‘There is no field of human endeavour where information does not matter. Try to think of one and you simply can’t.’
in an apparently ‘richer’ information environment than ever before, they may struggle more than they are aware to filter, evaluate, select and respond to the information with which they are provided.
3. Information and its use has never had a higher profile in society than it does at present. We are at a point in time in LIS when we have the potential to contribute to the widest range of dis- courses, for there is no field of human endeavour where information does not matter. Try to think of one and you simply can’t. However there is a danger implicit in being able as a discipline to contribute to all others – and that is that as a discipline you become lost in the mix. We become so ‘embedded’, so subordinate, so service oriented, that we no longer have a purpose of our own. That is a wholly bad thing in research terms and I have a sense sometimes that we are losing sight of our own core principles. As a discipline we need to come together to remind ourselves what these are and to set out what they should be for the future.
December-January 2017/18
4. Our discipline is facing real challenges too. We are often underfunded, we have to compete for scarce resources, we have become part of other departments and functions. We know that we are often overlooked, sometimes regarded as less ‘serious’ or significant than other subjects. We know our true worth but we need to be able to express and communicate that in a world where metrics are all. Whether a practitioner or an academic we have to demonstrate outcomes and impact and it is my view that we can work together to better demonstrate the impact of infor- mation on individuals, organisations, cultures and societies. We need to com- municate the contribution that informa- tion access can make to health, education, economic prosperity, creativity, relaxa- tion, happiness and the sum of human knowledge.
5. Ultimately REF success equates direct- ly with research funding both in direct grant but also in raising the profile of the departments, schools and universities in which we are situated. Without funding and students, the discipline will die in universities in the UK. We are in some danger currently as a discipline. While we in LIS research often outperformed our institutions in REF 2014, because we
are small departments on the whole the funding achieved is often fairly negligible and insubstantial. Student numbers in terms of applications have declined stead- ily over the decades since I first became a lecturer, and “funds follow numbers” has always been the mantra in HE. We need to address as a discipline the need to remotivate young people to be interested in LIS careers: this doesn’t just matter to the universities, it is hugely significant to the profession as a whole. One of the ways in which we can do this is by recognising the value of and celebrating our research together as a profession.
6. The research evaluation methodology that is currently adopted assesses: (i) the quality of public outputs produced by staff of universities in subjects grouped into Units of Assessment; (ii) the uni- versity environment and the degree to which it resources, supports and invests in research; and (iii) the impact of the university’s research through case studies which show that the research impacts upon society (of which more in 7 below). The first two of these depend very much upon the efforts of the universities and our commitment to continuing to carry out high quality internationally recog- nised research. It is important that we
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Why REF Matters
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