Introducing Gewit-Hring...
by Andy Corrigan
Introducing Gewit-Hring, a journal, a walk, a knowledge circle.
I’m extremely proud to have recently been awarded an AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellowship for research and academic libraries. Today, the RLUK made an official announcement about this year’s Fellows, where you can read more about the scheme and meet the Fellows and their projects.
I have created this site as a space for thinking and exploring, and will be posting some of my Fellowship outputs here.
You can read a bit more about my project below, and course there will be lot’s more to come soon!
What is the title of your project?
Encountering digital collections: Practical approaches to using digital collections in research and pedagogy
What is the focus of your Fellowship?
Over recent decades, our collections, operations, and audiences have moved from an analogue to a mixed analogue/digital environment. The “digital shift” has transformed our ways of working, the tools and methods at our disposal, our databases, and our catalogues. It has democratised access and enabled new modes of distant reading, but it has also created a fluid and dynamic landscape of such overwhelming scale that our understanding of it is fractured and blurred. This Fellowship will explore some of the questions raised by this challenge:
- Can we understand the relationship between the digital and our cognitive processes by bringing elements of our interaction with it back into focus?
- How does incorporating the digital into our physical lives impact research and teaching?
- What are libraries, in their role as a nexus for research and teaching, doing to understand and facilitate encounters with the virtual world we have created?
What will your Fellowship involve?
I propose to explore the impact of digital collections and technology on research and learning activity through the following themes:
- Methods of note making
- Practices of walking
- Processes of collaboration
- Acts of creation
- Impact on wellbeing
Doing so provides an opportunity to identify commonalities on which to build support and inspire putting theories into everyday practice. The Fellowship will be organised into five phases (P1-5):
- A scoping exercise and visits to peer institutions (P1-2)
- Convening a symposium to facilitate discourse and collaboration (P3)
- Produce a strategy for engagement activities with digital collections (P4)
- Developing a funding roadmap (P5)
What excites you most about undertaking the Fellowship?
Practical experience has been the backbone of my career, and the route to my current position has not always been a traditional one. This Fellowship provides the ideal opportunity for me to convene a programme of research and identify opportunities to publish that research, establish my experience, and to develop further research funding opportunities. This would build my own confidence and capabilities as well as opening the door for my own institution and wider network to benefit further from my skills and experience, as well as my future growth. It is an exciting opportunity for me to explore and validate what I hope might be a fresh and diverse approach for research library collections, and one in which can enable me to extol the benefits of such approaches and the richness they can add.
If you want to share any thoughts, comments, suggestions, please do get in touch:
admin@gewit-hring.com
This post has been funded by the AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellowship Scheme for research and academic libraries.