A LIS collaboratory to bridge the research-practice gap

The Authors

Marisa Ponti, Swedish School of Library and Information Science, Gothenburg University, Gothenburg and University College of Borås, Borås, Sweden

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Center for Collaborative Innovation at the University College of Borås, the Swedish School of Library and Information Science and Bengt Hjelmqvists Stipendium for their financial support to carry out the author's research on a LIS collaboratory. Special thanks to Professor Diane Sonnenwald, for her active support and participation.

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of a collaboratory as a virtual learning community and discuss its significance to support collaboration between library and information science (LIS) researchers and practitioners.

Design/methodology/approach – The LIS literature describes various forms of inter-institutional collaboration involving librarians and information professionals, but there is an apparent lack of documented cases of collaboratories involving LIS practitioners and researchers. The paper draws from the literature about collaboratories in the fields of social informatics and information systems and describes the notion of collaboratory, its characteristics and main functions.

Findings – It is argued that a LIS collaboratory in the form of a virtual learning community has the potential to provide researchers and practitioners the opportunity to bring in and integrate their respective knowledge, expertise and connections, as well as expand participation of practitioners in research projects. Another claim is that this virtual learning community may fill a critical niche for small institutions as LIS schools and practitioners, and give them the opportunity to choose and work together on relevant research projects. While the prospect of LIS collaboratory looks promising, the challenges to building one need not be overlooked, in particular working at distance and crossing institutional boundaries. More research is needed on the socio-organizational issues that can influence collaboration between LIS researchers and practitioners.

Research limitations/implications – The discussion is based on the author's review of the literature and observations.

Originality/value – The notion of collaboratory is still new to the LIS field. This paper offers the opportunity to trigger a new discussion on collaboration between researchers and practitioners and the potential of collaboratories to support new forms of collaboration.

Article Type:

Viewpoint

Keyword(s):

E-learning; Research; Libraries.

Journal:

Library Management

Volume:

Number:

4/5

Year:

2008

pp:

265-277

Copyright ©

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

ISSN:

0143-5124

Introduction

A wide gap exists between librarians and library and information science (LIS) researchers. Knowledge sharing and collaboration between the two groups is still limited. The different interests and commitments of practitioners and researchers have hindered the realization of a common research agenda driven by both specific problems identified by librarians and library administrators and researcher's interests. Collaboration between librarians and LIS researchers can help bridge this gap, especially through forms of scientific collaboration that values knowledge, experience and values of all the participating members and seeks to incorporate them in their respective activities. In these forms of collaboration, librarians and researchers could assess and establish the value and the effectiveness of collaboration.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the notion of a collaboratory as a virtual learning community and briefly discuss its significance to span the boundary between research and practice in LIS. The article is organized as follows. It first describes the notion of collaboratory and presents different types and functions. It then concentrates on the potential benefits of building a collaboratory as a virtual learning community to bridge the research-practice gap. Some final remarks on the challenges to building a successful collaboratory conclude the article.

Bridging the practice-research gap in LIS

A wide gap exists between librarians and LIS researchers. Knowledge sharing and collaboration between the two groups is limited. There has been a long tradition of concern in librarianship that much of the research emanating from academia lacks relevance for day-to-day practitioners (Joint, 2005; Haddow and Klobas, 2004; Booth, 2003; Bates, 1999). Typically practitioners do not make good use of the available research as they find that it is either divorced from their areas of concern, or that the presentation impairs understanding and application. At the same time, even when basic research could be applied, it can be difficult for LIS practitioners to translate it into practice (Bates, 1999).

Some recent research projects in Australia and UK have examined the relationships between practitioners and researchers. Middleton (2005) noted that the gap between the two groups is contributed to by issues including that:

The motivators are different – researchers must increasingly work within the framework of grants awarding procedures which can be subject to political agendas that may not fit public librarians concerns.
Practitioners often wish to see “research” into areas such as staffing, application of information technology or improvement of procedures and services, which essentially require application of management procedures rather than application of new knowledge.
Many of the immediate problems of practice may be addressed through consultancy and project management work, which may draw upon expertise of researchers, on a consultancy rather than research agenda basis.

