Kasia Idzi

My research question

“How as Course Librarians can we better support our Wimbledon students in evaluating and using variety of library resources to promote sustainability and help students to include their voices?”

I decided to look at our teaching of Information Literacy – more specifically a critical thinking about information sources. I wanted to discover how we can better incorporate critical pedagogy nad social justice into teaching too.

You can read more about my professional background in the first blog post here.

Project summary

What I think about it once is done, what went well, what I had struggled with and what ideas I got from working on it.

This is the last thing I am writing before submitting my project for an assessment.

This has been the most difficult unit on the PgCert course for me. I have never done any action project research (ARP) or used any primary research techniques. However, looking back at what I have achieved, I have to say that I am very pleased that I had this opportunity to learn by means of the ARP.

My project did not run very smoothly. I had started with a very different idea of what I was going to do to what I have done. My initial idea was to design an Information Literacy (IL) session and work with the students as the participants in my research. I spent at least two weeks working towards making that project happen before realising that it makes a bigger sense to start with myself as a librarian. When reading about ARP’s cycles I thought, hang on, I need to start in the beginning. Once I knew that I will be working with my team for this project I think I was on track.

What worked for me in this project was how it motivated me to work on my skills as a teacher. I gained more knowledge about my professional subject area and gained a new way of thinking about my role as a librarian. Learning how IL skills can empower anyone regardless of race, nation or social status was alone worth doing this project. Learning that IL is improving our sustainability by teaching us more effective use of information was a bonus too. This inspired me and brought lots of satisfaction in my job and everyday life too.

Additionally, it created this great opportunity for my team to work together and learn from each other. We are already using my focus group findings to design our next session for the students. We are going to use more formats of resources then usual and will try to engage the students’ voice in the session more, by being participants in the session ourselves.

Time management had been an issue for me. I spent so much time reading about my topic and research methods, then planning my actions, that I did not have enough time to record all my finding in the blog. I have done lots of writing anyway, so maybe that does not work against me in the end. However, I did not leave as much time as I would have wanted for gathering data and its analysis. I believe it went as well as it could, but if I was to do this again, I would have started taking some action a bit earlier into the project.

In terms of the research methods, I think I chose the right ones for my project. I got useful data from my questionnaire and the focus group. I definitely got answers to my question on how to improve our teaching of critical thinking about resources. I think the part of my research question that I got least data on was the sustainability element of the teaching. I did gather lots of secondary data on Sustainable Information Literacy and my knowledge of the subject is constantly broadening (I have a training session on eco-literacy library toolkit planned this term and I continue engaging with the literature on the topic), however, there was not much space left for this in my primary research. I may have packed too much into one research question, but at the same time it was worth researching. I feel better equipped now to put sustainability into any session I run. My secondary resources motivated me to learn more and gave me some ideas how to action teaching about sustainability within the IL.

The project gave me idea for the next one, so the cycle continues. I want to engage the students now to evaluate our teaching and ask them how we could improve it, so it is going to be more relevant to them.

Presentation slides

Slides for the presentation of the project. I will use them more as prompts. I did not want to put too much text in them. The problem I may have though is to be able to finish within 10 minutes. Fingers crossed!

Kasia-Idzi-arp-presentation-tutor-Liz-Bunting Download

Reference list:

Allison, B., Owen, A., Rothwell, A., O’Sullivan, T., Rice, J., Saunders, C. (2016) Research skills for students. London: Routledge.

Banks, S. (2016) ‘Everyday ethics in professional life: social work as ethics work’, Ethics and social welfare, 10(1), pp. 35-52. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2015.1126623.

Bell, J., Waters, S. (2018) Doing your research project: a guide for first-time researchers. London, England, New York, New York: McGraw-Hill Education.

Bloom, A. (2023) How do Performance students relate to information literacy? MA Dissertation, University of the Arts London. Unpublished.

Carlin, J.A. (2019) ‘Artists’ books as catalysts for social change’, Art Libraries Journal, 44(1), pp. 2-8. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2018.34.

Chen, K, Lin, P. (2011) ‘Information literacy in university library user education’, Aslib Proceedings, 63(4), pp. 399-418. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/00012531111148967.

