Library 2 You?

There is a one-day conference / workshop entitled "Library 2 You?: Experiences of Web 2.0 in the Library Environment" this Thursday at my university. I can't wait for the session on library blogging. It should be very relevant to my work and cutting-edge and so on, plus I am getting a bit bogged down in the literature review now and maybe some inspiration will shake me up and get me back on track. Hopefully I'll meet some nice people too and make some good professional contacts. I'll do a write-up of my impressions and publish it here.

Feeling a bit of trepidation now that I have my almost-full-time job scheduled for next week; I really look forward to having the structure to plan my life around, of course, but I'm also concerned how I'm going to make the dissertation happen in 3 free days per week over 4 months...! I'm sure it must be possible; others have done it in much harder circumstances. Any tips most welcome.

First supervision

I had my first supervision this morning and I'm just writing up the action points which came out of it. Things seem a bit clearer now and I'm quite happy that I'm more or less on the right track.

I need to work on clarifying the statement of my research questions and getting them out of my head and onto paper. I was trying to link the actual content of the blog posts to SCONUL's information literacy model but hadn't developed any clear understanding of how to do that. I think it may be more possible than I expected, given the next point:

The sample is potentially huge, since it's more or less the whole known population of these blogs, correct to the current date! However, if I cut it down to only what's current, i.e. updated in the last month, fortnight or week, it could end up being quite manageable. Hence I would only be looking at a few tens of blogs, and a more in-depth content analysis, with clear categories and some synonyms maybe, could be feasible.

So I plan to brain-storm everything I am planning so far as a mind-map, assess previous studies' coding instruments for relevancy, and go through my current draft dissertation write-up, and maybe aim to do a pilot study of the currency of the blogs to see what size sample I get left with. If it's good I may try out the SCONUL model as a source of categories (somehow!).

Supervison!

Great news. I now have a supervisor. So things can go ahead in earnest. First question to sort out is how detailed and how long a project it's going to be. Watch this space.

New job

I'm not sure if this pertains to the research project in a strict sense, but I received a job offer today and accepted; this means I'll be working over the whole summer and almost into the Autumn term.

Hence I have to put my hand-in date back a bit, most likely. That could actually be a good thing for the research; if I'm able to be more thorough, for example, or spend extra time on preparing a version for publication... I don't really know.

When I get a supervisor, it will hopefully become clearer. I think I need to keep on taking the initiative though, because the supervisor won't tell me what to do!

In any case, it will help me to relax a bit more, since I'll have a routine, and also it will give me a bit more cash than I would have from my research grant.

Content Analysis!

Krippendorf (2004) is the content analysis bible, as far as I can see from the literature. At one point (page 39) he says:

"Much too often, researchers design content analysis studies ad hoc and
conduct them without any thought of validation; such research contributes
little to the literature on content analysis".

Well, I wonder if he means they don't contribute much to the methodology literature? I'm not too worried about doing that, I'm only doing a short Masters thesis. But I have noticed that a lot of the studies I'm using are rather sparse in terms of methodological considerations.

Hopefully I can design something pretty simple as I only have 2 months to get the thing done.