PL 16/08: L&T make R&D

If learning and teaching is production rather than reproduction, they turn into research and development.

Ready for exploration.

Academic libraries have always supported research as well as teaching, As the walls go down, libraries and librarians must move deeper into the R&D process - or be bypassed by a new generation of web-oriented students, teachers and scholars.

At LATINA, we have focused on the teaching/learning dimension. But quite similar processes are at work in the world of research, development, entrepreneurship and market-oriented innovation. Two of my favorite bloggers - Lorcan Dempsey and Dan Cohen - have written nicely about this:

Reference and research

Science lives by cumulation, or building on past results - “standing on the shoulders of giants”, as Newton said. References are the bricks - dull, but necessary. Only librarians love them.

Cohen is the initiator of the reference management tool Zotero - and his team has just released version 1.5.

Dempsey says:

Libraries are not ends in themselves, although it is tempting to talk about them as if they are. They support research, learning, civic engagement, personal development, ….

This means that it is as important, or more important, to understand how technology is impacting those behaviors as it is to understand how technology is impacting libraries themselves.

He cites Carol Palmer:

At the practical level, informed decisions require deep knowledge of scholarly and scientific research practices and potentials.

For instance, studies have shown scientists are reading more and that information users of all kinds are searching in new ways by “bouncing” on the Web.

Source: Changing research behavior and libraries