Costello, P.J.M. (2003) Action research. London: Continuum.

Currie, L., Devlin, F., Emde, J., Graves, K. (2010) ‘Undergraduate search strategies and evaluation criteria: Searching for credible sources’, New Library World, 111(3/4), pp. 113-124. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/03074801011027628.

Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research, fourth edition (2018). Available at: https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018-online (Accessed: Jan 16, 2024).

Faix, A. (2014) ‘Assisting students to identify sources: an investigation’, Library Review, 63(8/9), pp. 624-636. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-07-2013-0100.

Gamtso, Carolyn B., Paterson, Susanne F. ‘Guiding Students from Consuming Information to Creating Knowledge: A Freshman English Library Instruction Collaboration. ‘, Communications in Information Literacy, 5(2), pp. 117-126. Available at: https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2012.5.2.107.

Gray, C. and Malins, J. (2016) ‘Interpreting the map: methods of evaluation and analysis’ In: Visualizing Research Routledge, pp. 129-158.

Harvard University Strategies for Qualitative Interviews. Available at: https://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/files/sociology/files/interview_strategies.pdf (Accessed: 30 December 2023).

Hauke, P. (2018), ‘From information literacy to green literacy: training librarians as trainers for sustainability literacy.’ IFLA World Library and Information Conference (WLIC), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 24-30 August, Available at: https://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/2147/1/116-hauke-en.pdf (Accessed: 30 December 2023).

INTRAC, Surveys and questionnaires. Available at: https://www.intrac.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Surveys-and-questionnaires.pdf (Accessed: 10 January 2024).

Kamińska, A.M., Opaliński, Ł and Wyciślik, Ł (2021) ‘The landscapes of sustainability in the library and information science: Systematic literature review’, Sustainability, 14(1), 441. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/su14010441.

Kara, H. (2015) Creative research methods in the social sciences: a practical guide. Bristol: Policy Press.

Kurbanoğlu, S., Boustany, J. (2014). ‘From Green Libraries to Green Information Literacy’, in: Kurbanoğlu, S. et al. (eds) Information Literacy. Lifelong Learning and Digital Citizenship in the 21st Century. ECIL 2014, vol 492. Cham: Springer. pp. 47-58. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14136-7_6.

Kwon, D. (2022) ‘The rise of citational justice: how scholars are making references fairer’, Nature, 603(7902), pp. 568-571. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00793-1.

Matthews, B., Ross, L. (2010) Research methods: a practical guide for the social sciences. Harlow: Longman, Pearson Education.

McCombes, S. (2022) Writing Strong Research Questions | Criteria & Examples. Available at: https://www.scribbr.com/research-process/research-questions/ (Accessed: Jan 16, 2024).

Ningi, A.I. (2022b) ‘Data Presentation in Qualitative Research: The Outcomes of the Pattern of Ideas with the Raw Data’, International Journal of Qualitative Research, 1(3), pp. 196-200. Available at: https://doi.org/10.47540/ijqr.v1i3.448.

Paterson, S.F., Gamtso, C.W. (2023) ‘Interrogating representations of transgressive women: Using critical information literacy and comic books in the Shakespeare classroom’, Art Libraries Journal, 48(3), pp. 80-89. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2023.14.

Peterson, R.A. (2000) Constructing effective questionnaires. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE.

Reale, M. (2012a) ‘Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom: Library Instruction that Gives Voice to Students and Builds a Community of Scholars’, Journal of Library Innovation, 3(2), pp. 80-88. Available at: https://scholarworks.arcadia.edu/librarian_articles/16 (Accessed: 30 December 2023).

Ruthven, L. (2019) ‘Facilitating the development of creativity using special collections and archives’, Art Libraries Journal, 44(1), pp. 9-12. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2018.36.

Shigwan, R. (2014) ‘Information Literacy; a source of self learning’, Bulletin of the Deccan College Research Institute, 74, pp. 329-343. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/26264712 (Accessed: 15 December 2023).

