Mary Anne Kennan

This chapter begins by reinforcing the integral role of writing and dissemination in the research process, while acknowledging that writing and dissemination practices vary from discipline to discipline, field to field. Despite these differences, there are characteristics and processes that most research writing and dissemination have in common, and these are discussed here. From the general structure of a research report to the importance of writing throughout the research process, key aspects of research writing are addressed after which dissemination and publishing are defined and major and emerging forms of publication are described. The chapter concludes with a discussion of peer review and the ethics of authorship.

ABSTRACT Introduction. The purpose of this study is to understand the provision and sharing of information between service providers and settling refugees while refugees transit to new living environments. Efforts of service providers are investigated to understand if community participation is enabled, social exclusion reduced, and barriers to information access and use minimized. Method. A qualitative approach was employed to explore in-depth the information practices of service agencies that care and provide for refugee resettlement in regional Australia. Semi-structured face-to-face interviews and focus groups with refugees and service providers from community and public sector organizations were conducted. Analysis. The interviews and focus group narratives were thematically re-analysed with a focus on the role of service providers. Results. Refugees find the information context complex and difficult to navigate and suffer from information overload during settlement. This complexity produces information barriers, which constrains information acquisition and thus participation. Service providers work hard to support the refugees but more supported coordination among themselves and with commercial entities would assist in reducing this complexity and overload and enable more tailored information provision. Conclusions. Government funded initiatives are recommended based on these findings to strengthen information sharing and coordination among refugee service providers.

ABSTRACT The desire to investigate similarities and differences of Australian and US academic library professional librarian jobs motivated this paper. Job advertisements were gathered in August, September and October 2004. They are a subset of those reported in earlier studies which are more general in scope; this paper focused on the job market’s expectations of academic librarians. Word counts and content and co-word analysis revealed a high demand in both countries for behavioural and interpersonal skills. The specification of generic competencies was more marked in the Australian data, and a number of differences existed in educational and experience specifications between countries.

Abstract: Much has been written about scholarly communication with studies investigating the drivers for research and publishing. For academics in particular, publication is a major determinant of a successful case for continuing employment, promotion and the winning of competitive research funding. The purpose of this paper is to inform understanding of publishing by Australian library and information studies (LIS) academics and practitioners. Records from a citation database were downloaded, cleaned, parsed and partially ...

Purpose–The purpose of this paper is to analyse job ads as relatively accessible indicators of the knowledge, skills and competencies required of librarians by employers. It then uses a framework provided by the literature on professional jurisdiction to examine what may be trends and shaping factors for the Library and Information Studies (LIS) profession with regard to jurisdiction in a changing information landscape. Design/methodology/approach–Job ads were examined in two separate studies; one comparing job ads in Australia and ...

Pre-investment evaluation of information system project proposals persists in being problematic and highly risky in practice. Numerous evaluation approaches and methodologies, offered in the literature, have not contributed to major improvements in practice. As the literature review shows, these methodologies have assumed an ideal of objective and scientific evaluation and taken the view of methodology as science. In this paper we aim to revisit the notion of IS evaluation methodology in practice and specifically explore the methodology as both the 'science ...

There is a current high level of interest in the status and future of the information professions, in our case specifically librarians. There are a number of different ways to approach an investigation of the current status. We have begun by looking at job advertisements (ads) ...

Abstract This paper reviews how Open Access policies (OA) and Institutional Repositories (IR) might be portrayed as agents of change within the realm of scholarly publishing. Using commentary on academic publishing as background, commentary that sees OA and IR as optimal and inevitable, and beneficially disruptive of the existing system, two theoretical approaches are presented as ways of providing a more detailed and explicit analysis of OA/IR dynamics.

In composing this short response to the paper in this issue by Houghton and Oppenheim (2010) based on their larger report to JISC (Houghton et al, 2009), I confess I am no economist, nor an expert in quantitative methods. Thus I cannot respond to their paper in either of these roles. Instead, I propose to respond both as an academic who conducts research, writes about it and tries to get it published, and as a researcher interested in scholarly communication, publishing and open access.

Scholarly publishing is concerned with the distribution of scholarly information through journals and conferences and other information media. As such scholarly publishing can be understood as a specific part of the information industry. With the advent of advanced information technologies many possible technologically enabled futures have been posited for scholarly publishing. This paper describes the current systems, processes and actors.

Abstract This paper surveys aspects of the research productivity and visibility of Australian Library and Information Studies (LIS) educators as reflected in publications retrieved from eight relevant databases. Searching was restricted to educators serving for at least two years in Australian LIS programs from 1959 to 2008; the records obtained were downloaded and checked for accuracy.

Abstract: This paper briefly describes the rapidly changing research evaluation and funding landscape in Australian universities, specifically in relation to open access and institutional repositories. Recent announcements indicate that funding and evaluation bodies are becoming increasingly concerned that publicly funded research be made publicly available.

ABSTRACT This paper will present initial findings from a survey that investigates existing technology-enhanced research practices, researchers' readiness to adopt eResearch, their needs and major barriers. The study was conducted as a part of a larger project which aims to establish researchers' requirements for eResearch infrastructures and support, build researchers' awareness about eResearch potential, and engage with them to co-develop eResearch services.

ABSTRACT Open access (OA) to scholarly publishing is encouraged and enabled by new technologies such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, their standards and protocols, and search engines. Institutional repositories (IR) as the most recent technological incarnations of OA enable researchers and their institutions to make accessible the outputs of research. While many OA repositories are being implemented, researchers are surprisingly slow in adopting them.

This chapter begins with a broad overview of the methodological landscape that distinguishes between three levels: the level of meta-theoretical assumptions where different paradigms are articulated, the level of research methods and the level of research techniques and tools. Different research paradigms are then discussed, making explicit the assumptions that inform them, and the relationships between methodology, theory and method in conducting research. We then build on this analysis illustrating the distinctive nature of the paradigms with examples from three seminal papers from within the same topic domain, information richness. Drawing on these papers, we discuss how the methodological assumptions determine choice of research paradigm, formulation of research questions and selection of methods, and provide practical examples of how this is achieved. The chapter concludes by summarising the arguments for adopting a broader view of research methodology and its importance for achieving greater reflexive awareness of our 'unconscious metaphysics' that underlay and influence how we see and research the world.