Overall, this was a really interesting panel discussion – although there wasn’t a consensus decision on the reliability of Wikipedia, there seemed to be a general feeling that Wikipedia was here to stay for the moment, and you have to work with what you’ve got (with a critical eye open of course!) Andrew Gray commented on how much time it would take for a team of encyclopedia editors to create something that was the size of Wikipedia (answer: LOADS of time, too much time for it ever to realistically happen). I wonder whether I should become a Wikipedia editor…

Tweets from this event can be found at #AcBookWeekShef

Sheffield Feminist Methodologies: Challenges and Negotiations

On Friday I went to a really interesting conference – Sheffield Feminist Methodologies: Challenges and Negotiations at Sheffield Hallam Uni. It was organised by Rachel Handforth, a PhD student at Hallam, and was targeted at PhD students, which was great for me, because all the speakers were talking about their own PhD research, and the methodological challenges they had faced.

The room was absolutely packed with people from different disciplines – I spoke to researchers in sociology, English Lit, and education among others.

Crowded conference room at SHU – photo courtesy of Jen Slater

Panel 1: Research using Digital Media

Speakers in this panel were analysing Twitter, Facebook and digital magazines to look at various feminist issues.The main discussion focussed on the ethics of analysing social media content, which seems to be a grey area. Just because tweets are publicly available, should we be able to use them as data, or should we be getting consent from the people who were tweeting? Emilie Lawrence, who was analysing constructions of feminism on Twitter using feminist hashtags was struggling with the issue – she felt that it wasn’t ethical just to use the tweets, but in practice she couldn’t get consent for over 17,000 tweets! She also had the added dimension of images… some of the hashtags she was analysing involved thousands of images of women’s bodies posted (by the women themselves) onto Twitter. This brought up even more issues of consent (and also more practical copyright problems when it came to publication).

Also during that panel, there was discussion around how to respond to data you really didn’t agree with, or reacted emotionally towards – something that is bound to happen when you are researching something you care about. As feminist theory challenges the idea that a researcher can be neutral and objective, the speakers found other ways to deal with this – Laura Garcia-Favaro spoke about what she termed a “solidary-critical approach,” which involved respecting her participants’ opinions and situations, but finding ways to critique them (and feeding her thoughts and findings back to them in the form of a report).

Panel 2: Feminist research Beyond the Binary

This panel explored how the experiences of trans & non-binary people have been (and still are) sidelined in feminist debates. (Example of how scholarly communications contribute to this sidelining – academic journals publishing transfeminist research in “special issues”). Emma Hutson took us through a history of how trans theory/politics has intersected and “butted heads” with feminist theory – you can find the paper on academia.edu here. Naomi Frisby focussed on the depiction of body hair and “bearded women” in circus novels, which was really interesting – I like interdisciplinary conferences where you hear from literature/cultural studies people as well as social scientists!

The third speaker, Ben Vincent, spoke about “non-binary transfeminist methodological considerations”  – they had interviewed people who identify as non-binary about negotiating their gender identies. On the methodology side, Ben told us about researcher/participant relationships where they (as researcher) were asked to justify why they were involved in the research project; where they were coming from politically/personally, before the participant would agree to be involved. Again, this can be seen to blur the line between researcher/research subject in an interesting way.

On a sidenote, watch this video of Jess Bradley and Loz Webb from Action for Trans Health…

We were interviewed on the telly at @ThatsManchester. Heres us talking about trans health and nonbinary issues https://t.co/AOyzcDWYez

— Action for Trans Health (@act4transhealth) October 28, 2015

On a second sidenote, we also talked about toilets! In our house we talk about toilets a lot. My partner and friends are involved in a toilet-related research project, so anything about toilets always gets flagged up. So, toilet related discussion:…

Concentrating on cis women's discomfort ignores stories of toilet hostility/violence experienced by trans ppl #SHUfemconf #cctoilettalk

— Em Nunn (@EBNunn) October 30, 2015

Keynote: Jessica Ringrose

After lunch we heard from the keynote speaker, Jessica Ringrose from the Institute of Education, UCL. My own research project is around open access to academic research and its use “outside the academy,” partly focussing on education based research, so it was especially useful for me that Jessica was from an education department and was talking about the idea of “impact” in her research. She spoke about the tension around impact – as a feminist researcher, of course she doesn’t only want to talk to other academics, she wants her research to make a difference in the world. However, she also recognises that “impact” is a term used within the neoliberal university to quantify, categorise and measure research/researchers with potentially harmful effects. I can see how the current drive to publish everything (Gold) open access could also be tied in with this concern, and it would be interesting to hear feminist researchers’ views on it.