Other studies exist (e.g. McNicol and Dalton, 2004) that highlight the different research priorities and the different problems faced by practitioners and researchers and outline a research agenda driven by specific problems identified by librarians and library administrators (Buckland, 2003). Haddow and Klobas (2004) conducted a thorough analysis of the LIS literature to identify the barriers to communication of research to practice. They identified 11 gaps between research and practice including; a knowledge gap, a cultural gap, a motivation gap, a relevance gap, an immediacy gap, a publication gap, a reading gap, a terminology gap, an activity gap, an education gap, and a temporal gap (p. 30).

Haddow and Klobas summarized the gaps as shown in Table I.

The two authors also found out that the literature suggest two main ways to address these gaps: one is to involve more practitioners in research and the other is to improve the dissemination of research to practice. A LIS collaboration has the potential to support the involvement of practitioners in research, but there is a dearth of studies exploring the needs and challenges concerning the creation of such a collaboratory. The potential for a collaboratory within library and information science has not been investigated. The results of a recent pilot study conducted in Sweden by Axelsson et al. (2006), which involved ten library and information science practitioners working in a range of settings including a large city public library and a small town public library, suggests that there is a need for collaboration between LIS researchers and practitioners and for a collaboratory to facilitate on-demand, personalized knowledge sharing. The authors noted that the collaboratory should be well integrated into the everyday practice of librarians.

Collaboration between librarians and LIS researchers can help bridge this gap, especially through forms of research collaboration that value knowledge and experience of all the participants and aims to help them incorporate the outcomes of joint-work in their respective activities. In such a form of collaboration, librarians and researchers could assess and establish the value and the effectiveness of collaboration. A LIS collaboratory may become a boundary object (Star and Griesemer, 1989; Wenger, 1998), aiming to link different partners, types of knowledge, levels of knowledge (theory-practice), and to become a common point of reference (Chrisman, 1999) for social interactions and activities.

A collaboratory, in which the different expertise, experiences, and knowledge of both practitioners and researchers are valued, needs to be built having clear their respective work practices, professional values, expectations, and logics of research. These aspects need to be considered at the stage of establishing collaboration to ensure that the process can be sustained over time and the collaborating participants can achieve shared goals. A collaboratory introduction needs a positive orientation to collaboration to succeed (Finholt, 2002).

Definitions and characteristics of a collaboratory

The term “collaboratory” is a hybrid of collaboration and laboratory. The flexible meaning of the parent words makes the meaning of collaboratory open to negotiation and change as well (Lunsford and Bruce, 2001). In this article, I adopt the recent definition of collaboratory given by the Science of Collaboratories (SOC) group as a:

Network-based facility and organizational entity that spans distance, supports rich and recurring human interaction oriented to a common research area, fosters contact between researchers who are both known and unknown to each other, and provides access to data sources, artefacts and tools required to accomplish research tasks (SOC, 2003).

According to Lunsford and Bruce (2001), a collaboratory has the following characteristics:

Shared inquiry. Not only do participants share common goals but also a set of problems that they all consider to be significant and worth the effort to work on.
Intentionality. Participants feel involved in a mutual project. A collaboratory then becomes a generative space where people feel that they earn as much as they give from taking part in the exchange. There is a tipping point, which brings about the critical mass awareness that is necessary to turn the joint work into a collaboratory.
Active participation and contribution. Participants actively contribute to joint activities and engage in constant negotiation of the objects of their projects.
Access to shared resources. Participants can use tools, documents, and information provided by the collaboratory.
Technologies. Technologies used in collaboratories vary depending on the research field, nature of tasks, purposes, and goals. They range from rare equipment such as observatories, space satellites, or enormous shared databases used in space physics, to ordinary technologies including electronic mail, file transfer software, online community websites, video conferencing, transcription software, and database software.
Boundary crossings. Collaboratories always cross some kinds of boundaries that can be geographical, time, institutional and disciplinary.

