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Research at the University of Sheffield postgraduate school of librarianship and information science
ht. Libr. Rev. (1979) 11, 199-212
Research at the University of Sheffield Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science W. L. SAUNDERS*
It is an article of faith within the British academic world that a university has a responsibility not just to teach, but to carry out research, to extend the boundaries of knowledge. It is further believed that the interaction between research and teaching is mutually beneficial, that the teaching of an academic who is personally involved in research is likely to have a sharper edge than that of one who is not; and it is in fact normal for the contract of a British university teacher to include a requirement that he should be engaged in research. In creating a new university department it therefore seems both right and natural to plan from the very beginning for research, as well as teaching. This was certainly the case with the University of Sheffield Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science which was set up in 1963, with the present writer as its Director, and which began teaching in October 1964. The intention to engage in research was clearly stated in the first major public statement of the School’s objectives1 and the concern of this article is to show how the intention was realized and to give some idea of the form and content of the School’s research activities in the years since 1964. If research is a normal expectation of a university department it may be felt that there is nothing particularly remarkable in a new School of Librarianship having stated an intention to engage in research in its field, and having succeeded in carrying out such research. The fact is, however, that at the time when the Sheffield School was founded, serious research, other than the bibliographical, was being carried out on only a very small scale. There was no tradition of funded research in library and information studies; there was a lack of awareness within the * Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, University of Sheffield, England. 1 W. L. Saunders (1964). Challenge and opportunity: Sheffield’s new postgraduate library school. A&b Proceedings16, 105-I 15. 0020-7837/79/020199+ 14 $02.00/O 0 1979 Academic Press Inc. (London) Limited
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profession at large of the need for research; and-unlike the established scientific disciplines-there was no pool of research-trained personnel to create and implement such programmes as might be established. On the other hand, it is now very clear that the time when the School came into existence was particularly favourable for an institution with the will and ambition to embark on research in the library and information field. In 1965-only months after the School admitted its first students-there was created the Office for Scientific and Technical Information (O.S.T.I.), charged, amongst other things, with the encouragement and sponsoring of research; and what is more, provided with the funds to finance well conceived research projects on quite a substantial scale. True, its major concern was with research in the field of scientific and technological information, but O.S.T.I. interpreted this remit very liberally and much of the work which it financed-mechanization is an obvious case in point-brought benefit to librarianship in general as well as to scientific information studies. The Sheffield School, in 1965-its first year of operation-in fact received the very first research grant offered by O.S.T.I., a grant which enabled it to bring back to Britain Dr M. F. Lynch, who was at that time head of basic research with Chemical Abstracts Service. Dr (now Professor) Lynch was a chemist by training with a strong information and computer orientation. He came equipped with research knowledge and experience originally gained in a discipline other than library or information science; and this turning to another, more established, discipline, for the research capabilities at that time lacking in library and information studies, is a good example of the way in which our discipline surmounted the problems of finding research-trained personnel during those early years of research activity which O.S.T.I. both stimulated and financed. Researchers from other, often cognate, disciplines-chemistry, computing science, physics, linguistics, psychology, to name but a few-have made most valuable personal contributions to research in our field, and moreover have trained many young professional librarians and information workers in the discipline of research. As time went by the library schools, too, contributed to research training, via Masters and Doctors degrees by research, but the now quite substantial cadre of British research workers in library and information studies has probably been mainly built up by on-the-job research experience gained, in the main, on projects financed by O.S.T.I. and its successor, the British Library Research and Development Department. Dr Lynch’s appointment in Sheffield proved to be the beginning of an involvement by the School in funded research which must now total at
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least 30 different research grants, to a value fast approaching one million pounds. At any given time the research staff will be likely to total between 12 and 15, covering between them three or four different projects, each under the direction of a member of teaching staff. The research staff themselves are normally quite senior people of at least (Associate Lecturer status and, in many cases, at Senior Lecturer Professor) level. The principal source of funding continues to be the British Library Research and Development Department, though grants have in fact been received from various other sources, for example the Department of Education and Science, O.E.C.D., and UJVESCO. Dr Lynch’s work ensured a continuing stream of research activity in the information science area, of which fuller details are given below. It is gratifying indeed that his pioneering work, which has gained wide recognition both nationally and internationally, has also been rewarded internally: the University in 1975 recognized the distinction of Dr Lynch’s research by the award of one of its rare Personal Chairs, and gave him the title of Professor of Information Science. In an institution such as the Sheffield School, which covers both library and information science and believes firmly that they are not separate entities, but part of a unified whole, it was natural that we should seek to engage in research across the whole spectrum of library and information science activity. It has normally been the case that Professor Lynch’s information science projects have been balanced by research with a more traditional librarianship orientation, or of a generally pervasive nature. During the last year, for example, there has been in progress, in addition to Professor Lynch’s work on variety generation and chemical structure information systems, the concluding stages of a large-scale research on library and information unit staffing, research on user studies, on information needs and services in local government social service departments, on the teaching of on-line searching, and on the automatic analysis of information in chemical data banks. In addition, of course, non-funded, personal research has been in progress, such as that of Dr F. S. Stych’s bibliographical study of Boccaccio and Mr N. Roberts’ work on communication in the social sciences. Reverting to the point made earlier about the value of interaction between research and teaching it is worth mentioning that with such a wide spread of research topics within the School it is possible each year for a good number of the approximately 60 students working for the taught Masters degrees to be able to choose for their dissertation a topic which directly contributes to an on-going research project. The availability of such meaningful dissertation topics offers educational benefits which the School and its students have come to value very
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highly indeed. From the research side there is, equally, a very great appreciation of the input which students’ special studies have provided over the years. Though smaller in numbers, reference must also be made to the Doctors and Masters degrees by research which, like the taught Masters degree dissertations, are often associated with on-going research projects, but which naturally represent far more substantial contributions. Similarly there has been an important contribution from the senior, Post-Doctoral Research Fellows, of whom there are normally one or two within the School at any given time; and from a succession of senior practitioners from overseas who have spent up to a year of study leave based on the School. It is not really feasible to set out a comprehensive or even a systematic statement of the research which has been carried out in the School to date, but it is hoped that the paragraphs which follow will at least provide something of the flavour of its research activities, starting with a description of the work of Professor Lynch which, as already stated, was the starting point for the School’s programme of funded research. The objective of the research team working under the direction of Professor M. F. Lynch since 1965 has been the identification and elucidation of fundamental structural patterns in the information and data which are typically handled in computer-based bibliographic information systems. The work which, as already stated, has been supported by the award of research grants from the British Library Research and Development (formerly O.S.T.I.), has thrown light on a number of phenomena and on the development of methods which lead to greater efficiency in the operation of publication and retrieval systems, and to a sounder theoretical basis for certain aspects of the design of information systems. The first major area of investigation was a study of the structure of index entries in articulated subject indexes, an important class of indexes in science and technology, particularly characteristic of those published in the English language. Perhaps the best known index of this type is the Subject Index to Chemical Abstracts, and in it, the entries consist of extended prepositional phrases describing the subject content of documents. These phrases are often structurally rearranged, or articulated, so that an entry point, which forms the main access point in the alphabetic sequence, is brought to the front of the entry. It was possible to show that this articulated form of entry is related to the normal, or unrearranged form of the phrase, by a simple transformation rule. In turn, it was relatively easy to demonstrate that reversing the transformation rule gave rise to the possibility of automatically creating