Silva, E., Green, J. and Walker, C. (2018a) ‘ Source evaluation behaviours of first-year university students.’, Journal of Information Literacy, 12(2), pp. 24-43. Available at: https://doi.org/10.11645/12.2.2512.

Smith, L. (2013a) ‘Towards a model of critical information literacy instruction for the development of political agency.’, Journal of Information Literacy, 7(2), pp. 15-32. Available at: https://doi.org/10.11645/7.2.1809.

Templin, C. (2022) ‘Why Citation matters: Ideas on a feminist approach to research – Blog ABV Gender- & Diversitykompetenz’, Freie Universitat Berlin. Available at: https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/abv-gender-diversity/2022/01/10/why-citation-matters-ideas-on-a-feminist-approach-to-research/ (Accessed: 29 December 2023).

Townsend, A.K. (2014) ‘Environmental sustainability and libraries: facilitating user awareness’, Library Hi Tech News, 31(9), pp. 21-23. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/LHTN-07-2014-0059.

Vis, D. (2021) Research for people who (think they) would rather create. Eindhoven: Ononmatopee.

Other readings that informed my project:

Civallero, E. and Plaza, S. (2016) ‘Libraries, sustainability and degrowth’, Progressive Librarian, Winter 2016/17(45), pp. 20-45. Available at: http://www.progressivelibrariansguild.org/PL/PL45/020.pdf (Accessed: 30 December 2023).

Drabinski, E. (2019) ‘What is critical about critical librarianship?’, Art Libraries Journal, 44(2), pp. 49-57. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2019.3.

Flick, U. (2014) The SAGE handbook of qualitative data analysis. Los Angeles, California: SAGE.

Georgas, H. (2015) ‘Google vs. the Library (Part III): Assessing the Quality of Sources Found by Undergraduates’, portal: Libraries and the Academy, 15(1), pp. 133-161. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2015.0012.

Leporati, B.R., Bach, P. , Hong, L. (2019) ‘Learning to Evaluate Sources: Comparing Teaching Modalities and Student Outcomes’, portal: Libraries and the Academy, 19(2), pp. 233-252. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2019.0014

Swanson, T.A. (2004) ‘A Radical Step: Implementing A Critical Information Literacy Model’, portal: Libraries and the Academy, 4(2), pp. 259-276. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2004.0038

Project findings

What I have learnt and how I recorded it – guide to my blog and ARP Unit journey

I start with the fact that this is the first time I have been working on an action research project (ARP).

I started by reading Action research by Patrick J. M. Costello to familiarise myself with the term ARP. The words such as observe, understand, reflect, evaluate and change were the most used in describing the process of ARP. Learning about what it means and that it is a never-ending, cyclic process that aims to improve educational practice was very inspiring. This book has also given me a starting point regarding my action plan.

I learnt a lot from reading about my research topic. I started with a more general Information Literacy (IL) subject and then once I narrowed down my research question, I moved onto learning about Critical (CIL) and Sustainable (SIL) Information Literacies. I recorded my journey in the series of blogs and documents available under Readings on my topic category.

To sum up, I mention only a few, most important findings here. First, IL can support social justice and critical pedagogy implementation. (Kurbanoğlu, Boustany, 2014; Shigwan, 2014). Secondly, academic students can struggle with identifying sources of information and their evaluation. (Faix, 2014), and that as librarians we have a role to play in teaching IL and critical thinking about resources. (Reale,2012)

Then, I needed to learn about research methods and chose techniques I wanted to use for my project. This was a long process and I think this was the part of the ARP project I spent the most time on. I found our workshops and tutorials very helpful, but I think the sheer amount of literature available on this subject could be overwhelming. I dealt with it by creating a Padlet with the resources I found most useful when researching the methods, and that way my reading felt more organised. Again, I recorded my readings and learning process in this blog, and it is available under the Research methods category. This is the biggest category in my ARP blog and it contains readings, reflection and actions I have taken during this project. It ahs blogs on designing the questionnaire and focus group, ways they both went and process of data analysis too.

I found the following books the most helpful in terms of finding the right research techniques and data analysis:

Bell, J. and Waters, S. (2018) Doing your research project: a guide for first-time researchers. London, England, New York, New York: McGraw-Hill Education.