Panel 3: Reflexivity

The final speakers were Reva Yunus, Hannah Retallack and Orla Murray – discussing their own positionality and privilege as researchers and their relationship to their research and research participants. There was a theme of going beyond just being reflective and trying as hard as you can to make changes to your research practice (not always possible when you’re part of a system with particular structures and constraints).  For example, Reva talked about her own discomfort that her research participants (school children in India who speak a range of different languages) would not be able to access her research, written and published in English (a language with a history of colonialization and oppression). She is trying as far as she can to make sure she publishes in different languages as a part of trying to “decolonise” her research.

Feminist research

At the end of the day someone asked me what my research was about, and when I explained, asked whether I would be able to “get feminism into that.” Although I probably won’t explicitly position my project as “feminist research”, I would hope that ideas drawn from feminist theory (researchers fighting for social change, critiquing current structures of how research is communicated, what knowledges are valued in society etc.) would all be able to inform a project about open access to research. And the methodological discussions around ethics, reflexivity, and participant/researcher interaction are surely useful to anyone carrying out a qualitative study.

All in all, it was a fantastic conference, many thanks to Rachel and her colleagues for organising it. Hopefully there will be others in future. You can see loads of tweets from the conference at #shufemconf.

Adventures in the arts and humanities: WRoCAH Conference 2015

We were advised to make a note of any events/training we attend, otherwise we’re likely to completely forget them by the end of the year, so here goes…

This week I went to York University for my first induction with the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH), which is funding my project. I worried that I would be an imposter in the Arts and Humanities as first (as really my project is on the social-sciencey side), but actually there was a huge range of topics and methodologies from different disciplines, from archaeologists, to museum studies people, lawyers to musicians, so I didn’t feel too out of place!

It was nice to meet the WRoCAH team in person at the induction (they were very friendly and welcoming) and hear a bit more about the various funding pots we could apply to for training, conferences and running events. Then we heard about everyone else’s projects, which were all totally different from each other. There isn’t anyone else from information science/librarianship, but as there are other ways for me to work with information people it is probably good to step outside my comfort zone a bit.

Very professional WRoCAH conference programme!

I stayed in York for the WRoCAH conference the next day, which had been organised by a couple of second year WRoCAH students. There were four panel sessions, Sound and Spectacle, Construction & Categorisation, Form and Narrative and Graves and Burials. Again, the research was pretty wide ranging – the reconstruction of 19^th century theatrical sound effects to stained glass window identification, to the story of a Spanish doctor who commissioned his own tomb sculpture 17 years before he died! Everyone communicated their research clearly and accessibly (which was important as we were all from different disciplines) and I learnt a lot.

It was especially interesting for me to see a range of different methodologies – ethnographic research in a museum setting, “remaking” as a way to find out more about history, statistical analysis of human skeletons to find out about their nutrition, and more traditional archival and library-based research.

From my own project perspective, it was good to talk to the other PhD researchers and explain what my PhD was going to involve to people who were really interested in research but who weren’t from a library and information studies background. Some already knew a bit about Open Access and related it to broader themes of public engagement (for instance, co-production of research with communities/young people). Some had not come across the concept before, and although they were interested and positive, there were some doubts about who exactly from the general public would want to read research literature. A common assumption was that I was talking about “hobbyist” and “amateur” researchers (particularly historians) – and a worry about whether lay readers were wanting to do “serious” research with any OA articles they might encounter. Also family historians were suggested as people who might be interested. This perspective isn’t something I’ve really reflected on before (clearly applying more to humanities research than to the medical research I worked on for my MA dissertation) so it was definitely useful to have a chat about it.

Also, there was a lot of emphasis in the previous day’s inductions about the importance of working with cultural partners (such as museums, galleries, heritage organisations) and how they appreciated access to humanities research/researchers. This was couched in terms of increasing researcher employability and the impact of humanities research (which understandably causes some worry in the arts and humanities that less ‘useful’ and more obscure research will be sidelined in a climate where impact and employability is paramount).  However, it made me think that there could be an interest in free access to research publications for these organisations, especially in a climate where they are facing funding cuts.

All in all, it was a lovely two days in York – it was great to meet the WRoCAH team and so many other people excited about starting their PhDs (not to mention the excellent meal afterwards, which included wine and Bakewell tart!)  It gave me lots of food for thought, and I look forward to meeting everyone again in November.

First post…

Hello! I hope to keep this blog updated with PhD related thoughts and write-ups of events I’ve attended as the year goes on…