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articulated subject indexes from simple, unrearranged descriptive phrases recorded by indexers. The development first of experimental software, and later of a production system which is used by several Research Associations in Britain, has provided a useful method of index production which results in greater productivity on the part of highly skilled indexing staff.lp2 More recently, the adoption, with further development, of the basic algorithm by the Chemical Abstracts Service holds the prospect of yet wider use of the results of the original search. The second major area to which attention was directed was the problem presented by the need for chemists to search records of chemical molecules to identify all those substances in which a particular subassembly of atoms and bonds occur. Chemistry, and in particular, organic chemistry, has developed during the past century on the basis of analogies which can be drawn between the behaviour of molecules which show substantial structural similarities. In this instance, it was argued that the identification of partial structures which could act as highly discriminant features during the search process was an ideal model on which to study the development of indexing theory. It was also argued that the problem was better viewed as an information systems problem, rather than as a chemical problem, so that the conventional nomenclature of chemistry, and the groupings of atoms and bonds with which it deals, should be ignored, and that the statistics of occurrence of atoms, bonds, and their co-occurrences should be taken into account instead. Since the structures of more than 2.5 million different molecules, principally organic, are already recorded in information systems, this is a major problem and need. In the event, a strategy was developed which led to a simple and costeffective method of describing the structural components of chemical molecules with a limited number of characteristics which were more or less equally frequent in their occurrence, and which were also equally likely to be used in searches for particular classes of structurally related molecules.3l4 1 J. E. Armitage, M. F. Lynch, J. H. Petrie and M. Belton (1970). Experimental use of a program for computer-aided subject index production. Information Storage and Retrieval, 79-87. s I. J. Barton, S. E. Creasey, M. F. Lynch and M. J. Snell (1974). An information-theoretic approach to text-searching in direct-access sytems. Cbmmunications Association for Computing il4achirmy 17, 345-350. s G. W. Adamson, J. Cowell, M. F. Lynch, A. H. W. McLure, W. G. Town and A. M. Yapp (1973). Strategic considerations in the design of a screening system for substructure searches of chemical structure files. 3ouwd of Chemical D ommentation 13, 153-157. 4 G. W. Adamson, J. Bush, M. F. Lynch and A. H. W. McLure (1974). An evaluation of a substructure search screen system based on bond-centred fragments. 3ournal of Chemical Documentation 14, 4448.
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This work led directly to an examination of similar phenomena in the context of information systems in which text and related linguistic entities provide the main forms of attention. Here it has been possible to develop a reinterpretation of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, with significant and very far-reaching implications for information science. It has been shown that the interpretation which Shannon and subsequent researchers in this area placed on his most fundamental statement of the theory has been unduly limited and restrictive. Shannon’s theory, as yet, occupies no central position in the theory of librarianship and information science. That this is so is largely due to the fact that the interpretation placed on the theory has been restricted to a particular strategy, one essentially similar to that introduced by Samuel Morse in his design of Morse code, over a century ago. Shannon’s theory deals with the fact that linguistic records have much redundancy, and that in mechanical or electronic systems this redundancy implies inefficiency-although for humans, redundancy may imply greater understandability. This is evidenced by the fact that not all possible combinations of letters, even those which are pronounceable, occur as recognizable words in a language. Moreover, the frequency distributions, both of words and of letters in a language are highly disparate. Morse used the latter fact to advantage in the design of his code, which ensures that frequent characters have short sequences of dots and dashes, while infrequent characters are represented by long combinations, thus achieving a reduction in the total number of impulses to be transmitted. The new interpretation adopts, instead, a different strategy. It makes use of the fact that certain combinations of common characters, e.g. ATION in nouns of Latin origin, occur at least as frequently as less frequent characters. The strategy permits the identification of new symbol sets, some symbols of which consist of combinations of primitive characters, which in themselves are almost equally frequent, and thus approach the ideal of the theory. The theory leads to the discovery of fundamental variety-probability relationships in texts (in a variety of Western languages, regardless of the subject content of the texts), and in turn, to the possibility of using these relationships in devising more efficient algorithms and processes which may increase the efficiency of operation of computer-based information systems.19 29s The general 1 I. J. Barton, M. F. Lynch, J. H. Petrie and M. J. Snell (1974). Variable-length character string analyses of three data-bases, and their application for file compression. In Proceedings of 1st Znfownatics Conference. London: Aslib. 154-162. s D. W. Fokker and M. F. Lynch (1974). Application of the variety-generator approach to searches of personal names in bibliographic data-bases. (I) Microstructure of personal author
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framework within which this work is pursued is now known as Variety Generation. Professor Lynch’s current research work is directed to determining the range of application of these methods, and the degree of improvement in efficiency which they may lead to. Dr G. W. Adamson, a member of one of Professor Lynch’s earliest research teams, joined the full-time teaching staff in 1971, and until his departure in 1978 followed a related line of research in association with Ph.D. students working under his direction. This work is concerned with the automatic analysis of information in chemical data banks and the background is as follows. Research activities in some areas of chemistry have resulted in the accumulation of large amounts of data. In order to manage it computer-based systems and very large computer-readable data banks have been developed. However, as well as offering good methods of storage and retrieval, such systems make possible automatic data analysis which may be of scientific and economic value in aiding research planning. The work under Dr Adamson has taken as an example chemical structure, property and biological activity data, as held in internal data banks in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries, and has developed methods for automatic correlation and prediction in these areas. The methods produced have handled chemical structure explicitly in the form of connection tables or Wiswesser Line Notation and have used multiple regression analysis and pattern recognition techniques. Results obtained have been statistically highly significant and their usefulness is being assessed in collaboration with industrial groups. As already mentioned, work in the field of information science has always been balanced by research in library science. The present writer had carried out in the early 1960’s a large-scale survey of the use of a university library,1 from which quite significant information emerged on such matters as the varying needs and use-patterns of different disciplines at undergraduate, postgraduate and research level, and the varying intensity and nature of the provision of books and journals in the different sections of the university library’s stock. A particularly important question thrown up by the survey was that of the nature, use, names. Journal of Library Automation 7, 105-l 18. (II) Optimisation of key-sets, and evaluation of their retrieval efficiency. Journal of Library Automation 7, 201-213. s M. F. Lynch (1977). Variety Generation-A reinterpretation of Shannon’s mathematical theory ofcommunication, and its implications for information science. JASZS 28,1%25. 1 W. L. Saunders, E. W. Roberts and L. J. Wichison (1966). Survey of borrowing from the University of Sheffield during one academic year. In The provision and use of library and documentation series (W. L. Saunders, ed). London: Pergamon Press.
