Research

Shelves of books in a library

 

The Department of Information Studies has a well-established reputation for research in the field of library and information studies.

DIS research focuses on issues in relation to the ability of individuals, organisations and societies to obtain, manage, organise and retrieve information and knowledge in increasingly complex and diverse societies.

Digital innovation and developments change the way people and organisations interact, and bring opportunities and challenges for libraries, information services, museums and archives.

The structure and content of our degree schemes encourage an appreciation of how research evidence should inform professional practice. Policy research is therefore significant. The vocational nature of the Department requires that we maintain links with and show leadership in developments related to professional practice.

The Department has research interests across the subject areas of information studies, archives and records management.

  • Information society including digital inclusion and social inclusion, information disclosure, privacy and employer surveillance of social networking sites.
  • Archives and records management including digital curation, estate records, cultural memory and identity.
  • Information behaviour including the impact of information behaviour on information failure, everyday life information seeking, cross language information seeking and serendipity.
  • Knowledge organisation and information retrieval, including data modelling for analysis, discovery and retrieval, classification and indexing, ontologies and taxonomies, tagging, image retrieval and intertextuality.
  • Academic communication including changing styles of academic communication in relation to the developments in communication technology and journal impact factors.
  • Knowledge management, including inter-organisational knowledge sharing and absorptive capacity.

This broad coverage of the information studies fields is reflected in staff publications, PhD, MPhil and DProf supervisions and submissions and Masters dissertations. Staff work in collaboration with colleagues at other Higher Education Institutions and in the professional sector to produce jointly authored papers and other contributions, as well as acting in editorial roles in leading academic journals.