The most outstanding feature of this subject was the amazing support provided by the lecturer! Throughout the semester we were able to email or call the lecturer and the response was always supportive and prompt.
This subject involved a great amount of reading in an area tha I have never expored before. Although I enjoy reading articles in SCAN, ACCESS etc, I have never given any thought to how these articles obtain their information, facts or conduct the studies that are reported on. This was a complete eye opener as I had never understood how much background work goes into conducting a study effectively, nor the ethical and practical constraints that need to be considered.
The area that I focussed on for my assignment, was to do with the changes that are currently affecting libraries worldwide; the issue of the impact of the onformation internet age and the place of libraries as information portals in this type of society.
We needed to then construct the scaffold on how we would conduct a small scale piece of research, bearing in mind the constraints of time, inexperience, ethics and models. This was a really difficult exercise to comprehend and then act on to construct the practical exercise. However, with Bev's support and wise guidance, I managed to get through the subject, learn and achieve a reasonable result - 66/100.
Although this was a subject that I really learnt a lot from, I doubt that I would ever conduct any research apart from examining aspects of our library service and areas for improvement. However, it will help me think more deeply about articles I read in my field of work and sometimes question the validity and strength of information presented and whether bias is evident which could affect what has been published.
The main text used was the main source of information and would be of use later if I ever wanted to conduct research.
Bryman, A. (2012). Social research methods (4th ed.). Oxford, UK: OUP.
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