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and general justification of the extensive collections of books and journals in foreign languages to be found (in nearly all subjects) in British university libraries. This is a matter of substantial academicand economic-significance, and O.S.T.I. agreed to finance a two-year research project under Professor W. L. Saunders, to investigate in very considerable depth the existence and nature of the language barrier in an academic community. Sheffield University, which covers the whole normal range of academic disciplines, was the subject of the research and a whole battery of techniques-from citation analysis to in-library use surveying, and in-depth interviews-was used in the production of a very substantial report. it2 The results threw a great deal of light on the nature and extent of foreign language materials, in a university library, on who uses them and how they are used, on the language competence of British academics, the relative importance of different languages, in different disciplines, and a host of other matters. It concluded by making recommendations for action by university librarians. This was the first funded research project in academic librarianship, but in one way or another a pretty steady flow of work in this field has emerged from the School over the years. In addition to the work already described, Mr N. Roberts was the Library Association’s reporters for many years on university library matters, and Miss J. E. Friedman, with a Newcastle colleague, Mr A. E. Jeffreys, produced in the late 1960s a very illuminating series of reports on cataloguing and classification in British university libraries.4>5*6 Another important strand in the School’s research activity has been that of professional education for library and information science. In view of the School’s specialized and pioneering concern with the professional education of scientists and technologists for scientific and industrial information work, O.S.T.I. awarded a grant in 1966 to Professor W. L. Saunders and Mr H. Schur to carry out an investigation into education and training for scientific and technological l W. J. Hutchins, L. J. Pargeter and W. L. Saunders (1971). The language barrier: a study in depth of thejlace offoreign language materials in the researchactivity of an ac&ic community. Sheffield : Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, University of Sheffield, o.p. 2 W. J. Hutchins, L. J. Pargeter and W. L. Saunders (1971). University research and the 1 anguage barrier. 3ownal of Libratianship 3, l-25. s Library Association Record, 74 (1) January, 1972-1976, (9) Sept., 1974. 4 J. E. Friedman ami A. E. Jellkeys (1967). Cataloguing and classification in British universiv libraries: a survey of practices andprocedures, Part I. Sheffield: Postgraduate School of Librarianship, University of Sheffield. 5 J. E. Friedman and A. E. Jeffreys (1967). Cataloguing and classification in British university libraries: a survey of practices and procedures. Journal of Donrmentation 23, 22&2&. 6 J. E. Friedman and A. E. Jeffreys (1969). Cataloguing and classification in British university libraries, Part 2: The labour force. Journal of Documentation 25, 43-51.
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library and information work. This research led to the publication of an H.M.S.O. report of that title 1 in 1968, and the work was taken further when in 1971 Mr H. Schur carried out for O.E.C.D. a survey of selected advanced courses in the U.S.A. and a number of European countries as a basis for a recommended range of courses and curricula. The report which emerged from this work, Education and training of information specialistsfor the 197Os,2 turned out to be a seminal document which has had considerable influence on education and training programmes in all parts of ihe world. Mr Schur has also been directly concerned with research into the education and training of information specialists for two particular countries, Israel and Colombia. For the latter country he proposed a national plan in the form of a restricted circulation report, produced in 1976. Work on these education and training projects, together with a number of other forces at work within the British library and information world was by the late 1960s focusing very great attention on the whole subject of library and information manpower. In 1971 a Library Association committee set up to examine research needs identified manpower-and particularly the qualitative aspects of manpower-as the number one priority. As a consequence of this, a major research project was financed by O.S.T.I., based on the Sheffield School, under the direction of Professor W. L. Saunders and Mr N. Roberts. Mr R. Sergean, an industrial psychologist, was appointed Principal Investigator, and his team carried out between 1972-1975 a study of library and information staffing covering units of every type : academic, public and special. In simple terms the project was concerned with matching people to jobs and jobs to people. More specifically, it was an investigation of the characteristics of the personnel required for library and information work and the nature of the work itself-the content and demands of existing jobs. An important part of the research was, of course, the devising of an appropriate methodology; information was collected through the administration of a very carefully devised job analysis questionnaire to individual staff members in a representative 5% sample of libraries and information departments of all types and sizes. The reports which emerged examine library and information work, its constituent tasks and the environment in which this work takes place, in terms of the intellectual, social and physical demands placed on the job holder. The degree to which these job demands are met by existing 1 H. Schur and W. L. Saunders (1968). Education and training for scientific and technological library and information work. London: H.M.S.O. 2 H. Schur (1972). Education and training of infomation specialists for the 1970s (O.E.C.D.) : (DAS/STZNFO/72.9). Paris: O.E.C.D.
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personnel is also examined. Suggestions are made as to how the matching ofjob and job holder might be improved and special sections are devoted to the impact of change, the relative roles of men and women and the part played by graduates.19 2 The findings of this manpower research clearly have very important implications for future policy in professional education and training and early in 1978 a seminar was planned by Mr N. Roberts at which an invited audience, principally professional educationists, will critically discuss the report with a view to future educational policy and objectives. This is perhaps a suitable point at which to high-light the importance of disseminating and implementing the results of research, once a project has been completed. The School has found small seminars of invited specialists to be a useful first step in dissemination and the British Library has generously supported a number of such seminars. It is perhaps worth mentioning, too, that seminars of this type have also been valuable before research, as well as after: a group of specialists can often very quickly identify research needs in a particular field, and give guidance on priorities. Simultaneously with the project on management and staffing there was being carried out in the School a two-year study of concern to academic and publicly funded librarians of all types. This work, which was under the direction of Professor W. L. Saunders, with Dr T. D. Wilson as Principal Investigator, was the local library co-operation project, funded by the Department of Education and Science, following discussions in the Library Advisory Councils for England and Wales. The scope of the project was restricted to co-operation in the service of higher education needs and involved a series of investigations in 6 institutions in the City of Sheffield: the University Library, the Polytechnic Library, the City Library, the libraries of two colleges of education, and the Institute of Education Library. The project involved a wide range of investigations under several headings: attitudes of library staffs and library managers towards cooperation ; a review of current practice in the field of library co-operation and of opinions on the desirability of specific forms of co-operation; various studies of local resources, staff, bookstock, reference materials and periodicals, and of the overlap in holdings of these materials; studies of the overlap in current acquisitions; studies of the demand for 1 R. Sergean, J. R. McKay and C. Corkill (1976). The She@ld man@wer project: a survey of sta@g requirements for librarianship and infmation work. Sheffield: Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, University of Sheffield. 2 R. Sergean (1977). Librarianship and information work: job characteristics and staffing needs. Bn’tish Library Research and DeveQnnent Reports, No. 5321 HC. British Library Research and Development Department.
