Information Studies Students Present their Research to the Profession
On Wednesday, 16 October 2013, four Information Studies students from the School of Information Management took part in an event organised by the Te Ūpoko o te Ika a Māui Wellington Region of LIANZA (Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa) in conjunction with LIANZA's Research Special Interest Group).
The aim of the event was to give student researchers an opportunity to share their work with the wider profession.
Vanessa King (Master of Information Studies, 2013)
Vanessa spoke about the relationship between Councils and Council-controlled organisations in relation to record keeping.
"Council-controlled organisations (CCOs) occupy a liminal position between the public and private sectors. This often creates dissonance between how they see themselves and how their shareholding councils see them. With this in mind, the research project explored the motivations for local body records managers becoming involved in CCO records management, as well as the barriers to their involvement."
Amy Joseph (Master of Information Studies, 2013)
Amy detailed her findings on e-book licensing requirements of public libraries.
Amy's project was developed in conjunction with an ongoing National Library of New Zealand initiative to investigate collaborative e-book procurement for libraries. It surveyed New Zealand public libraries in order to discover what elements of existing and proposed e-book lending models would best meet the needs of their users, and the degree of tolerance to limitations and friction imposed by different models to meet the needs of other stakeholders such as publishers and authors.
Eric Boamah (PhD, in progress)
Eric has conducted a study on digital preservation management in Ghana, and the barriers to a national programme.
"My focus is to explore the various contextual factors that are influencing the management and preservation of digital cultural heritage resources in Ghana and I use the context of New Zealand as my point of reference."
Rasmus Thogersen (PhD, in progress)
Rasmus spoke about his forthcoming research on the extent to which social (user generated) metadata can be trusted and used wholesale by libraries and similar institutions.
"In aggregations of cultural heritage metadata like Europeana, DPLA or DigitalNZ a certain degree of trust is embedded in the process of social (user generated) metadata aggregation; the local experts are authoritative sources and it is taken for granted that their metadata is of high quality.
"Social metadata provides the potential for semantic richness and it is cheap, but it also can result in errors and maybe even sabotage. My study intends to look at what happens when social metadata is shared between institutions through metadata aggregation and understand the role of trust and the perceived risks when social metadata of questionable provenance is re-used."
All the presentations were well received by the LIANZA members in attendance.
The event was hosted by School of Information Management staff Kathryn Oxborrow (Committee Member, Te Ūpoko o te Ika a Māui LIANZA) and Philip Calvert (Chair, LIANZA Research Special Interest Group).