Marisa Ponti & Diane H. SonnenwaldGöteborg University & University College of Borås

Sweden

Investigating the Potential Uptake ofE-Research within a

Social Science Discipline:Socio-technical Issues within Library &

Information Science

Introduction• Library & Information science (LIS) - Focuses on the use of technology in info environments - Historically a ’less privileged’ discipline but valuable:

£1.00 spent in support of public libraries = £4.40 in terms of gross regional product, time & money saved (British Library, 2004)

• Challenges facing LIS

- Not ”big science”

- Not historically an academic discipline

- Limited research funding

- Practice-research gap

Can e-Research help to fill the gap?

Research Question & Methods• Question - How do socio-technical aspects of work organization

interplay with the heterogeneous interests of actors in a collaborative project between LIS researchers and practitioners?

• Research Methods - Informed by Actor-Network Theory/ Callon’s model of translation of interests (1986) - Case study approach - Data for first case study:

8 semi-structured interviews Texts, e.g., listserve (250 messages), 20 project documents

Case: Semantic OPACs

Initial Findings• Low level of institutionalization - Lack of external funding: no budget, no expenditures - Importance of professional expertise - Element of both risk and freedom

• Collocated and remote collaboration - Unplanned complications Face-to-face meetings & collaborative knowledge creation - Listserv Ongoing situation awareness & project memory

• Lack of institutional intellectual property rules - Flexibility for actors - Possibility to reward individual effort

Conclusion & Future Work

• Creative use of available resources & navigation of work environments

• Practitioner volunteers vs. high performance computing

• SemOP ”2” project underway

• Two additional case studies in progress

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to the study participants:http://www-dimat.unipv.it/biblio/sem/

This research is funded by the Center for Collaborative Innovation and

the Bengt Helmqvist Fund