Thursday, July 03, 2008

Primary Research Group is seeking a project directors for two monographs on librarianship

Primary Research Group is seeking a project directors for two monographs on librarianship

URL: www.primaryresearch.com

The first concerns academic library reference services and some of the issues that will be covered include: virtual reference, commercial virtual reference systems, use of e-books, reference acquisisitons, reference software and web applications, use of reference wikis, marketing online reference services and other issues of interest to academic reference librarians.
The second is for a project on psychology librarianship.

Responsibilities: Devise a questionnaire, recruit 9-10 library participants, administer the questionnaire online or by phone. Follow up each online or email interview with a brief phone interview to flesh out and develop the points raised in the email or online interview. Write an introduction or summary of results. Edit report for content. About half of the participants should be major research universities.

We estimate about 3,000 words of original writing, time spent to recruit participants, plus about 20-25 hours or so on average contacting participants and drawing out explanations, clarifications and expansions of their submissions. Each submission should average about 1,500 words.

For this project you need:

• Contacts in the broader academic library community to recruit participants, half of which should be from major research universities

• Good writing skills since you will be responsible for writing an introduction and summary and also adding to the submissions submitted by participants;

• Journalistic interviewing skills – since some participants will need to be interviewed by phone and you will have to draw them out and add to their answers, sometimes considerably.

• Knowledge of the main issues for the topic covered since you will be partially responsible for questionnaire development.

Each requires email interviews followed up by phone calls to 9 academic libraries.

Contact Primary Research Group at primarydat@mindpsring.com for more
information.