Collaboratories can take different forms, depending on their main type of resource (instrument, data, or knowledge) and activity (aggregating resources across distance or co-creating knowledge across distance). The SOC project groups collaboratories into seven categories, based on their main function, as Table II shows.

Most existing collaboratories have been concerned with large-scale collaborations in engineering, physical sciences and life sciences (Finholt and Olson, 1997; Finholt, 2002; Arzberger and Finholt, 2002). In comparison, there has been less development of collaboratories in the social sciences and humanities, due to limited funding opportunities, less need for expensive and unique scientific instrumentation, and different behavior and attitude to collaboration[1].

As for the LIS field, a vast literature – both academic and professional[2] – exists on various forms of inter-institutional collaboration, including interlibrary consortia (e.g. Shachaf, 2003), federating systems, and information communities bringing together disparate kinds of information for a community (Lougee, 2002), because libraries and librarians/information professionals participate in a broad array of organizations at all levels of practice (Webster, 2006). However, there is an apparent lack of documented cases of collaboratories and/or research collaboration involving librarians/information professionals and LIS researchers. Lougee (2002) seems to confirm this lack of examples when she argues for the potential of libraries to develop collaboratories, as they search for increasingly effective ways to widen access to content and better serve target user communities.

Potential benefits of a LIS collaboratory

The scholarly literature on research collaboration and collaboratories appears to contain relatively few empirical studies of actual collaboratories (Sonnenwald et al., 2003a) and even fewer of prospective collaboratories (Sonnenwald, 2003; Bly et al., 1997). Drawing from the reviews of earlier or existing collaboratories in science (e.g. Arzberger and Finholt, 2002; Finholt, 2002; Finholt and Olson, 1997) and from case studies of collaboration between researchers and practitioners (e.g. Dreher et al., 2001; Allen-Meares et al., 2005), I envision that a LIS collaboratory may enhance the research and practice of library and information science as follows.

Collaborative research

A collaboratory can provide the opportunity for projects involving practitioners, students and researchers. To aggregate the efforts towards a common research problem, however, both practitioners and researchers need to build common ground, through mutual understanding and reciprocal efforts to take their respective concerns and obligations into account. For example, Joint (2005) suggests that practitioners adopt a reflexive approach to their work practices to evaluate research opportunities as well as to repurpose administrative data into core procedures. At the same time, researchers should keep in mind practitioners' concerns about confidentiality, data repurposing, workload issues, and project control, and should be aware of the possible impact of practice-based research on library services (Joint, 2005).

Collaborative practice

The experience of the Nursing Collaboratory (Dreher et al., 2001) shows that bringing together perspectives and inputs from both academics and practitioners can enhance problem solving. This collaboratory acted as an infrastructure for the College of Nursing, the Department of Nursing and hospitals and clinics to work together to create, disseminate and apply knowledge for the improvement of nursing practice. Likewise, a LIS collaboratory can become an incubator to foster ideas and creativity and develop innovative products and services that improve library practice and enhance public satisfaction.

Educational practice

A collaboratory can become the working space in which research and learning intersect. It can make possible to bring together teaching, learning and research, that kind of combination that should be integral part of LIS academic curricula, which, at times, tend to be restricted to theory. A collaboratory can provide the actual means by which a group of librarians, LIS researcher and students can work together in a specific project, such as, for example, the Semantic OPACs (Gnoli et al., 2004), in which participants worked together virtually to discover the level of use of semantic indexing in Italian online public access catalogs to describe and organize library holdings. Not only can a collaboratory allow project members to meet and communicate, but also to organize and provide access to research instruments and stored data contributed by project members (e.g. publications, research data files, etc.) for new learning opportunities.

