This morning I went ahead and read Dr. Palmer’s “Information Work at the Boundaries…” article, and I am glad I did. Homework can wait. And besides, I went out last night and networked with some colleagues about my case study (major project) for my change management class.

What? Who said you can’t network with colleagues at an outdoor cafe on a fine, late summer evening? OK, OK, it’s a bar, but faculty members, PhD and Masters students talking widely in our own little real world Carnival of the Infosciences still constitutes networking. Going to do some more networking tonight too. You do networking your way; I’ll do it mine. Heck, we even had a guy from NCSA with us for a while. Talk about interdisciplinarity. And on that note, onward to this morning’s reading:

Palmer, Carole L. “Information Work at the Boundaries of Science: Linking Library Services to Research Practices.” Library Trends 45, no. 2 (1996): 165-91.

Introduction

Although I did not do a good job of stating it, we saw in yesterdays’ readings that, “Library services, collections, information tools, and criteria for allocating budgets often do not account for interdisciplinary and emerging fields of study” (166).

[I would love to get some feedback on this from Jenica, and any others actively doing collection development.]

If we were to understand the information ecology of interdisciplinary researchers, then we as librarians would be better able to serve as active participants in the research process.

Approach

The article is heavily based on Dr. Palmer’s dissertation: Practices and conditions of boundary crossing research work : a study of scientists at an interdisciplinary institute—University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996. It is listed as unpublished, but I believe that her 2001 book, Work at the boundaries of science : information and the interdisciplinary research process, is heavily based upon it.

My recent study [her dissertation] of scientists at an interdisciplinary institute (Palmer, 1996) combines quantitative and qualitative methods to gain an understanding of the practices and and conditions involved in the cross-disciplinary research process. After identifying a sample of boundary-crossing researchers through citation analysis methods, interview data were collected and analyzed to explore how researchers gather and disseminate information in multiple knowledge domains. Based on results from that study, this article examines the discipline-crossing information practices and strategies described by highly interdisciplinary scientists (167).

An Overview of Boundary Elements

• Physical objects – data, data sources, molecules, apparati, computational technologies
• Methods – techniques, procedures, methodological training, computational technologies
• People – “big guys,” colleagues, students
• Words – metaphors, frameworks, concepts (168-9)

Ways of Working across Boundaries

“Problem-centered” research is how these scientists regard their work, being uncomfortable with disciplinary, multidisciplinary, or interdisciplinary labels (169).

Information probing is an important type of information work for cross-disciplinary researchers at the Center. Probing is investigative in nature and takes place outside of the scientist’s core knowledge domain. Researchers probe broadly to increase their breadth of perspective and to generate new ideas (169).

Probing, though, may well lead to broadened or changed research interests and, thus, complicates the information ecology for interdisciplinary researchers “by altering the scope of relevant subjects to search and changing where pertinent information will be found” (170).

While interdisciplinary scientists may have different information needs than more discipline-based scientists, they use the same general sources. “The researchers rely on both formal and informal channels for gathering information, depending primarily on personal networks, conferences, and the published literature” (170).

Networks (Personal)
Most important vehicle for information exchange for Center scientists (170).

Conferences

While the large discipline-oriented conferences were rarely mentioned by the researchers, small specialized meetings were considered by many to be as critical as personal contacts for keeping up with information. The most valued meetings are those that congregate at the problem level, where researchers feel part of a “closely knit group” that shares specific research interests (172).

I am wondering how applicable this might be to the library world. While I haven’t exactly seen it stated this way, and many librarians may not consider themselves researchers, I seem to get the feeling that this may be the case in librarianship based on comments I have read about the effectiveness of, say, ALA Annual compared to ACRL or another divisional conference, or even smaller, more specialized conferences.

Now admittedly, I have only attended one ALA Annual and one ACRL conference (both this year), and one Endeavor Voyager EndUser conference, at which I presented in 2003. I would have to say that for me the highest direct benefits went from the latter to the former. While I received much of value from all of them, the greatest direct benefits came from the most highly constrained in size and topics. I am not sure which one provided the greatest amount of indirect benefits, which should certainly not be overlooked though. I certainly had the most fun at both the ACRL Blogger Dinner and OCLC‘s It’s All Good Bloggers’ Salon at ALA Annual [pic live on location post].

What do the rest of you think? Which conferences are the most beneficial to you in your work and why?

EndUser was most valuable to me because:

• It provided me an opportunity to present to a large audience
• It was directly applicable to my job and the ILS that we used
• I was able to learn a great deal that I was then able to go back and implement to better assist my patrons

I certainly can work towards giving a presentation at a larger conference, and even had a possible opportunity to present at ACRL, but left it to fellow students I felt were better qualified. My current view of the value scale of direct benefits is also probably highly correlated with the fact that I was a practitioner, and in effect, a researcher, when attending EndUser, while I attended the two larger as a student getting “the lay of the land.” Thoughts anyone?

Benefits of conference attendance for Palmer’s interdisciplinary researchers:

• framework for intensified personal exchange
• social interaction
• professional interaction
• meet future research partners/collaborators
• references to the literature
• communication difficulties less than in the literature
• information acquired is different than that in the literature
• raw, unpolished
• speculative
• “undercurrent”

Literature
The problem is (a) too much to read and, (2) literature dispersion. The Internet has only made the dispersion problem worse.

“Broad reading can help maintain a cross-disciplinary edge and sustain a wide perspective, developing new interests, and opening “broader vistas”" (174).

