I MPLICATIONS OF A DIVERSE TARGET AUDIENCE

The starting point of this section is the third research question “How can the social actors model and the online community life-cycle model contribute to the understanding of the perceptions and practices related to data collection instruments and a potential LIS collaboratory?”, focusing in particular on the social actors model (Section 3.2).

As stated, and as supported by the findings of the empirical studies, the target audience for an LIS collaboratory is diverse concerning professional roles and types of organizations. Because of the diverse target group, it is even more important to understand the current practices of the LIS

community, to accommodate actors who have different roles in different types of organizations. The aim of the social actors model corresponds very well to these needs, as discussed in Section 3.2. However, the data from the empirical studies turned out to be too complex to provide a stringent conceptualization of the potential collaboratory actors. In view of the broadly defined target group, it added more dimensions to an already complex research aim. To clarify, the dimensions causing the complexity include the diverse target group (including different educational and professional roles in academia and other types of organizations); including many LIS research methods (represented by study participants with experiences of at least interview guides, questionnaires or experiments); and the global perspective on LIS (including study participants from four continents, which could mean differences in national culture, native and working languages). In all, this makes up a very complex data set which does not allow a neat fit into theoretical categories. From a design perspective, it is vital that an LIS collaboratory supports the culture, languages and communication styles of the actors (as found and discussed in Paper I). Therefore, a discussion of the findings in relation to the social actors model is carried out in this section.

It is clear that different groups see different facilitators, challenges and benefits of an LIS collaboratory. A pattern that emerged from the data is that a particular actor may have different motivations depending on their professional role. This became evident with researchers who, as stated, saw many challenges with sharing, but who saw many and only benefits of using an LIS collaboratory for teaching their students about LIS methods. Also, librarians saw different benefits of using an LIS collaboratory for helping others than for themselves. Librarians also stressed that they would need to ask their managers for time to use an LIS collaboratory, as it would not be part of their typical work tasks, which is in line with previous research on professionals’ motivations for conducting or not conducting research (Haddow & Klobas, 2004; Hall, 2010; McBain, Culshaw & Walkley Hall, 2013). This was not an issue with any other group of study participants.

Including LIS professionals as collaboratory actors was a novel approach according to the literature review (Paper I). The results showed that there are many differences in the type of work, the professional roles and organizational contexts of LIS professionals and academics. LIS professionals reported that their organizations stipulate how actors should work in more detail than actors in academia; are not as used to creating research content and sharing it; and are worried that the quality of their data

collection instruments may not be good enough compared to researchers’

resources. These results are in line with the results of Axelsson, Spante and Sonnenwald’s (2006) study of library managers’ perceptions of an LIS collaboratory (Section 2.2) which showed that managers of small libraries were unsure if they had anything to offer larger libraries, and that managers of public libraries stated the same hesitancies in relation to research libraries.

This tension between researchers and LIS professionals, and the difficulties that the hospital librarians had in describing some aspects of the survey in the evaluation study can be seen in light of the importance of common ground found in the literature review of the understanding needs phase (Paper I). It also relates to the identities dimension of the social actors model (Section 3.2), in that actors in a community may have different identities, including expert and novice in LIS research methods. If these identities are clarified in an LIS collaboratory, it may provide a context for actors and for the data collection instruments they share – information that can help other actors to determine whether a data collection instrument is suitable for a study or not. Forming identities in an LIS collaboratory could occur during the growth phase according to the online community life-cycle model (Section 3.3), when a set of actors continuously use the LIS collaboratory. So, despite challenges, it may still be worthwhile to include LIS professionals in an LIS collaboratory, with the right support for contributions, e.g. peer review to get quality suggestions, and actors providing rich information about data collection instruments to help others who may want to use it to determine its quality.

The different uses of an LIS collaboratory for librarians became evident in the follow-up interviews with the hospital librarians who had conducted tasks in the prototype collaboratory (Study IV). The hospital librarians saw the primary purpose of an LIS collaboratory as a tool for aiding patrons, to a much higher degree than using it for their own work. This result was not evident in the interviews in the first empirical study (Study II), the reasons being at least twofold. First, the study participants in Study II were recruited on the basis of their experiences with conducting studies using different types of data collection instruments. Secondly, the interview guide in Study II focused mostly on practices of creating, sharing, and reusing data collection instruments. Study IV, on the other hand, focused on the study participants’ views and thoughts about the collaboratory prototype. The study participants were recruited on the basis of them having experiences of using collaborative technology, and not their experiences of creating, using and sharing data collection instruments. Comparing the results of the

studies creates a bigger picture regarding the purposes and potential uses of an LIS collaboratory from the LIS professionals’ perspective. The study participants in Study IV also suggested the following purposes for an LIS collaboratory: to help other collaboratory actors, to interact with collaboratory actors, and for rewarding actors’ activities by offering feedback on data collection instruments shared by actors, which corresponds to the results of a “gift-culture” culture (Ponti, 2010a) and discussions on reciprocity in online communities (Paper I). These results are a contribution to research on collaboratories, as the new group of professionals has been added to the target audience of a collaboratory.

A challenge for librarians in both empirical studies was to find time and be allowed to use a collaboratory by their managers. This was exclusively discussed by librarians, and not by any other LIS professionals or career or educational level. In the TORSC framework, Olson and colleagues (2008) suggest that having time to conduct collaborative work is important to scientists. The difference between the TORSC framework and the results of this research project may be explained by the difference in TORSC’s focus on tightly coupled activities, versus this project’s focus on sharing and reusing data collection instruments which is a loosely coupled activity.

To connect to the findings (Chapter 6), the relation between benefits and challenges for an LIS collaboratory was synthesized as: “A LIS collaboratory would be great for LIS as a discipline, but I am not sure I want to actively contribute”. This statement reflects the socio-technical approach to actors discussed in Chapter 3.1; one way for people to affect ICTs is to not use them, or to be clear about what needs to be in place for them to consider adding another ICT to their work.