Research for practice

Professor Hazel Hall (Edinburgh Napier University) held a public lecture at the School of Business and Economics on research/practice linkages in the UK (slides available in SlideShare). The lecture discussed collaborations in library and information science and library sector, but her observations are broadly relevant to many other areas of research and practice as well.

Hall argued for the importance of research-led practice and the problems with the "evaluation bypass" that was originally observed in medical practice but later on also in other fields. According to Hall, to achieve good practical results, research should feed into the practice and practice should be based on research. Evaluation bypass refers to a phenomenon when practitioners (too) eagerly adopt new techniques and technologies without evaluating them and their impact properly. This leads to suboptimal performance and in some cases, may be harmful.

Hall also noted that in library field, there is little practitioner-led research. This observation could well be extended to the broader information and knowledge field. There is a large number of professional journals, but only a few practitioners participate in rigorous research. At the same time, very often shallow investigations, badly designed and conducted small surveys and opinion-pieces are passed and cited as 'research'.

Some possible strategies to remedy the situation are to put explicit effort into fostering researcher/practitioner collaboration, help practitioners learn about doing research, informing professional press and key research connectors (people who are well-connected within the professional field such as trainers and popular speakers) and from practitioner point of view, to engage in horizon scanning.

Hall's work has been published, for instance, in following outlets:

This post has been published also at http://blogs.abo.fi/ikm/2014/03/17/importance-of-research-led-practice/

Archaeology and Archaeological Information in the Digital Society shows how the digitization of archaeological information, tools and workflows, and their interplay with both old and new non-digital practices throughout the archaeological information process, affect the outcomes of archaeological work, and in the end, our general understanding of the human past.

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Taking Health Information Behaviour into Account: implications of a neglected element for success- ful implementation of consumer health technologies on older adults (HIBA) is an Academy of Finland funded research project at Åbo Akademi University.

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ARKDIS project maps the implications and opportunities of the digitalisation of information and information work in the domain of archaeology and to develop and evaluate conceptual and practical methods and procedures for enhancing archaeological information work in the digitalised environment.

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