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inter-library loans and the sources of supply; and studies of the information seeking behaviour of the staff and students of the various educational institutions. The scope of the project made it probably the most detailed investigation of the background to co-operation ever conducted. l* 2 This research study was expected to provide a model and methodologies for use over the country in general-not just Sheffield-and its findings have already stimulated a great deal of activity at both national and local level. In Sheffield itself a Sheffield Libraries Coordinating Committee has been established, under the Chairmanship of the University’s Vice-Chancellor, the objective of which is to stimulate and co-ordinate co-operative activity of all types with a view to ensuring maximum utilization of the resources of all publicly funded libraries in the region. The Local Library Co-operation project is a good example of research with a definitely practical objective which nevertheless generated new methodologies and techniques potentially of much wider value. Reference was made earlier to the close relationship between research and teaching, and in 1973, when the School established a new taught Masters degree-the M.A. in Information Studies (Social Sciences)thought was quite naturally given to initiating research which would reflect and interact with the social science orientation of this new programme. In 1974 a forum on information needs in social welfare was held in Sheffield with representatives of various disciplines. One of the recommendations arising out of this forum was that research should be undertaken into the information needs of social workers and social administrators. Following this recommendation a proposal was successfully submitted to the British Library R & D Department by Dr T. D. Wilson for funding to support the first two stages of a three stage “action research” project. That is, a programme of research involving the determination of user needs; the feedback of the research data to the departments participating in the study; the development, in consultation with staff of these departments, of innovations in information services, and the monitoring and evaluation of these innovations. The first phase of this project has involved the observation of 22 members of social services staff in five departments, representing all levels of staff from Director to basic grade social worker. The aim of this phase of the study has been to put information need and information use 1 T. D. Wilson and W. A. J. Marsterson (1974). Local library co-operation: final report on a project funded by the Department of Education and Science. Sheffield : Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, University of Sheffield. a T. D. Wilson (1975). Local library co-operation in the service of higher education. 3oum1 of Librarianship 7, 143-152.
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in the general context of organizational communication and the nature of the work performed in social services departments. An element of feedback has been introduced in that the narrative accounts of the observation weeks have been returned to the subjects and interviews will be held to assess the general validity of these accounts. The understanding gained through this first phase of the study has led to the development of an interview schedule which will be used with a larger number of people in the same departments, to test the hypothesis emerging out of the first phase of the investigation and a proposal has now been submitted to the BLR & DD for further funding of a programme of monitored and evaluated innovations in information service provision.l* 2*3l 4 This project moves into general areas of communication which are not bounded by the institutional context of libraries and information services and it well reflects the more generalized approach to communication which characterizes the new M.A. in Information Studies (Social Sciences) programme. The programme itself has been the occasion for a good deal of innovatory work and experimentation which may have wider implications for professional education and which are well described in a forthcoming paper by the co-ordinator of the programme, Mr N. Roberts.5 At the beginning of 1976 there was initiated the largest research project with which the School has so far been associated. This is the Centre for Research on User Studies, financed by the British Library Research and Development Department, and of special significance in being funded for 5 years. This is a much longer period than the duration of a normal research grant and has obvious advantages in facilitating continuity of work and the long-term planning of research; it also of course makes for a more stable research team. Another distinctive feature of the project is its deliberately multi-disciplinary character. One of the two joint project heads-Professor W. L. Saunders-provides a background of librarianship and information science; the other, Dr 1 D. R. Streatfield (1977). Information in local authority social services departments. Social ServicesQgarterb 51,5-g. s T. D. Wilson and D. R. Streatfield (1977). Information needs in local authority social services departments: an interim report on Project INISS. 3ournd of Documentation 33,277-293. s Information needs and information services in local authority social services departments (Project INISS). Final report to the British Library Research and Development (1978), 2 ~01s. (BLRDD Report 5453). 4 D. R. Streatfield (1978). Information services in local authority social services departments : preliminary review. 3oumalof Librarianship 10, 1-18. 5 N. Roberts (to be published). Information studies and the social sciences: a Master’s programme at the Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, University of Sheffield.
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P. H. Mann, is Reader in Sociology and has a specialist knowledge of reading, publishing, and the book trade in general. The research team of five is headed by an information scientist and its members provide between them skills in sociology, surveying, librarianship, computing and statistics. It is intended that the Centre should become the national focus of expertise in its field and that in addition to carrying out research it should also have advisory, educational and informational roles. Its first two research projects are concerned with information and library needs and use in the humanities (a relatively neglected area) and the library and information needs of the general reader.1 That this paper has been concerned thus far with fairly large-scale externally funded research does not mean that smaller, more individual research projects have not also been in progress. These have often been concerned with education programmes and teaching: in the subject bibliography field, for example, Mr F. S. Stych has applied a flow-chart technique to teaching the principles of reference work, Miss F. E. Wood tested for UNISIST their draft reference manual for machine-readable bibliographical descriptions, and a group of staff members has carried out experimental work on the teaching of on-line retrieval techniques. Reference should also be made to a large-scale follow-up survey and analysis of former students of the School; this resulted in publications by Miss F. E. Wood and Mr N. Roberts which have proved to be very valuable in curriculum development both within the School and elsewhere.273 All in all the record of the School in research, since its creation 15 years ago, gives cause for a fair degree of satisfaction, though by no means for complacency. More work is still needed on the integration of Ph.D. work with on-going research; more follow-up work is needed on the implementation of the findings and recommendations of completed research projects. Above all, perhaps, continuous vigilance and effort is required to ensure that the School’s research benefits its teaching to the maximum possible extent and that there is adequate communication and interaction between individual research teams. In this latter respect it was, for instance, very chastening to find members of the manpower research project team seeking discussion and advice outside the School on cluster analysis techniques, when the knowledge and experience in 1 K. Wilson-Davis (1977). The Centre for Research on User Studies: aims and functions. As&b Proceedings29, 67-76. 2 F. E. Wood (1975). Scientists in librarianship and information work. Journalof Librarianship 7, 31-48. s N. Roberts (1973). Graduates in academic libraries: a survey of past students of the Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Studies, Sheffield University, 1964-65 -1970/71.30urna1 of Librarianship 5, 97-l 15.
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question was available all the time on our own doorstep, with Dr Adamson’s research group. Finally, it must be confessed and made clear that research has always constituted a major demand on the time and resources of the School and its staff. It should be clear from this paper that we believe it to have been a wise and beneficial investment, from which the benefits far outweigh the costs.