• Browse large bodies of literature
• Broad conceptual and “summary books”
• General and comparative journals
• Journals at the “right disciplinary intersections” (175)
• Cross-disciplinary review articles

“The combined practice of browsing both the general multidisciplinary titles and the more specialized cross-disciplinary journals provides an important balance of breadth and depth, both of which are necessary for interdisciplinary progress” (175).

Learning

The more subject areas a scientist spans, the greater the burden, and the work is especially taxing because the researchers are not just responsible for specifics that are borrowed from another field. They must also understand the history, surrounding context, and the current status of the material. White (1987) maintains that any meaningful crossing of disciplines “must take place through a process of translation that is based upon rather full knowledge of the practices that define each community” (p. 11) Researchers must understand theory, technique, and particulars” (176, emphasis mine).

No wonder I often feel overwhelmed in my learning. This is the way I feel, and I have often complained about how commoditized higher education makes this a completely unrealistic goal. I find my LIS education to be particularly egregious in this respect. And yes, I would find most any discipline lacking along these lines, but many of the LIS Masters students I know seem downright deathly allergic to theory, and often even context. They only want the technique and particulars. This actually one of the few dimensions that I do not care if I am judgmental about others.

• Colleagues as pointers and quality filters
• Team learning
• Footnote chasing
• Name searching
• Workshops and classes
• General interest colloquia
• Collaboration

Intermediaries
Most vital factor; serve as conduits, transfer mechanisms or intermediaries between scientific communities (179).
Grad students, at least in this context, play a vital and unique role.

The Import/Export Imbalance

Serious imbalance, with very few researchers trying to reach multiple or general audiences. Seems to be an accepted condition of research.

In a study of cross-disciplinary research, it is easy to focus on cooperative approaches to science and neglect the competitive aspects of the enterprise. Cooperation is often necessary to complete a specific project, but within and between fields there is intense competition for resources, authority, and territory. Rivalry could be a factor in the differential between import and export (182).

There is a clear opportunity here for information professionals to assist in the information trnasfer cycle by facilitating the dissemination of information across disciplinary boundaries. To do so, we will need to set our goals beyond providing access and begin concentrating on how to promote interaction and synthesis (183).

Shifting Emphasis to the Periphery

Many researchers find that to play the science game strategically, they need to sustain a firm position in a discipline-based specialization while they target cross-disciplinary opportunities. … Core maintenance can keep a career intact and sustain funding while a researcher starts as a novice in a territory where he or she is not recognized (183).

Active strategies employed to increase serendipitous discovery.

Facilitating Boundary-Crossing Information Work

“Having asserted from the outset of this article that information professionals are part of the research process, what can we do to advance the cause of interdisciplinary integration” (184)?

• Understand the use of information in the cross-disciplinary research process.
• Formulate “information initiatives that may promote boundary-crossing inquiry” (184).
• Conducive to probing and learning.
• Tools that function as boundary objects.
• Librarians equipped as boundary intermediaries.
• Provide “services that transfer and translate information across scientific communities” (184).
• Collections – multidisciplinary periodicals and general texts, handbooks, and review literature.
• Digitize these.
• Integrative reviews of research.
• Digitize and do the footnote chasing by “providing a link to the full text of each reference” (184).
• “Since there are few incentives for scientists to take on bibliographic compilation projects, information professionals need to initiate collaborative arrangements with experts to produce high quality problem-centered information tools” (185).
• Facilitate exposure to raw results – “it would be a mistake to continue to emphasize only the published product or the electronic equivalent. We will need to develop new standards and criteria for the presentation of raw data and results and create platforms for discussion around materials” (185).
• Mapping concepts and tracing terms across disciplines.
• Current awareness and selective dissemination of information programs, but particularly in peripheral areas.

Cross-disciplinary researchers need to probe, retrieve, and learn within core and peripheral knowledge domains, and the borders between domains are mutable. Information environments should be flexible enough to accommodate changing boundaries. Undoubtedly, many users will continue to have a need for disciplinary approaches to information. Hypertext capabilities allow us to create adaptable systems that can place in the foreground either the periphery or the core, whichever framework is best suited to the researcher’s problem area and approach (186).

We can then become informed and active participants in the export process by making linguistic and electronic links that will promote freer exchange across boundaries, and by creating information tools that are configured around the actual research problems and information work practices of contemporary researchers (186-70).

I find this article extremely thought-provoking and relevant. The implications to librarianship, and to the kind of librarian I hope to be, are profound. My biggest concern, other than the direct implications for librarians as cross-disciplinary researchers, is how do we reconfigure the structure of knowledge to support this type of scholarship? And then, how do we go about implementing it in our information tools?

This article is highly recommended. In fact, I highly recommend you acquire the entire issue of Library Trends 45(2) Fall 1996. Well, I was going to point you to the school’s Publication Office website but it seems they’ve recently outsourced the publishing to Johns Hopkins University Press and back issues are unavailable online. And where the hell is the student subscription rate now? <grrr>

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I would seriously appreciate any feedback, or answers to the various questions I asked throughout. I spent most of this last, and very beautiful, summer Saturday working on this. I have invested almost eight hours in reading, summarizing, and commenting on this article. Please let me know if you found it useful or interesting. Feel free to leave lengthy comments. I seriously do not mind and, would in fact, appreciate it.

If you think I am a complete idiot for “wasting” such a day, well, I’m capable of coming to that decision on my own often enough.