Welcome to the second post in our series highlighting suggestions for interacting with LibParlor Online Learning! Each post in this series will provide a list of lessons that a particular persona would be interested in and provide advice for navigating the curriculum accordingly. Each persona will then have a starter pack for jumping into LPOL in order to help with their research journey, professional development, and mentorship. Check out the first post here.
LibParlor Online Learning Personas: The MLIS Student
You are currently in a MLIS program and are interested in pursuing research. Perhaps you’ve taken a research methods course or maybe that wasn’t an option or requirement in your degree program so you didn’t pursue it. Maybe this is your second or third career and you have experience of other types of disciplinary research. Whatever the case may be, the LibParlor Online Learning curriculum provides all of the building blocks for your pursuit of publishing original LISLibrary and Information Science An interdisciplinary field that examines how physical and digital information is organized, accessed, collected, managed, disseminated and used, particularly in library settings. research! While taking the whole curriculum in chronological order could be the way you choose to engage with LPOL, this starter pack will provide the lessons that will give you the foundational overview of LIS research, if that is more your speed.
Course 1, Lesson 1: Developing An Identity As a Researcher
Course 1, Lesson 2: Finding a Research Direction
Course 1, Lesson 3: Prioritizing Reflection and Community
Course 1 of the LPOL curriculum is meant to be extremely reflective and iterative for you to learn about what drives your interest in LIS research and how that connects to who you are as a researcher. Embarking on your personal research journey can be very overwhelming, with a lot of skills and knowledge you may not have learned elsewhere in past degree programs or careers, but the lessons in Course 1 will gently introduce some preliminary concepts of research practice to you before you jump into actual research practice. This can be a really great way to start your learning and is all self-paced to meet you where you are, as you may be balancing your classwork, jobs, and caretaking obligations all at the same time. After taking Course 1, you will hopefully be able to identify what your research interests could be and where to take them and how to build a researcher community for when you need a place to turn to for brainstorming, feedback, and support.
Course 2, Lesson 3: LIS Research Methodologies & Frameworks
Course 2, Lesson 4: Exploring Methodologies That Suit Your Project
Course 2 introduces the characteristics of LIS research and methodologies to help you choose an approach for your project ideas by learning about the field’s body of literature, methodologies, and approaches to conducting research. These lessons will provide you with suggestions on how to plan out your research, how to create your own timelines that work best for you, and align your desired outcomes to a research question and methodological approach. Even if you’re not quite ready to take the steps toward selecting a research project, Course 2 can give you an overview of what this work can look like when you’re ready.
Course 3, Lesson 1: Identifying Collaborators
Course 3, Lesson 2: Refining Your Research Approach
Finding collaborators can be challenging when you’re still in grad school. Course 3, Lesson 1 builds on the researcher community you work on in Course 1, Lesson 3 and offers recommendations on how to find and work with collaborators on research projects. Lesson 2 will help you narrow down your research interests into forming the potential for a research question that will lead your future project, as well as matching your question to the proper methodologyMethodology The theoretical framework that informs how a researcher approaches their work and what methods are used to collect data. for how to pursue the answers to your question.
Course 4, Lesson 1: What and Where To Publish
Course 4, Lesson 2: The LIS Literature Review
Course 4, Lesson 3: Writing Skills
Course 4, Lesson 4: Self-Management
Even if you have an extensive amount of experience in writing, Course 4 on writing and editing can be a very helpful overview of common LIS research outputs, thinking about what venues make the most sense for your research project, reviewing the state of literature on your topic, writing either alone or with your collaborators, and how to stay on track with your work to set yourself up for success while balancing other priorities in your life.
Course 6, Lesson 1: Building Your Research Plan
Course 6, Lesson 2: How LibParlor Can Support You & How You Can Support the LIS Research Community
Whether you choose to take the whole curriculum or use this starter pack to put together different lessons, the final course in LPOL helps you put all the pieces together of a research project to give you a map of how to eventually submit a project proposal. Our workbook provides final templates for all of the curriculum activities that build towards a project so that you feel prepared to submit an idea to whichever venue with which you’ve chosen to share your research. From there, you’ll be recommended future steps and some reflection work for you to assess what you’ll need after you’ve finished the curriculum, as well as resources from LibParlor and suggestions for how to support and improve the LIS research community.
Being a student about to enter the LIS field and start your own research project can be an intimidating experience! But we hope LPOL and this starter pack can provide you with the resources to grow your confidence and get you to where you want to be in your research journey. Consider posting in our Classifieds section if you’d like to navigate the curriculum with a cohort, and build a group of library workers to learn and discuss together!
Look out for the next starter pack in our series next month that will be curated for early-career librarians in their first tenure-track positions.
Do you plan on using these? Is there anything missing here you’d like to see us provide in the curriculum? Let us know in the comments, or email us at libparlor@gmail.com!
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