Matthews, B., Ross, L. (2010) Research methods: a practical guide for the social sciences. Harlow: Longman, Pearson Education.

Both have a clean and accessible layout with lots of visual aids such as checklists, tables, charts and diagrams. I learnt about the questionnaire and focus group planning, design and data analysis mostly by coming back to these two positions every time I felt stuck or unsure of what comes next.

I decided to use thematic analysis, as it allowed me to analyse qualitative data that I gathered though the open questions in the questionnaire and the focus group conversation with the participants.

I learnt about different techniques of thematic analysis and data presentation and tried to use most of them. I used wordclouds, tables, charts and diagrams to present and interpret my data. The results of my work on data analysis are also recorded in the Research methods category of the blog.

Both, my secondary and primary research brought me answers to my research question.

I found out that as librarians we need to do more sessions on information sources, we need to keep on top of the changes happening to ways the research is carried out and what kind of resources formats are most used. Through my focus group I got lots of practical solutions to how make our teaching of resources better and how to include our students’ voices in it. Both, reading about critical information literacy and discussing it with my colleagues convinced me that this is one of the most important aspects of my professional role. This ARP provided me with tools I cannot wait to use in practice. I feel better equipped to run sessions using our Wimbledon library resources and teaching students to think critically about the information sources.

The project rationale

How I decided on my topic:

I am an Assistant Academic Support Librarian working at the UAL Wimbledon Library.

When deciding on my research query for this ARP project, I knew I would like to focus on teaching information literacy.

One of the reasons was the fact that when I joined my team in 2021 our library had been in a process of preparation for renovations. For the next two years our main focus as a team was to get ready for the building works, working in limited space when the renovation was ongoing and then organising our new space. In practice it meant that we were not able to have any information literacy sessions in person during that time. Now, having new teaching room and more space to accommodate face to face sessions, I thought it is a perfect time to investigate what we used to do and use this project to improve our teaching.

Additionally, during the last two years I got to know our library collections (both main and special collections) better, and I felt ready to look at how we could better use them in teaching. During my second unit on the PgCert course I engaged with diversifying our collections and it felt like a natural progression to look at how I can use them in my teaching to improve my practice.

To define what part of librarianship I want to focus on, I made a simple mind map of what are my interests in my profession:

By working on the mind-map I realised that I am looking at the very broad subject area and that I will need to really focus my research further. I could already see that I am looking at least at three different areas of my profession (collections promotion, teaching methods and Info Skills tailoring to our students’ needs), and I try to see all of them through the lenses of inclusivity. My mind-map did not help me to focus my research question straightaway, but it showed me that I need to choose a much smaller area of my profession to be able to do my project in given time.

Then, inspired by one of our first workshops on ARP unit, I thought of critical friendship and decided to talk about my project with one of my colleagues who also studied on the PgCert course. Looking at the mind-map together helped me to decide on and narrow down my topic. Furthermore, my colleague shared with me her MA Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication dissertation. The chapter about the resources that the students trust and use made it clear to me that looking into teaching resources evaluation would be very useful.

“One of the themes that came through from the interviews was that the students tend to equate library resources with books. It became apparent that library resources tended to be seen as the books and by the internet they meant the wider internet beyond library resources.” (Bloom, 2023, p.22)

The need for teaching IL and evaluation of resources is also evident in the writings on the subject. In many studies it becomes apparent that the students can struggle in finding and judging the resources they need. (Currie et al., 2010; Faix, 2014; Silva et al., 2018)

“[S]tudents often use only superficial criteria like whether or not the web page includes advertisements or flashy graphics to evaluate Internet sources and do not delve into a deeper analysis of sources. (…) not only did students tend to use superficial criteria when evaluating websites, they also often could not explain exactly what criteria they were using. ” (Faix, 2014, p.627)

Reading more about Information Literacy (IL) inspired my research question further.

The following two quotes stand out for me in my reading. They both talk about how important IL is for the society, how empowering it can be. I have never thought before of the sustainability aspect of the IL and I definitely want to study it further. They brought the elements of sustainability and critical pedagogy into my research question.