Research at the University of Sheffield Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science W. L. SAUNDERS*
It is an article of faith within the British academic world that a university has a responsibility not just to teach, but to carry out research, to extend the boundaries of knowledge. It is further believed that the interaction between research and teaching is mutually beneficial, that the teaching of an academic who is personally involved in research is likely to have a sharper edge than that of one who is not; and it is in fact normal for the contract of a British university teacher to include a requirement that he should be engaged in research. In creating a new university department it therefore seems both right and natural to plan from the very beginning for research, as well as teaching. This was certainly the case with the University of Sheffield Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science which was set up in 1963, with the present writer as its Director, and which began teaching in October 1964. The intention to engage in research was clearly stated in the first major public statement of the School’s objectives1 and the concern of this article is to show how the intention was realized and to give some idea of the form and content of the School’s research activities in the years since 1964. If research is a normal expectation of a university department it may be felt that there is nothing particularly remarkable in a new School of Librarianship having stated an intention to engage in research in its field, and having succeeded in carrying out such research. The fact is, however, that at the time when the Sheffield School was founded, serious research, other than the bibliographical, was being carried out on only a very small scale. There was no tradition of funded research in library and information studies; there was a lack of awareness within the * Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, University of Sheffield, England. 1 W. L. Saunders (1964). Challenge and opportunity: Sheffield’s new postgraduate library school. A&b Proceedings16, 105-I 15. 0020-7837/79/020199+ 14 $02.00/O 0 1979 Academic Press Inc. (London) Limited
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profession at large of the need for research; and-unlike the established scientific disciplines-there was no pool of research-trained personnel to create and implement such programmes as might be established. On the other hand, it is now very clear that the time when the School came into existence was particularly favourable for an institution with the will and ambition to embark on research in the library and information field. In 1965-only months after the School admitted its first students-there was created the Office for Scientific and Technical Information (O.S.T.I.), charged, amongst other things, with the encouragement and sponsoring of research; and what is more, provided with the funds to finance well conceived research projects on quite a substantial scale. True, its major concern was with research in the field of scientific and technological information, but O.S.T.I. interpreted this remit very liberally and much of the work which it financed-mechanization is an obvious case in point-brought benefit to librarianship in general as well as to scientific information studies. The Sheffield School, in 1965-its first year of operation-in fact received the very first research grant offered by O.S.T.I., a grant which enabled it to bring back to Britain Dr M. F. Lynch, who was at that time head of basic research with Chemical Abstracts Service. Dr (now Professor) Lynch was a chemist by training with a strong information and computer orientation. He came equipped with research knowledge and experience originally gained in a discipline other than library or information science; and this turning to another, more established, discipline, for the research capabilities at that time lacking in library and information studies, is a good example of the way in which our discipline surmounted the problems of finding research-trained personnel during those early years of research activity which O.S.T.I. both stimulated and financed. Researchers from other, often cognate, disciplines-chemistry, computing science, physics, linguistics, psychology, to name but a few-have made most valuable personal contributions to research in our field, and moreover have trained many young professional librarians and information workers in the discipline of research. As time went by the library schools, too, contributed to research training, via Masters and Doctors degrees by research, but the now quite substantial cadre of British research workers in library and information studies has probably been mainly built up by on-the-job research experience gained, in the main, on projects financed by O.S.T.I. and its successor, the British Library Research and Development Department. Dr Lynch’s appointment in Sheffield proved to be the beginning of an involvement by the School in funded research which must now total at
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least 30 different research grants, to a value fast approaching one million pounds. At any given time the research staff will be likely to total between 12 and 15, covering between them three or four different projects, each under the direction of a member of teaching staff. The research staff themselves are normally quite senior people of at least (Associate Lecturer status and, in many cases, at Senior Lecturer Professor) level. The principal source of funding continues to be the British Library Research and Development Department, though grants have in fact been received from various other sources, for example the Department of Education and Science, O.E.C.D., and UJVESCO. Dr Lynch’s work ensured a continuing stream of research activity in the information science area, of which fuller details are given below. It is gratifying indeed that his pioneering work, which has gained wide recognition both nationally and internationally, has also been rewarded internally: the University in 1975 recognized the distinction of Dr Lynch’s research by the award of one of its rare Personal Chairs, and gave him the title of Professor of Information Science. In an institution such as the Sheffield School, which covers both library and information science and believes firmly that they are not separate entities, but part of a unified whole, it was natural that we should seek to engage in research across the whole spectrum of library and information science activity. It has normally been the case that Professor Lynch’s information science projects have been balanced by research with a more traditional librarianship orientation, or of a generally pervasive nature. During the last year, for example, there has been in progress, in addition to Professor Lynch’s work on variety generation and chemical structure information systems, the concluding stages of a large-scale research on library and information unit staffing, research on user studies, on information needs and services in local government social service departments, on the teaching of on-line searching, and on the automatic analysis of information in chemical data banks. In addition, of course, non-funded, personal research has been in progress, such as that of Dr F. S. Stych’s bibliographical study of Boccaccio and Mr N. Roberts’ work on communication in the social sciences. Reverting to the point made earlier about the value of interaction between research and teaching it is worth mentioning that with such a wide spread of research topics within the School it is possible each year for a good number of the approximately 60 students working for the taught Masters degrees to be able to choose for their dissertation a topic which directly contributes to an on-going research project. The availability of such meaningful dissertation topics offers educational benefits which the School and its students have come to value very
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highly indeed. From the research side there is, equally, a very great appreciation of the input which students’ special studies have provided over the years. Though smaller in numbers, reference must also be made to the Doctors and Masters degrees by research which, like the taught Masters degree dissertations, are often associated with on-going research projects, but which naturally represent far more substantial contributions. Similarly there has been an important contribution from the senior, Post-Doctoral Research Fellows, of whom there are normally one or two within the School at any given time; and from a succession of senior practitioners from overseas who have spent up to a year of study leave based on the School. It is not really feasible to set out a comprehensive or even a systematic statement of the research which has been carried out in the School to date, but it is hoped that the paragraphs which follow will at least provide something of the flavour of its research activities, starting with a description of the work of Professor Lynch which, as already stated, was the starting point for the School’s programme of funded research. The objective of the research team working under the direction of Professor M. F. Lynch since 1965 has been the identification and elucidation of fundamental structural patterns in the information and data which are typically handled in computer-based bibliographic information systems. The work which, as already stated, has been supported by the award of research grants from the British Library Research and Development (formerly O.S.T.I.), has thrown light on a number of phenomena and on the development of methods which lead to greater efficiency in the operation of publication and retrieval systems, and to a sounder theoretical basis for certain aspects of the design of information systems. The first major area of investigation was a study of the structure of index entries in articulated subject indexes, an important class of indexes in science and technology, particularly characteristic of those published in the English language. Perhaps the best known index of this type is the Subject Index to Chemical Abstracts, and in it, the entries consist of extended prepositional phrases describing the subject content of documents. These phrases are often structurally rearranged, or articulated, so that an entry point, which forms the main access point in the alphabetic sequence, is brought to the front of the entry. It was possible to show that this articulated form of entry is related to the normal, or unrearranged form of the phrase, by a simple transformation rule. In turn, it was relatively easy to demonstrate that reversing the transformation rule gave rise to the possibility of automatically creating
