Did you know that about 95% of incarcerated people eventually reenter the general population? Neither did I. Nor did I know that a high proportion of them are high school dropouts, though I suppose that’s not all that surprising. Given those circumstances, the importance of, say, health literacy training for inmates seems pretty obvious. Obvious, but not easy, especially when you consider that, um, they’re not allowed to use the internet.
Solving that conundrum is the aim of a project led by Gail Kouame of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM). She and her team built a sort of internet-in-a-box to simulate the experience of web browsing. The regional NN/LM is housed at our university’s health science library, which is how I got to hear about this.
My point isn’t just to show off the work of our library’s great people—like Emily Keller and Deb Raftus, who are writing books for new academic libraries that are suddenly faced with new subject specialties, or John Vallier, whose project involves figuring out what to do about those horrible DRM terms of service on music downloads that nobody reads (though institutions should really pay attention to terms of service lest they run afoul of them.
Nope, not just showing off. I’m writing about this because, for as long as I’ve been in this field, I’ve heard the continual “They don’t get it” from both academics and practitioners when it comes to research. “Academics are pointy-headed theorists who wouldn’t know what to do with a real patron and whose research is abstruse at best and frivolous at worst.” “Practitioners are small-minded drudges who care not a whit about anything that doesn’t speak to their momentary and comparatively petty work concerns.”
Sound familiar?
And for the record, it’s not hard to find cringe-inducing research that sends me scrambling for the door at conferences and to find library staffers who believe all research is pointless. Moreover, there are colleges and universities with libraries and LIS programs that barely tolerate or even acknowledge one another, or worse.
This all seems so . . . pointless. Yes, we see the world from different perspectives, but c’mon. Numerous recent examples of great research that’s useful in and motivated by practice (and vice versa) have arisen from OCLC, Pew, Project Information Literacy, and a bunch of libraries. I’ve also been very impressed with the kinds of in-house investigations done by folks at universities like Illinois and Rochester, helping us to understand the nature of their users and how they do their work.
The point here is that “research” can take many forms and be for many purposes, and when our professional and scholarly communities come together and understand each other and each other’s perspectives, the results of that research can be even more powerful in both venues. That same research that is seen as today’s esoterica could become tomorrow’s can’t-live-without-it. (Google? Probabilistic information retrieval?)
If you want a great example of research that can do both, I give you our PhD student Jill Woelfer. She’s spent much of the past several years working with homeless young people and researching their information lives and their use of mobile devices. She asked them how they use and experience public libraries. In her study, she found that almost 80% use them, mostly to get online (for employment information, classes, social networks), to find books, and—get this—to talk to librarians. For help.
It’s possible that engaging with librarians and libraries might help homeless kids move past the bad experiences many of them have had with social institutions. Knowing how they relearn how to interact could be an important part of facilitating that process. A goal we can all agree on . . . but that’s another story.
JOSEPH JANES is associate professor and MLIS program chair at the Information School of the University of Washington in Seattle.