“Information literacy and self learning have a strategic and mutual relationship with each other [.] (…) Both are self empowering: Both the concepts are aimed to help all categories of individuals, regardless of their social, economical, cultural and educational status, as well as their place, gender, race, religion or ethnic background in the society.” (Shigwan, 2014, pp.341-342)

“Information literacy is, in fact, closely linked to environmental literacy and has a positive impact on the environment. (…) Information literacy simply facilitates accessing and selecting the most relevant, current and reliable information sources to make well informed decisions on environmental issues. Critical thinking, another important component of the information literacy skills set, helps not only to critically evaluate information available on environmental issues but also helps to perceive and understand the relative health of environmental systems. Secondly, although environmental sustainability is not the ultimate target, there is no doubt that advanced search skills – a part of information literacy skills- help to develop better search strategies, which, in turn, bring better results in a shorter time span, and leave fewer carbon footprints.” (Kurbanoğlu and Boustany, 2014, p.54)

The Focus Group – how it went and the data analysis

The focus group I facilitated was smaller than I had planned. Main reason was that it was December and many people in my team were taking leave at that time. It was similar case in the beginning of January. I decided to have the group on in the week that I could talk with two the most experienced members of my team.

I used the prompts that I established when planning my focus group (see this blog post), however, the way the conversation went meant that I did not managed to ask all the questions I wanted. This was something I knew that could happen, as I wanted at least a part of the group to be unstructured, so I could tap into the creative side of my team. What I did not plan for, was the group to focus on mostly one aspect of my research, which was what kind of sessions and themes we can run to improve our Information Literacy teaching. It was great that I got lots of ideas from my team that can definitely help to answer my research question, however, I feel we got very excited about working on the sessions together and got a bit carried away in the conversation. On my part I think I lost my facilitator role and became a participant myself at some point, as I loved the way my colleagues approached the subject of teaching. I wanted to add to the conversation and you can see in the transcript that I talked a bit too much at times.

However, I am very pleased with some data I gathered and I think the group was successful in creating time and space for us to discuss the teaching part of our jobs. The timing of it could not be better, as our library space had just been renovated and we gained a teaching room. It is the first time we actually have the space that we can invite our students too. One of the participants said the following in the focus group:

“You’re doing this at an ideal time because this is the time now we’ve got the space and these are the sessions that we’ve all sort of been dreaming of being able to do. It’s amazing that you’re doing the PGcert and this is what you’re focusing on.” (Focus group transcript, 2023, p.8)

I am including the transcript of the focus group here. I chose to use the version with the highlights and comments I made when analysing the data. It will be deleted once I will finish the course, as it was established in the consent forms that the participants had signed.

Kasia – focus group Download

Process of analysis

I based my analysis mostly on the Thematic analysis chapter of Matthews, B. and Ross, L. (2010) Research methods: a practical guide for the social sciences. Harlow: Longman, Pearson Education. pp.372-385. I found this book very accessible and the examples of the charts, tables and diagrams very useful.

I started with reading the transcript a few times. I was already familiar with it, because I listened to the recording of the session a number of times already when working on transcript. I did remove some unnecessary words that we all use in speech such us ‘like’, ‘you know. ‘yeah’. I have also removed all the names of my colleagues to keep the transcript anonymous.

When reading the transcript I started adding notes (sticky notes you can do in Adobe Acrobat, first all in the same colour, just my thoughts, then colour coding them and highlighting the relevant text accordingly to establish the set of initial themes. The effects of this you can see in the transcript version I included in this blog.

The following image shows the colour-coded themes and their reflection in the transcript. Starting with simple comments, all in yellow and then adding the colours and highlights.

Process of establishing the initial themes and colour-coding. Getting ready for creating a chart

The above allowed me to create a chart with the quotes and their initial interpretation and creating categories. I am publishing the PDF version of my Excel file here. You can see that some of the initial themes such as ‘themes for sessions’ are not in the chart – it is because they became a part of the larger themes (Green colour – sessions in this case)

Focus-Group-interpretation-chart Download

The above chart can be expressed as the following diagram:

Diagram – analysing data from my focus group in relation to my research question

Overarching themes that came out from the focus group:

Teaching IL needs to be accessible and inclusive to be effective.
Students perspective is necessary for our teaching to be relevant to them.
Library resources are very varied and we should include all of them in teaching.
Library offer to teach IL and especially evaluation of resources needs to be known to academics and students.