Social networking

Not only do collaboratories provide for the diffusion and preservation of knowledge created as a result of collaboration, but they also have the potential to support networking and collegiality that has a social leveling effect and lowers the barriers to dialog. Practitioners and researchers can extend their contact networks, enhance opportunities for informal communication, and sustain relationships to support long-term personal and organizational goals. In this regard, a collaboratory can contribute to reduce the culture gap (Haddow and Klobas, 2004) by fostering mutual understanding and respect between practitioners and researchers.

A LIS collaboratory as a virtual learning community

A LIS collaboratory may become a boundary object (Star and Griesemer, 1989; Wenger, 1998), aiming to span the boundary between research and practice by linking different partners, types of knowledge, levels of knowledge (theory-practice), and becoming a common point of reference (Chrisman, 1999) for social interactions and activities. A LIS collaboratory is envisioned to provide researchers and practitioners the opportunity to bring their respective talents to the table and combine them in a synergistic fashion. Practitioners bring specific experiential knowledge, resources and connections, whereas researchers contribute scientific knowledge. A collaboratory has the potential to ease the “translation” (Minna and Gazdar, 1996) of scientific knowledge into practical knowledge and applications.

In a similar vein, collaboratories have the potential to expand participation of practitioners in research projects (Arzberger and Finholt, 2002; Finholt, 2002; Allen-Meares et al., 2005). With respect to the LIS field, a collaboratory may fill a critical niche for small institutions (as LIS schools tend to be) and practitioners who are generally not included in frontline research, and provide them the opportunity to choose, and work together on, significant research projects.

This phenomenon refers to “peripherality hypothesis” (Sproull and Kiesler cited in Finholt, 2002), according to which technologies may produce benefits especially for those at disadvantage (e.g. non-elite scientists, etc.). Librarians and information professionals, who are least able to travel and/or to meet LIS researchers, can have the opportunity of establishing contacts with them and gain from their work. In a non-elite collaboratory (Finholt and Olson, 1997; Finholt, 2002), LIS researchers may have the opportunity of linking practitioners, not considered as merely informants as in traditional forms of scholarships, but as colleagues who can bring knowledge, skills, capacities, and experiences to the process (Nyden et al., 1997; Cornwall and Jewkes, 1995).

In this regard, a LIS collaboratory would be used differently than in “big” science: it would support participatory forms of research (for example, to engage librarians in collecting data within their libraries and share them with researchers); or it would evolve into virtual locations, where members of a community of practice can go to meet and collaborate with both familiar and new colleagues, and not just to access facilities and data (Arzberger and Finholt, 2002). Building a collaboratory as a virtual learning community might work toward achieving these goals, because it can be a favourable locus for translating research (Minna and Gazdar, 1996), engaging in participatory research practices (Cornwall and Jewkes, 1995), fostering long-term relationships to support personal and organizational goals (Sonnenwald, 2003), and knowledge sharing (Brown and Duguid, 2001). Then a collaboratory might develop to support a community of practice – or a constellation of communities (Wenger, 1998) – in which people cross boundaries to learn through sharing knowledge on a given topic, or to collaborate on the development of new services and products.

LIS and e-research for the humanities and social sciences

Over the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in developing a cyberinfrastructure[3] to support scientific collaboration, both in Europe and in the USA. The term cyber-infrastructure is not confined to distributed computing networks, discipline-specific instruments and project-specific databases, but refers to “the layer of information, expertise, standards, policies, tools, and services that are shared broadly across communities of inquiry but developed for specific scholarly purposes” (American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), 2006, p. 1). The report of the ACLS noted that this layer can provide a platform to empower specific communities of researchers to innovate and broaden participation to research.

