A Transacting I Plop or A Satanic Glint Prop or just plain Grant applications

I am knee deep in grant applications for both projects that I’m crazy enough to pursue this summer. One is an internal library grant, but the other is a grant that is largely pursued by non-faculty members (i.e. professors). You can tell the grant is designed for the teaching/research professors. The application process is more stringent than for the library research grant. I need to fill out protocol forms, design informed consent forms for ethics approval and have an external referee who is knowledgable in the field on top of the research proposal. I also need an endorsement from my department’s Chair (which doesn’t exist in the library). I’ve got 4 days to complete one of the research proposals and I am sweating bullets. However, I’m finding the “Writing the Research Proposal” chapter of Ronald R. Powell’s Basic Research Methods for Librarians particularly useful.

A thought on “A thought on the library literature”

I stumbled upon this interesting post by the Gypsy Librarian about the state of library literature today.

“It is the dirty little secret that a lot of the library literature is pretty much written by people who just need to write something to get their tenure…Instead, what we often get in the library journals are the articles detailing how X library did Y project and how cool it was. Or we get the article that starts, “we did a survey of 200 students, 50 filled it out, 35 filled it out correctly, and the results, which may not be generalized by the way (but we will generalize anyhow) are. . . .” We don’t need any more of that. We need serious, reflective research and inquiry. Maybe that’s why, in my case, I don’t like the idea of librarians on a tenure line. I don’t see myself having to churn out little pieces of “my library is so cool because. . .” in order to earn my living.”

I have to admit that I might be guilty of this “dirty little secret”. Now that I’m on the tenure track I’ve re-examined my CV and realize that now is the time to start publishing (or perish!!). I’m racking my brain thinking of what to write about. I’ve signed up for one article in a non-peer-reviewed online library-related newsletter, but it is not a serious inquiry into anything. It is a practical how-to-do-it article for working librarians. I think that the Gypsy Librarian is right about needing serious library literature, but there is a place for literature outlining practical approaches to our everyday responsibilities as information professionals. Remember information professionals also suffer from information overload too!

The Gypsy Librarian does make a great observation about her learning more from blogs than from published journal articles because of its timeliness. However the reality for a tenure-track librarian is that publishing or other forms of contribution to the profession is a necessity. Perhaps after we achieve tenure we can devote our sabbatical year to devote to “serious, reflective research and inquiry”. Many of the librarians at my institutions are involved in exciting initiatives in their everyday professional lives that finding time to sit down and write a serious, in-depth paper is challenging. It would be interesting to see how the reading of blogs replaces the traditional methods used by librarians when seeking information.