The focus group has definitely answered how we can improve our teaching of resources and include students voices parts of the research question. My participants had shown great understanding of critical pedagogy and need of our students perspective. The suggestion of asking the students what topics they would be the most interested in is a great example of this understanding.

The experience and knowledge of the local situation has shone through too. It is evident in many parts of the transcript when the participants bring examples of different courses and how we could tailor our teaching of IL to make it relatable to all of the students. This thinking about inclusivity is visible when they talk about students coming from different parts of the world, embracing students who do not want to take active part in the sessions, using various formats of library material to cater to different needs the students may have.

I found the FG findings inspiring and I have already started to plan a session that would put them in practice. The diagram I created as a part of the analysis is something I constantly refer to when planning in order to remind myself of the wide range of methods and themes that were mentioned in the group.

In the group we touched upon the subject of our teaching often depending on what we are asked to do by the tutors, which can be restrictive. One of the solutions we discussed was focusing on the library teaching offer in the course committees. This will be implemented as soon as possible. We are working on a number of sessions at the moment and once they are ready we will be discussing the best way of promoting them. We need to take into account when is the best time for different kinds of sessions too. When teaching evaluation of information sources would benefit the students most.

Planning the focus group for the ARP

By the time I started planning my focus group I had done lots of reading on my research topic (see this category in my blog , especially readings on evaluating sources of information), had analysed themes in the questionnaire responses (more details in my blog post here), and had read about the interviews and focus groups too (for example blogs A and B ).

Despite all of the above, I still was a bit comprehensive when working on the FG preparations. It was going to be the first time I carried out primary research. Additionally, the focus group participants were going to be the senior members of my team. On one hand I knew it is great to have good and experienced librarians on board, as one of the focus group principles is involving people who have knowledge about your research topic. (Matthews and Ross, 2010). On the other, I thought that I may find it difficult to steer the conversation, so we stay on track with my plan. I tried not to worry too much and focus on the positive side of having a chance to talk about very important subject with my creative and experienced colleagues. Additionally, the FG was planned to be a semi-structured event, so I was prepared it may go differently to what I though it was going to be.

I limited the time of the FG to 20-25 minutes maximum in order to be able to analyse the data it was going to generate. Even if I do not manage to go through of all of the planned themes I still should have a good set of material to analyse and be able to find some answers to my research question.

My FG plan was based mainly on the reading I did on my topic and the questionnaire’s findings. Most of the themes I chose appeared in both, the reading and the questionnaire. I wrote them down to become my prompts helping with asking questions and making sure I cover the most important aspects of my topic in the FG. I also wanted to use this opportunity to ask more about my participants’ experience of teaching and ideas for sessions. This is going to be a less structured part of the FG. I hope to bring the subject of sustainability into the discussion too, as i left it out of the questionnaire.

My prompts for the FG:

remind the participants of the research topic and ask them what they think could do at Wimbledon to improve teaching about IL. I think it will provide a good starting point and allow us to discuss some issues that came up in the questionnaire.
make sure to ask about involving students’s voices and critical pedagogy – this was clear in the answers to the questionnaire that we value students’ perspective and want their input in the sessions. And this reflected what many librarians see as a very important aspect of our teaching that needs to be looked into and improved (Paterson and Gamtso, 2023; Reale, 2012; Ruthven 2019).
both my readings (Chin and Lin, 2011, Faix, 2014) and the questionnaire answers talk about the importance of closer relationship between library and faculty. Is there anything that we could do to work on it together?
I am planning to work on a session that would be based on sustainable information literacy principles. What are your thought on this subject? Is there anything you can think of now that would be useful for my plans?

Working with and analysing the data gathered with the questionnaire

I used MS Forms for my questionnaire and it proved to be the right choice. It provided a very nice, ‘clean’ looking questionnaire, gave enough space for responses to the open-ended questions and it made it easy to get all the responses collated in an Excel file.