This point is particularly crucial for LIS. Over the last 20 years, investments have been made to build digital libraries and develop standards and best practices that support their acquisition, exchange and preservation. However, now it is time to use advance technologies to develop new forms of scholarship and collaborative partnerships in LIS. Certainly when it comes to the adoption of a cyber-infrastructure, LIS is not the only field in social sciences that needs to move toward new ways of working. The humanities and social sciences need to bridge the increasing divide that separates them from science, technology and medicine as to the use of cyber-infrastructure for collaboration (Berman and Brady, 2005). “Big Science” has always been a form of distributed work (Bowker and Star, 2001), therefore scientists have been attentive to the potential of ICT to extend and develop their work. Most of the existing collaborative research environments and other e-science initiatives launched in the USA and Europe concern large scale, inter- and intra-institutional, and inter-disciplinary collaborations in science and technology. By comparison, there are only few formal digital communities and collaboratories in the humanities and social sciences. This gap also reflects low levels of investments in the humanities and social sciences. Most of the funding frameworks and initiatives in the USA and Europe allocate their resources to support the development of a cyberinfrastructure in science, engineering and medicine. For example, in the USA, the 2003 report to the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure recommended annual investments of $1 billion for such purpose (ACLS, 2006). Not much of this expenditure goes to social sciences, though[4].

Collaborative research environments in science and technology are about projects whose magnitude of scale, scope and complexity of the problems addressed, number of resources engaged, and number of participants, require assembling people, funding, infrastructure, software, data, and so forth. Although the humanities and social sciences tend to work on much smaller projects and do not generally need the same large scale and expensive facilities, they would certainly benefit from learning how to do and sustain research in computer-mediated collaborative environments. In other words, they would benefit from thinking in terms of e-research, rather than e-science, since, as the British Academy (2005) affirmed, “e-science is envisaged as more than larger scale e-based science” (p. 63). This way of thinking may have positive repercussions in terms of broadening opportunities for the humanities and social sciences. It may encourage the development of a new generation of virtual research communities involving students, less advantaged researchers, professionals and other groups excluded so far. Expanding the focus of collaboratories to promote inclusion is necessary to avoid that they become the exclusive virtual realms of elite-scientists working in traditional and highly ranked disciplines, in which the use of technology seems to extend the status quo, and not to expand participation in science (Finholt and Olson, 1997). Besides, a new generation of collaboratories may contribute to “democratise science by making resources – instruments, dataset, facilities and tools – available to those who cannot afford their own investment, but can benefit from a collective one” (Atkinson, 2006).

A cyber-infrastructure for humanities and social sciences should promote not only access to and preservation of data collections, but also and especially collaboration across institutional and professional boundaries. There is the need to increase the participation of other stakeholders, especially non-profit organizations, to foster collaborations among practitioners, and between practitioners and researchers, for they play an important role in intellectual, educational and economic development. With respect to LIS, Axelsson et al. (2006) reported figures from recent studies conducted in the USA showing that for every $1.00 spent in public support of public libraries, there is return of $6.54 in terms of gross national product and time and money saved. Thus promotion of innovation and participation of libraries in new forms of collaboration with researchers should be seen of great scholarly and societal relevance. In LIS, professionals and researchers might gain from the use of ICT to support research collaboration even on a modest scale. The ACLS is right when they affirm that what matters is not just the collection of data but also the social activities that occur around and integrate it (ACLS, 2006).

The road winds uphill for humanities and social sciences, however. Different scientific paradigms and lack of collaborative scholarship are just few of the main challenges that humanities and social sciences need to face in order to partake of the cyber-infrastructure. There is no doubt that these areas of knowledge, including LIS, must take the lead in taking forward discussion and development of e-research tools to ensure that their interests and specificity are taken into account.

