If you already completed Course 1, Lesson 1: Developing an Identity as a Researcher, you worked to examine your lived experiences, current motivations, and perspectives that will shape the research you pursue. Developing this identity is an essential first step for determining what you want to research and what you want to write. Your research may be informed by your job duties, your search for knowledge and understanding of a particular concept, skill, or task, or it may result from a philosophical need to explore an abstractAbstractThe concise summary of a research article that provides a broad overview of the research being presented. idea. Either way, it is important to identify an audience as a part of this process.
Is your audience a practitioner just like you? Is your audience someone seeking to improve a skill or task? Is your audience interested in how your organization accomplished a change or implemented an innovation so they might use it as a model? Or is your audience someone who wants to think deeply about a philosophical issue in librarianship, higher education, or professional practice? You will want to determine who might make up your audience and how much they may already know about the topic of your research. Knowing these factors can help you write effectively and help you decide on a context for your publication that might be most accessible to the readers you want to reach.
Once you have identified the audience, consider where they turn for information. Your potential readers may have many professional characteristics influencing where and how they read. For example, they may have limited access to subscription publications. Once you understand the audience, you can consider how you’d like to shape the work to meet the needs and interests of the target audience and thus can anticipate the ideal type of publication to pursue.
Let’s take a look at how different LISLibrary and Information ScienceAn interdisciplinary field that examines how physical and digital information is organized, accessed, collected, managed, disseminated and used, particularly in library settings. publication venues identify or scope their audiences. While the LIS Publications Wiki is no longer being maintained, it contains a valuable inventory of publications in the field. Browse through the different lists of publications and explore some titles that interest you, either because of the subject focus or because the purpose, objective, or mission of the journal speaks to you. Each journal profile on the wiki will indicate an audience (and if it doesn’t, open up the website for the journal and look for one.)
For example, look at the Aims & Scope of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly from the LIS Scholarly Journals list. They define their audience in the following way: “For library school faculty, it provides an outlet for research publication as well as source materials for students. For the cataloger, the journal provides both theoretical background and potential solutions to current problems. For the public services librarian, there are discussions of bibliographic records in actual use and of the importance of feedback from the user to the creator of cataloging systems. For the administrator, it explores the complex elements in the library organization.” If you have research in-progress or an idea for future research, how would you identify the audience(s) for whom you write your work? Who is most likely to be seeking out the subject of your work in order to inform their practice or understanding?
Exercise
Complete the following exercise in your LPOL Workbook. This exercise will help you check for learning, engage with the material, and work through new ideas.
The 4.1.1: Know Your Audience worksheet in your LPOL Workbook will help you match your research ideas and topics to an audience and venue. Fill in the table with three ideas and identify three potential professional audiences. Ask yourself who would benefit from your work, who is doing similar work, and who you want to reach. You will also record a justification for why this audience might be interested in the chosen topic. Here’s an example to work from:
TOPIC
AUDIENCE
WHY?
AUDIENCE NOTES
Example: Strategies for conducting outreach to campus faculty to increase awareness of Open Educational Resources
Academic librarians at community colleges, colleges, and universities who provide instruction and scholarly communication as well as OER librarians; library administrators seeking to launch programs or hire OER librarians
These practitioners and administrators want to know how other libraries have launched OER programs for their campuses. They want practical strategies they can adopt and adapt to their local environment.
– academic librarians tend to read scholarly journals – those in instruction will likely focus mainly on instruction-oriented journals and conferences, while scholarly communicationsScholarly communicationsThe ecosystem that exists where research and other kinds of scholarly information is created, evaluated, disseminated, and preserved for the scholarly community to use now and in the future. librarians will focus on those venues – administrators tend to focus on different spaces and require short, easy-to-digest information
Table 1. Created by Elaine Thornton for LibParlor Online Learning, 2023.
Know Your Audience
If you already completed Course 1, Lesson 1: Developing an Identity as a Researcher, you worked to examine your lived experiences, current motivations, and perspectives that will shape the research you pursue. Developing this identity is an essential first step for determining what you want to research and what you want to write. Your research may be informed by your job duties, your search for knowledge and understanding of a particular concept, skill, or task, or it may result from a philosophical need to explore an abstractAbstract The concise summary of a research article that provides a broad overview of the research being presented. idea. Either way, it is important to identify an audience as a part of this process.
Is your audience a practitioner just like you? Is your audience someone seeking to improve a skill or task? Is your audience interested in how your organization accomplished a change or implemented an innovation so they might use it as a model? Or is your audience someone who wants to think deeply about a philosophical issue in librarianship, higher education, or professional practice? You will want to determine who might make up your audience and how much they may already know about the topic of your research. Knowing these factors can help you write effectively and help you decide on a context for your publication that might be most accessible to the readers you want to reach.
Once you have identified the audience, consider where they turn for information. Your potential readers may have many professional characteristics influencing where and how they read. For example, they may have limited access to subscription publications. Once you understand the audience, you can consider how you’d like to shape the work to meet the needs and interests of the target audience and thus can anticipate the ideal type of publication to pursue.
Let’s take a look at how different 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. publication venues identify or scope their audiences. While the LIS Publications Wiki is no longer being maintained, it contains a valuable inventory of publications in the field. Browse through the different lists of publications and explore some titles that interest you, either because of the subject focus or because the purpose, objective, or mission of the journal speaks to you. Each journal profile on the wiki will indicate an audience (and if it doesn’t, open up the website for the journal and look for one.)
For example, look at the Aims & Scope of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly from the LIS Scholarly Journals list. They define their audience in the following way: “For library school faculty, it provides an outlet for research publication as well as source materials for students. For the cataloger, the journal provides both theoretical background and potential solutions to current problems. For the public services librarian, there are discussions of bibliographic records in actual use and of the importance of feedback from the user to the creator of cataloging systems. For the administrator, it explores the complex elements in the library organization.” If you have research in-progress or an idea for future research, how would you identify the audience(s) for whom you write your work? Who is most likely to be seeking out the subject of your work in order to inform their practice or understanding?
Exercise
Complete the following exercise in your LPOL Workbook. This exercise will help you check for learning, engage with the material, and work through new ideas.
The 4.1.1: Know Your Audience worksheet in your LPOL Workbook will help you match your research ideas and topics to an audience and venue. Fill in the table with three ideas and identify three potential professional audiences. Ask yourself who would benefit from your work, who is doing similar work, and who you want to reach. You will also record a justification for why this audience might be interested in the chosen topic. Here’s an example to work from:
– those in instruction will likely focus mainly on instruction-oriented journals and conferences, while scholarly communicationsScholarly communications The ecosystem that exists where research and other kinds of scholarly information is created, evaluated, disseminated, and preserved for the scholarly community to use now and in the future. librarians will focus on those venues
– administrators tend to focus on different spaces and require short, easy-to-digest information
Topic 1 References
Izenstark, Amanda, Agee, Ann, Jackson, Holly, Sandelli, Anna, and Lindsay Roberts. “So You Want to Publish: Becoming a Researcher.” College & Research Libraries News 82, no. 1: 10 (2021). https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/24765/32611
Reid, Stephen, Kiefer, Kate, and Dawn Kowalski. (Adapting to Your Audience. The WAC Clearinghouse. Colorado State University (2013). Available at https://wac.colostate.edu/repository/resources/writing/guides/