The Personal Networks of Novice Librarian Researchers

This presentation reports the findings of an analysis of personal network data gathered from the novice librarian researcher participants of the summer workshop of the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL), an institute designed to provide instruction in how to conduct a research project and establish a peer-network of like-minded library professionals to support each other throughout the research process. The first wave of data was gathered before the participants began IRDL, again at the completion of the workshop, at six months after completing the workshop, and will be gathered again at the one-year marker. The data gathered is about the people and the strength of the relationship in the personal research networks of each of the IRDL participants. During the presentation we will report on the observations of the research networks over time.

Highlighted in the presentation is the use of the freely available, open source, web-based software used to gather the personal network data, EgoWeb 2.0. We will describe the process of customizing the survey software to ask questions about the names of people these novice researchers go to get or give advice or help related to research, how often they interact (related to research or not), modes in which the interactions take place, and whether or not the people in the network know each other. We will report the statistical results that the software computes, about density and closeness and provides a customizable visualization of the personal network.