The challenges to building a successful collaboratory

The experiences from the first generation of collaboratories indicate that a number of social and technical aspects are critical to the success of a collaboratory. Although it is outside the scope of this paper to review in depth social and technical aspects influencing collaboration, it is important to recognize that they have a strong bearing on its initiation and sustainment. Three main challenges have proved to be very difficult to solve (Bos et al., 2007). First, unlike information, knowledge is difficult to transfer. In fact, knowledge may be tacit and difficult to be formalised and explicit, or it can be at the current limits of scientific/technological progress and thus hard to explain outside face-to-face interactions. Second, people tend to create knowledge more efficiently in and through interpersonal face-to-face interactions, while technologies are designed to support knowledge construction in a distributed manner and to make knowledge mobile outside those face-to-face interactions. Therefore, it is challenging to conduct activities in spatially remote locations, as people are used to doing things in collocation where physical proximity facilitates interpersonal communication and the creation of common social spaces (Finholt, 2002). Third, Bos et al. (2007) argue that crossing institutional barriers is even more challenging than working at a distance, because of organizational problems, such as legal issues, for example, that cannot be easily solved.

Although suitable technologies and human-centred design can help create virtual settings in which people feel more comfortable, there are social and institutional barriers to successful collaboration. Unfortunately, seldom have the social and the technological received the same level of attention. While technological progress goes fast to produce advanced software and hardware to sustain scientific research, social arrangements enabling organizations, groups and individuals to collaborate better and in a more affordable manner improve at a much slower rate (David, 2005). David put the question in quite clear terms, by contending that the complex demands for suitable institutional infrastructures have been downplayed, as they were deemed simpler to address than technological requirements, but indeed they may prove much harder to tackle.

As technological and social aspects of collaboration are bound together, much closer attention must be directed to their relationships to create appropriate organizational foundations for the use of collaboratories. This concern calls for the use of a socio-technical perspective that helps understand how the interplay of the social and the technological takes place and also what can be done, in practical terms, during design and implementation process to reduce the chances of failure.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued for the benefits of a LIS collaboratory in the form of a virtual learning community to cross the boundary between research and practice. The creation of a LIS collaboratory is predicated on the belief that intersecting practice, education, and research is important to generate ideas that can produce benefits to researchers, educators, students and professionals in library and information science. Such benefits will include promotion and strengthening of both collaborative research and collaborative practice.

I have also remarked on the difficulties of achieving a successful collaboratory – which include, among the other aspects to be taken into account, a shared vision of the structure of the collaboratory, meaningful recognition for contributions, and trust among participants. As a matter of fact, collaboration between LIS researchers and practitioners can be achieved but it takes investment, commitment, motivation, and some experience. To build and sustain a successful collaboratory, in which the different expertise, experiences, and knowledge of both practitioners and researchers are valued, it is necessary to know work practices, professional values and commitments, and expectations of participants. Before starting collaboration, researchers and practitioners need to be aware of their respective concerns and obligations to ensure that opportunities for collaboration are exploited successfully (Joint, 2005). Lack of awareness of the respective interests and commitments will keep preventing the development of a research agenda decided in collaboration with, and guided by the needs of both. The literature shows that LIS researchers and practitioners need to bridge many gaps. Therefore, to build a common research agenda, both of them need to feel integral part of a collaborative project and influence such an agenda from the beginning.

The practice of collaboration raises personal, political and professional challenges that must be carefully considered at the initial stage of collaboration, to ensure that the process can be sustained over time and collaborating participants can achieve shared goals. More research is thus needed to explore the socio-organizational issues concerning the creation of a collaboratory for LIS researchers and practitioners. Indeed, the potential for a LIS collaboratory has not been investigated.

The creation of a collaboratory could accompany a new way of thinking about LIS research that involves researchers, practitioners, students, and other stakeholders. Expanding the focus of collaboratories to promote inclusion is necessary to avoid that they become the exclusive virtual realms of elite-scientists working in traditional and highly ranked disciplines, in which the use of technology seems to extend the status quo, and not to expand participation in science (Finholt and Olson, 1997).

Table IA total of 11 types of gaps between research and practice

Table IISeven types of collaboratories

References

Allen-Meares, P., Hudgins, C.A., Engberg, M.E., Lessnau, B. (2005), "Using a collaboratory model to translate social work research into practice and policy", Research on Social Work Practice, Vol. 15 No.1, pp.29-40.