Have you ever written something you’re really excited about? That was my mood while writing our latest article, “The evolution of the personal networks of novice librarian researchers.” Why so excited, you ask? It’s the first time in our field that we have observed how the networks of librarians who are new to conducting research change over time.
The population examined for the article is the Scholars of the program I co-direct, the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL). Over the course of a year we asked each of the Scholars from the first cohort to complete an egocentric network survey at four different times during their IRDL year, about the current state of the people they talk to about research, and how those people may be connected to each other. To conduct the surveys we used the freely available software, EgoWeb 2.0 (https://github.com/qualintitative/egoweb). What we found was that the size of the research networks of the Scholars dramatically increased after the IRDL summer workshop and continued to evolve over the yearlong program.
We’re continuing to conduct these surveys with each cohort to see if comparisons to the network changes are observed across cohorts over time. If you’d like to read more about our research the article is at portal: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/645353 , and there’s a free version stored in LMU’s institutional repository at http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/librarian_pubs/39/.
Citation: Kennedy, Marie R., David P. Kennedy, and Kristine R. Brancolini. 2017. “The Evolution of the Personal Networks of Novice Librarian Researchers.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 17(1): 71-89.
