Information users should also consider themselves information creators, reusing and re-purposing discovered content in different formats. Learners should understand how their discipline’s processes produce, reproduce and disseminate scholarly material. Learners consider their contribution to the body of knowledge through their original work and discipline’s scholarly conversation community of practice.
Personal
During lockdown, I have been creating quizzes, which is almost as enjoyable as taking part in them. This requires research, such as the one where I was finding photos of worldwide landmarks during lockdown. Some were easy such as musicians in films and TV, films based on video games and place names in song titles: that's what Wikipedia is made for! However the more difficult ones were anniversaries in 2021 (Ian Holm would have been 90 next year 😢), songs for our times (such as Don't Stand So Close to Me, Ghost Town, You Can't Touch This, It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine) and my personal favourite Que Sera Sera) and technology predicted by fiction (did you know the author William Gibson invented the word cyberspace?). It was all about how to find the information and then repurposing it into quiz questions. It was easier to search for the information in a way than searching as part of my work as there was a lot out there, but it was more difficult to find accurate sources and use the right search terms. Plus the process and structure of the content was set by me, so there was more scope to work with. I tried to theme the quizzes, such as Cambridge, doing three quizzes per week: one wordy quiz such as missing vowels, one general knowledge with questions and one picture quiz. I've had to revise some of the quizzes to make them fit; the technology predicted by fiction was going to be questions, but it had to change to alternate letters removed as I couldn't make the information I'd found into questions, without them being incredibly difficult anyway.
Finally, sending them proved more difficult as I used Word documents initially, but my edition of Word wasn't compatible with everyone's, so I changed it to PDFs, which has been working fine. I generated enough interest that instead of only my brother sending them to his work colleagues, which is where it started; I got exasperated by them using the ones from The Sun and the Daily Mail; it branched out to family and friends, and now the most applicable ones are going out to my A&H librarian colleagues. I've been broadening the audience through word of mouth. Getting such great feedback, making sure I'm pitching the questions at the right level and choosing appropriate subjects and fun themes has given me such a great confidence boost at this difficult time and has been giving me a welcome distraction. I'm going to do some book-themed questions next, just for my colleagues, or maybe even library-themed, if I can...
Professional
I wrote a series of articles for CILIP Update magazine, before the mass exodus; now I barely know anyone who suscribes anymore. I did it that way as it was a quick turnaround from submission to publication: ebook information can go out of date very quickly, plus I avoided the saga outlined in the Nature article. The articles were repurposed from my PG dissertation for my librarianship degree. I was told not to let all that research go to waste. I suppose my perspective was unique at the time, focusing on the industry and the librarian perspective, not the student experience. The magazine is less formal than academic journals, so I tried to make them entertaining, comparing choosing the right ebook model and platform to dating for instance. The structure and processes were set by the editor and the publication's house style, so working under such restrictions made the writing much simpler. The managing editor and I worked out the length of the articles, the timetable of when each would be published and I found free to use, creative commons images, then worked with the editor to choose the best image for the piece to fit the page. Everyone I worked with was a woman incidentally, apart from the images guy, so I was surprised to read Chawla's article on underrepresentation of women in peer review, but less surprised about the underrepresentation of non-Westerners.
Once I realised how locked down the articles were, only readable through the magazine to subscribers; I thought they'd also go on the website and as blog posts; I made them open access by checking with the editor who let me put them on my LinkedIn page. If you're interested, here they are: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahburton3/. The whole process showed me how naive and inexperienced I am, leaving me feeling a little lacking in self esteem. But after the publication there was a lot of great feedback and interest. I was asked to do some presentations at a conference and various meetings. I repurposed the articles into presentations for a formal conference in London and for library peers. There was a lot of repurposing into different formats and for different audiences going on! From dissertation, to articles, to presentations. Although it was a few years ago, the presentation is sadly still applicable as it covers the broad strokes:
P. S. Thank you for highlighting that Claire Sewell's book is accessible as an ebook, I will certainly read the whole of it and not just one chapter.
Friday, 26 June 2020
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