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articulated subject indexes from simple, unrearranged descriptive phrases recorded by indexers. The development first of experimental software, and later of a production system which is used by several Research Associations in Britain, has provided a useful method of index production which results in greater productivity on the part of highly skilled indexing staff.lp2 More recently, the adoption, with further development, of the basic algorithm by the Chemical Abstracts Service holds the prospect of yet wider use of the results of the original search. The second major area to which attention was directed was the problem presented by the need for chemists to search records of chemical molecules to identify all those substances in which a particular subassembly of atoms and bonds occur. Chemistry, and in particular, organic chemistry, has developed during the past century on the basis of analogies which can be drawn between the behaviour of molecules which show substantial structural similarities. In this instance, it was argued that the identification of partial structures which could act as highly discriminant features during the search process was an ideal model on which to study the development of indexing theory. It was also argued that the problem was better viewed as an information systems problem, rather than as a chemical problem, so that the conventional nomenclature of chemistry, and the groupings of atoms and bonds with which it deals, should be ignored, and that the statistics of occurrence of atoms, bonds, and their co-occurrences should be taken into account instead. Since the structures of more than 2.5 million different molecules, principally organic, are already recorded in information systems, this is a major problem and need. In the event, a strategy was developed which led to a simple and costeffective method of describing the structural components of chemical molecules with a limited number of characteristics which were more or less equally frequent in their occurrence, and which were also equally likely to be used in searches for particular classes of structurally related molecules.3l4 1 J. E. Armitage, M. F. Lynch, J. H. Petrie and M. Belton (1970). Experimental use of a program for computer-aided subject index production. Information Storage and Retrieval, 79-87. s I. J. Barton, S. E. Creasey, M. F. Lynch and M. J. Snell (1974). An information-theoretic approach to text-searching in direct-access sytems. Cbmmunications Association for Computing il4achirmy 17, 345-350. s G. W. Adamson, J. Cowell, M. F. Lynch, A. H. W. McLure, W. G. Town and A. M. Yapp (1973). Strategic considerations in the design of a screening system for substructure searches of chemical structure files. 3ouwd of Chemical D ommentation 13, 153-157. 4 G. W. Adamson, J. Bush, M. F. Lynch and A. H. W. McLure (1974). An evaluation of a substructure search screen system based on bond-centred fragments. 3ournal of Chemical Documentation 14, 4448.
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This work led directly to an examination of similar phenomena in the context of information systems in which text and related linguistic entities provide the main forms of attention. Here it has been possible to develop a reinterpretation of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, with significant and very far-reaching implications for information science. It has been shown that the interpretation which Shannon and subsequent researchers in this area placed on his most fundamental statement of the theory has been unduly limited and restrictive. Shannon’s theory, as yet, occupies no central position in the theory of librarianship and information science. That this is so is largely due to the fact that the interpretation placed on the theory has been restricted to a particular strategy, one essentially similar to that introduced by Samuel Morse in his design of Morse code, over a century ago. Shannon’s theory deals with the fact that linguistic records have much redundancy, and that in mechanical or electronic systems this redundancy implies inefficiency-although for humans, redundancy may imply greater understandability. This is evidenced by the fact that not all possible combinations of letters, even those which are pronounceable, occur as recognizable words in a language. Moreover, the frequency distributions, both of words and of letters in a language are highly disparate. Morse used the latter fact to advantage in the design of his code, which ensures that frequent characters have short sequences of dots and dashes, while infrequent characters are represented by long combinations, thus achieving a reduction in the total number of impulses to be transmitted. The new interpretation adopts, instead, a different strategy. It makes use of the fact that certain combinations of common characters, e.g. ATION in nouns of Latin origin, occur at least as frequently as less frequent characters. The strategy permits the identification of new symbol sets, some symbols of which consist of combinations of primitive characters, which in themselves are almost equally frequent, and thus approach the ideal of the theory. The theory leads to the discovery of fundamental variety-probability relationships in texts (in a variety of Western languages, regardless of the subject content of the texts), and in turn, to the possibility of using these relationships in devising more efficient algorithms and processes which may increase the efficiency of operation of computer-based information systems.19 29s The general 1 I. J. Barton, M. F. Lynch, J. H. Petrie and M. J. Snell (1974). Variable-length character string analyses of three data-bases, and their application for file compression. In Proceedings of 1st Znfownatics Conference. London: Aslib. 154-162. s D. W. Fokker and M. F. Lynch (1974). Application of the variety-generator approach to searches of personal names in bibliographic data-bases. (I) Microstructure of personal author
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framework within which this work is pursued is now known as Variety Generation. Professor Lynch’s current research work is directed to determining the range of application of these methods, and the degree of improvement in efficiency which they may lead to. Dr G. W. Adamson, a member of one of Professor Lynch’s earliest research teams, joined the full-time teaching staff in 1971, and until his departure in 1978 followed a related line of research in association with Ph.D. students working under his direction. This work is concerned with the automatic analysis of information in chemical data banks and the background is as follows. Research activities in some areas of chemistry have resulted in the accumulation of large amounts of data. In order to manage it computer-based systems and very large computer-readable data banks have been developed. However, as well as offering good methods of storage and retrieval, such systems make possible automatic data analysis which may be of scientific and economic value in aiding research planning. The work under Dr Adamson has taken as an example chemical structure, property and biological activity data, as held in internal data banks in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries, and has developed methods for automatic correlation and prediction in these areas. The methods produced have handled chemical structure explicitly in the form of connection tables or Wiswesser Line Notation and have used multiple regression analysis and pattern recognition techniques. Results obtained have been statistically highly significant and their usefulness is being assessed in collaboration with industrial groups. As already mentioned, work in the field of information science has always been balanced by research in library science. The present writer had carried out in the early 1960’s a large-scale survey of the use of a university library,1 from which quite significant information emerged on such matters as the varying needs and use-patterns of different disciplines at undergraduate, postgraduate and research level, and the varying intensity and nature of the provision of books and journals in the different sections of the university library’s stock. A particularly important question thrown up by the survey was that of the nature, use, names. Journal of Library Automation 7, 105-l 18. (II) Optimisation of key-sets, and evaluation of their retrieval efficiency. Journal of Library Automation 7, 201-213. s M. F. Lynch (1977). Variety Generation-A reinterpretation of Shannon’s mathematical theory ofcommunication, and its implications for information science. JASZS 28,1%25. 1 W. L. Saunders, E. W. Roberts and L. J. Wichison (1966). Survey of borrowing from the University of Sheffield during one academic year. In The provision and use of library and documentation series (W. L. Saunders, ed). London: Pergamon Press.
