SLIS faculty member Blaise Cronin will present the opening keynote address for the DREaM Project - Launch Conference on Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - (see talk abstract below.)
DREaM (Developing Research Excellence and Methods) is funded by an AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) grant. "The purpose of the grant is to develop a formal UK-wide network of Library and Information Science (LIS) researchers. The project started in January 2011 and runs until August 2012."
The Conference will be held at the British Library Conference Centre, London. The theme is "Out of the Comfort Zone" - with a goal of "extending the comfort zone of LIS researchers."
Talk Abstract:
• Opening keynote: “… And into the zone of quasi-rationality”
Blaise Cronin, Rudy Professor of Information Science, Indiana University, US, chaired by Charles Oppenheim, DREaM project, LIS Research Coalition.
In his keynote presentation Professor Cronin will provide a brief historical overview of LIS research before critically reviewing competence and practice in the field. He will identify a number of deficiencies, including lack of cumulation, “narcissism of minor differences,” false antinomies, failure to scale, and redundancy. At the same time, he will highlight several trends that may (or may not) be seen as having potentially positive downstream effects: growth in the number of faculty from disciplines other than LIS populating LIS departments, increasing rigour and diversity of LIS research programs, quantifiable growth in the export of ideas from LIS to other disciplines, greater receptivity of LIS research to outsider literature. He will consider social media both as a means of fostering research collaboration and as a subject warranting significant research attention in its own right. He will conclude by considering a few domains in which LIS researchers may be able to establish a stronger presence.
• Video of the Opening Keynote Address
british library by pshab
Some Rights Reserved
Posted July 05, 2011