I am providing all the data from the questionnaire here. It was gathered anonymously, and with five people responding, I think it provides enough confidentiality. Once I finish the PgCert course, I will be deleting the data from the blog and my device, as agreed in the consent forms.

Questionnaire-on-our-experience-as-librarians-in-teaching-information-literacy1-5-good-one Download

To start with, I created the wordclouds using my data. In the first one I used all the text from the responses, and in the second one I chose to use the words, phrases and sentences that directly related to my research question (teaching, improvement, resources evaluation, critical thinking and information literacy). Probably as I could expect. the second cloud provides the vocabulary that is more useful for me (commonly used words like use, see, just, need and want almost disappeared from the cloud). Information, academic, support, engage/d, library, resources and literacy are the words that stand out more when I used more focused text. It has also picked up more words describing different types of resources (books, e-books, journals, dissertations). What was also very interesting to me was an appearance of words like colleagues, collections and online in the second cloud – all very important when we think of teaching with and about the library resources.

This exercise allowed me to get to know my data better and I could start using it for finding themes that I can later use in my focus group. It was an interesting process, although, I recognise the fact that the software I used was not ideal. It could not handle phrases, so it separated ‘special collections’ and ‘critical thinking’ for example. I used the wordclouds simply as a visual aid to thinking about my data. and I feel it fulfilled its role.

Wordcloud done using the whole text of the questionnaire

Wordcloud done with using the words and phrases I selected from the text – using criterium of relevance to my research question and subject area

Then, I gathered all the answers in the Word document. That made the text easier to read and handle. I read the data a number of times and established main themes recurring in it. I colour-coded them and highlighted the relevant text to each of the themes. These themes created the base for building my focus group plan. They helped me to establish what are the most meaningful and important aspects of my research for the people I work with.

Questionnaire-text-and -themes Download

The themes I found in my questionnaire data:

How we perceive ourselves as librarians and what we think of our teaching
Our students’ attitudes and experiences regarding the library and resources
How we run our sessions. What tools and methods we use in teaching.
Working with other faculty colleagues.
Other useful opinions and observations.

Then I created a spreadsheet to record the themes and subthemes in more organised and focused way. This further narrow down the area of discussion for my focus group.

Questionnaire-themes-and-subthemes Download

Questionnaire findings that will inform my focus group:

It is clear from the data I got that we all think that we do lots of good quality teaching on resources and IL, however we are not doing enough of it. (4 out of 5 participants pointed this).
We use wide range of methods already that work for us and the students (variety of sources used in sessions, using software to support interactions in the classrooms), however, we still experience a low attendance or students engagement in the sessions. We see the need for working closer with the academics from other departments and going to the classrooms to make our teaching more closely related to what students are currently researching. It would be interesting to ask in the focus group how we can do it in our library space.
We need students perspective to be effective in our sessions. (3 participants mentioned it). This touches upon inclusivity and critical pedagogy part of my research question – including students voices in teaching. Another interesting theme to explore in the focus group to help to answer my question.
The conversation about our IL teaching is very timely for our team (2 participants talk more about it). We have new teaching space and all the collections finally in place ready to be explored. To address low students engagement we need to cooperate and find ways to bring them in.

There are some other interesting themes in the questionnaire that help answering my research question. I will be addressing it in the summary of this project. However, the questionnaire was mainly design to help me with organising a focus group and the above themes were chosen as the most relevant to our local team and purpose of my project.

Is data complete and accurately recorded ?	It is in my case. I have all the text from the questionnaires in clear format. Recording of my focus group was clear and I have a good transcript of it. All the data that could lead to identification of the participants have been removed.
Organising your data	It will include coding open questions (I will need to read about it more). In terms of my questionnaires I think of finding main themes, colour-coding them and highlighting the text relevant to each theme. I will not have that much data to work with here, compering to the transcript of my focus group (FG).
Creating an Index	The example of an indexed semi-structured interview on the page 333 will be very useful for me in analysing transcript from my FG. This provide a basis for coding.