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and general justification of the extensive collections of books and journals in foreign languages to be found (in nearly all subjects) in British university libraries. This is a matter of substantial academicand economic-significance, and O.S.T.I. agreed to finance a two-year research project under Professor W. L. Saunders, to investigate in very considerable depth the existence and nature of the language barrier in an academic community. Sheffield University, which covers the whole normal range of academic disciplines, was the subject of the research and a whole battery of techniques-from citation analysis to in-library use surveying, and in-depth interviews-was used in the production of a very substantial report. it2 The results threw a great deal of light on the nature and extent of foreign language materials, in a university library, on who uses them and how they are used, on the language competence of British academics, the relative importance of different languages, in different disciplines, and a host of other matters. It concluded by making recommendations for action by university librarians. This was the first funded research project in academic librarianship, but in one way or another a pretty steady flow of work in this field has emerged from the School over the years. In addition to the work already described, Mr N. Roberts was the Library Association’s reporters for many years on university library matters, and Miss J. E. Friedman, with a Newcastle colleague, Mr A. E. Jeffreys, produced in the late 1960s a very illuminating series of reports on cataloguing and classification in British university libraries.4>5*6 Another important strand in the School’s research activity has been that of professional education for library and information science. In view of the School’s specialized and pioneering concern with the professional education of scientists and technologists for scientific and industrial information work, O.S.T.I. awarded a grant in 1966 to Professor W. L. Saunders and Mr H. Schur to carry out an investigation into education and training for scientific and technological l W. J. Hutchins, L. J. Pargeter and W. L. Saunders (1971). The language barrier: a study in depth of thejlace offoreign language materials in the researchactivity of an ac&ic community. Sheffield : Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, University of Sheffield, o.p. 2 W. J. Hutchins, L. J. Pargeter and W. L. Saunders (1971). University research and the 1 anguage barrier. 3ownal of Libratianship 3, l-25. s Library Association Record, 74 (1) January, 1972-1976, (9) Sept., 1974. 4 J. E. Friedman ami A. E. Jellkeys (1967). Cataloguing and classification in British universiv libraries: a survey of practices andprocedures, Part I. Sheffield: Postgraduate School of Librarianship, University of Sheffield. 5 J. E. Friedman and A. E. Jeffreys (1967). Cataloguing and classification in British university libraries: a survey of practices and procedures. Journal of Donrmentation 23, 22&2&. 6 J. E. Friedman and A. E. Jeffreys (1969). Cataloguing and classification in British university libraries, Part 2: The labour force. Journal of Documentation 25, 43-51.
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library and information work. This research led to the publication of an H.M.S.O. report of that title 1 in 1968, and the work was taken further when in 1971 Mr H. Schur carried out for O.E.C.D. a survey of selected advanced courses in the U.S.A. and a number of European countries as a basis for a recommended range of courses and curricula. The report which emerged from this work, Education and training of information specialistsfor the 197Os,2 turned out to be a seminal document which has had considerable influence on education and training programmes in all parts of ihe world. Mr Schur has also been directly concerned with research into the education and training of information specialists for two particular countries, Israel and Colombia. For the latter country he proposed a national plan in the form of a restricted circulation report, produced in 1976. Work on these education and training projects, together with a number of other forces at work within the British library and information world was by the late 1960s focusing very great attention on the whole subject of library and information manpower. In 1971 a Library Association committee set up to examine research needs identified manpower-and particularly the qualitative aspects of manpower-as the number one priority. As a consequence of this, a major research project was financed by O.S.T.I., based on the Sheffield School, under the direction of Professor W. L. Saunders and Mr N. Roberts. Mr R. Sergean, an industrial psychologist, was appointed Principal Investigator, and his team carried out between 1972-1975 a study of library and information staffing covering units of every type : academic, public and special. In simple terms the project was concerned with matching people to jobs and jobs to people. More specifically, it was an investigation of the characteristics of the personnel required for library and information work and the nature of the work itself-the content and demands of existing jobs. An important part of the research was, of course, the devising of an appropriate methodology; information was collected through the administration of a very carefully devised job analysis questionnaire to individual staff members in a representative 5% sample of libraries and information departments of all types and sizes. The reports which emerged examine library and information work, its constituent tasks and the environment in which this work takes place, in terms of the intellectual, social and physical demands placed on the job holder. The degree to which these job demands are met by existing 1 H. Schur and W. L. Saunders (1968). Education and training for scientific and technological library and information work. London: H.M.S.O. 2 H. Schur (1972). Education and training of infomation specialists for the 1970s (O.E.C.D.) : (DAS/STZNFO/72.9). Paris: O.E.C.D.
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personnel is also examined. Suggestions are made as to how the matching ofjob and job holder might be improved and special sections are devoted to the impact of change, the relative roles of men and women and the part played by graduates.19 2 The findings of this manpower research clearly have very important implications for future policy in professional education and training and early in 1978 a seminar was planned by Mr N. Roberts at which an invited audience, principally professional educationists, will critically discuss the report with a view to future educational policy and objectives. This is perhaps a suitable point at which to high-light the importance of disseminating and implementing the results of research, once a project has been completed. The School has found small seminars of invited specialists to be a useful first step in dissemination and the British Library has generously supported a number of such seminars. It is perhaps worth mentioning, too, that seminars of this type have also been valuable before research, as well as after: a group of specialists can often very quickly identify research needs in a particular field, and give guidance on priorities. Simultaneously with the project on management and staffing there was being carried out in the School a two-year study of concern to academic and publicly funded librarians of all types. This work, which was under the direction of Professor W. L. Saunders, with Dr T. D. Wilson as Principal Investigator, was the local library co-operation project, funded by the Department of Education and Science, following discussions in the Library Advisory Councils for England and Wales. The scope of the project was restricted to co-operation in the service of higher education needs and involved a series of investigations in 6 institutions in the City of Sheffield: the University Library, the Polytechnic Library, the City Library, the libraries of two colleges of education, and the Institute of Education Library. The project involved a wide range of investigations under several headings: attitudes of library staffs and library managers towards cooperation ; a review of current practice in the field of library co-operation and of opinions on the desirability of specific forms of co-operation; various studies of local resources, staff, bookstock, reference materials and periodicals, and of the overlap in holdings of these materials; studies of the overlap in current acquisitions; studies of the demand for 1 R. Sergean, J. R. McKay and C. Corkill (1976). The She@ld man@wer project: a survey of sta@g requirements for librarianship and infmation work. Sheffield: Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, University of Sheffield. 2 R. Sergean (1977). Librarianship and information work: job characteristics and staffing needs. Bn’tish Library Research and DeveQnnent Reports, No. 5321 HC. British Library Research and Development Department.
