eloquently argued that: “If people believe a story, if the story grips them, whether events actually happened or not is irrelevant. It is for the pedant or the unreconstructed positivist to ques- tion poetic licence, seeking to convert story telling into testimony” (see Gabriel, 1998; see also Gabriel, 2000). My brief communication carries a cautionary note as it dispenses with several of the accepted format and requirements of a conventional research study as it offers only a glimpse of the research study undertaken.
Combining interests in stories with reference work
Firstly, in my research I was predom- inately interested in how stories are used to understand and facilitate the information seeking behaviour of library patrons and other stakeholders. Allied with my immediate interest was my quest to find out the role of story- telling in an organisation, for example, a library. I found that individuals and indeed groups tell stories for a variety of reasons, ranging from warning col- leagues, providing entertainment to encouraging each other when faced with personal or work-related prob- lems. These reasons made me conscious of stories as sources of rich informa- tion that abound in organisations and around people.
In my research work I adopted the often-quoted definition of mediation in librarianship by Kuhlthau, and it is as follows: “One who assists, guides, enables, and otherwise intervenes in another person’s information search process.” (Kuhlthau, 2005). My own take on this is that people tell their own stories during information seeking process, they never remain indifferent. Rather, they share stories or experience
of their previous information searches, and if new to the process, communicate with the reference librarian what they expect in the mediation process. Storytelling as a research method, espe- cially in organisations, is by all accounts a well-researched field in organisational management but not so in library and information science disciplines. This omission may well indicate a methodo- logical gap in the context of information seeking behaviour. A methodological gap is “variation of research methods which is necessary to generate new insights to avoid distorted findings” (see for example, Miles, 2017). This identifiable gap led me to adopt storytelling as research method in my work.
According to Boje (1991:106), storytelling organisation is “a collective storytelling system in which the performance of stories is a key part of members sense- making and a means to allow them to supplement individual memories with institutional memory.”
The main enquiry of my doctoral thesis could be described as phenomenologi- cal interview. It involved an “informal, interactive process… aimed at evoking a comprehensive account of the person’s experience of the phenomenon” (Mous- takas,1994:114). The interview, which included storytelling, helped to capture lived experience of the participants.
Tasks of exploring storytelling as a research method
Adopting storytelling as a research method, may seem interesting but many prob- lems soon appeared during my research. For instance, storytelling as a research method in library and information science is rarely mentioned in the literature. Even more problematic is the overemployment of quantitative analysis in library science. Inevitably, there is dearth of alternate
research method in this area of research method.
The main matter-of-fact initial tasks I encountered included the following:
l creating an ambience in which to en- gage participants in storytelling and elicit stories which could provide the oppor- tunity to create knowledge rather than a piece of fiction or fantasy. Additionally, how to gain the confidence of the partici- pants involved in the research?
Other practical challenges included the following:
l ensuring that all the participants in- volved in the storytelling activity included a good sample of all sections of the organ- isational workforce; and no stories were disparaged;
l ensuring that I did not become part of the story and how to look out for “the acts of embellishment, and exaggeration” in the stories being told? Or avoid being drag into “proto stories”. For example, the nar- rative‘s opening line “… did you hear …”?
l reacting to emotions such as – pleasur- able anticipation, self-confidence anxiety, which some of participants brought to storytelling exercise;
l resolving the ambiguity (if any) sur- rounding the data collection technique, and how would it encourage and enable the production of sufficiently compelling stories, and whether the nature of the research would yield tales of experiences rich enough for analysis;
l reacting to participants who were inclined to retract “their stories” because they felt their stories could “harm” a colleague. Invariably, I was faced with the dilemma of reconciling original with the retracted stories.
Perhaps more problematic was the issue of how to navigate a myriad of ethical
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