A common refrain within the library and information professions is the perceived disconnect between research and practice—at the same time one hears how important appropriate and applicable research could (and should) be in practitioner settings and how greatly many researchers would like their work to affect practice. Not to mention the high and growing need to innovate, validate, assess, and justify our work.
Happily, there are numerous recent examples of research projects and efforts with just those kinds of connections. The USA Impact study of uses of public access computers in public libraries, new projects at the University of Rochester and Illinois to better understand the college population and their information needs, and of course, the impressive studies and results from Project Information Literacy, housed here at the iSchool. Also over the last few years, the rise of collaborative spaces in academic libraries, such as our Research Commons, has opened up a number of ideas, questions, and opportunities for the roles of libraries, librarians, library spaces and resources in the research process.
These forces independently have great potential to transform the way we think about information services in libraries going forward. Put together, that potential could be even greater.
So for your third and final task, you are to develop and describe an innovation for the UW Research Commons that draws directly from one or more research findings from Project Information Literacy. How you express that vision is again up to you, but you must convey what your innovation is, how it would work, and how it ties to which PIL finding(s). You should work in groups of 2 or 3 on this task, and your submission may take up no more than 2 standard pages, though in any format(s) you like. You will also present your idea to a panel of celebrity judges in class on the 23rd. Your work will be evaluated on creativity, connection to the PIL research findings, fit within the context of the Research Commons, viability, feasibility, and sustainability, and the overall quality of your submission and presentation.
Your submission is due at 5:30pm on February 23. Please use this Catalyst dropbox for your submissions (including any slides or links to presentation materials you may have; it would be a good idea to get those materials to me early so they can be downloaded and ready.)