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inter-library loans and the sources of supply; and studies of the information seeking behaviour of the staff and students of the various educational institutions. The scope of the project made it probably the most detailed investigation of the background to co-operation ever conducted. l* 2 This research study was expected to provide a model and methodologies for use over the country in general-not just Sheffield-and its findings have already stimulated a great deal of activity at both national and local level. In Sheffield itself a Sheffield Libraries Coordinating Committee has been established, under the Chairmanship of the University’s Vice-Chancellor, the objective of which is to stimulate and co-ordinate co-operative activity of all types with a view to ensuring maximum utilization of the resources of all publicly funded libraries in the region. The Local Library Co-operation project is a good example of research with a definitely practical objective which nevertheless generated new methodologies and techniques potentially of much wider value. Reference was made earlier to the close relationship between research and teaching, and in 1973, when the School established a new taught Masters degree-the M.A. in Information Studies (Social Sciences)thought was quite naturally given to initiating research which would reflect and interact with the social science orientation of this new programme. In 1974 a forum on information needs in social welfare was held in Sheffield with representatives of various disciplines. One of the recommendations arising out of this forum was that research should be undertaken into the information needs of social workers and social administrators. Following this recommendation a proposal was successfully submitted to the British Library R & D Department by Dr T. D. Wilson for funding to support the first two stages of a three stage “action research” project. That is, a programme of research involving the determination of user needs; the feedback of the research data to the departments participating in the study; the development, in consultation with staff of these departments, of innovations in information services, and the monitoring and evaluation of these innovations. The first phase of this project has involved the observation of 22 members of social services staff in five departments, representing all levels of staff from Director to basic grade social worker. The aim of this phase of the study has been to put information need and information use 1 T. D. Wilson and W. A. J. Marsterson (1974). Local library co-operation: final report on a project funded by the Department of Education and Science. Sheffield : Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, University of Sheffield. a T. D. Wilson (1975). Local library co-operation in the service of higher education. 3oum1 of Librarianship 7, 143-152.
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in the general context of organizational communication and the nature of the work performed in social services departments. An element of feedback has been introduced in that the narrative accounts of the observation weeks have been returned to the subjects and interviews will be held to assess the general validity of these accounts. The understanding gained through this first phase of the study has led to the development of an interview schedule which will be used with a larger number of people in the same departments, to test the hypothesis emerging out of the first phase of the investigation and a proposal has now been submitted to the BLR & DD for further funding of a programme of monitored and evaluated innovations in information service provision.l* 2*3l 4 This project moves into general areas of communication which are not bounded by the institutional context of libraries and information services and it well reflects the more generalized approach to communication which characterizes the new M.A. in Information Studies (Social Sciences) programme. The programme itself has been the occasion for a good deal of innovatory work and experimentation which may have wider implications for professional education and which are well described in a forthcoming paper by the co-ordinator of the programme, Mr N. Roberts.5 At the beginning of 1976 there was initiated the largest research project with which the School has so far been associated. This is the Centre for Research on User Studies, financed by the British Library Research and Development Department, and of special significance in being funded for 5 years. This is a much longer period than the duration of a normal research grant and has obvious advantages in facilitating continuity of work and the long-term planning of research; it also of course makes for a more stable research team. Another distinctive feature of the project is its deliberately multi-disciplinary character. One of the two joint project heads-Professor W. L. Saunders-provides a background of librarianship and information science; the other, Dr 1 D. R. Streatfield (1977). Information in local authority social services departments. Social ServicesQgarterb 51,5-g. s T. D. Wilson and D. R. Streatfield (1977). Information needs in local authority social services departments: an interim report on Project INISS. 3ournd of Documentation 33,277-293. s Information needs and information services in local authority social services departments (Project INISS). Final report to the British Library Research and Development (1978), 2 ~01s. (BLRDD Report 5453). 4 D. R. Streatfield (1978). Information services in local authority social services departments : preliminary review. 3oumalof Librarianship 10, 1-18. 5 N. Roberts (to be published). Information studies and the social sciences: a Master’s programme at the Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, University of Sheffield.
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P. H. Mann, is Reader in Sociology and has a specialist knowledge of reading, publishing, and the book trade in general. The research team of five is headed by an information scientist and its members provide between them skills in sociology, surveying, librarianship, computing and statistics. It is intended that the Centre should become the national focus of expertise in its field and that in addition to carrying out research it should also have advisory, educational and informational roles. Its first two research projects are concerned with information and library needs and use in the humanities (a relatively neglected area) and the library and information needs of the general reader.1 That this paper has been concerned thus far with fairly large-scale externally funded research does not mean that smaller, more individual research projects have not also been in progress. These have often been concerned with education programmes and teaching: in the subject bibliography field, for example, Mr F. S. Stych has applied a flow-chart technique to teaching the principles of reference work, Miss F. E. Wood tested for UNISIST their draft reference manual for machine-readable bibliographical descriptions, and a group of staff members has carried out experimental work on the teaching of on-line retrieval techniques. Reference should also be made to a large-scale follow-up survey and analysis of former students of the School; this resulted in publications by Miss F. E. Wood and Mr N. Roberts which have proved to be very valuable in curriculum development both within the School and elsewhere.273 All in all the record of the School in research, since its creation 15 years ago, gives cause for a fair degree of satisfaction, though by no means for complacency. More work is still needed on the integration of Ph.D. work with on-going research; more follow-up work is needed on the implementation of the findings and recommendations of completed research projects. Above all, perhaps, continuous vigilance and effort is required to ensure that the School’s research benefits its teaching to the maximum possible extent and that there is adequate communication and interaction between individual research teams. In this latter respect it was, for instance, very chastening to find members of the manpower research project team seeking discussion and advice outside the School on cluster analysis techniques, when the knowledge and experience in 1 K. Wilson-Davis (1977). The Centre for Research on User Studies: aims and functions. As&b Proceedings29, 67-76. 2 F. E. Wood (1975). Scientists in librarianship and information work. Journalof Librarianship 7, 31-48. s N. Roberts (1973). Graduates in academic libraries: a survey of past students of the Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Studies, Sheffield University, 1964-65 -1970/71.30urna1 of Librarianship 5, 97-l 15.
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question was available all the time on our own doorstep, with Dr Adamson’s research group. Finally, it must be confessed and made clear that research has always constituted a major demand on the time and resources of the School and its staff. It should be clear from this paper that we believe it to have been a wise and beneficial investment, from which the benefits far outweigh the costs.