Over the weekend I attended the Research Applications in Information and Library Studies Seminar (RAILS2) at the National Library in Canberra. It was one of those conferences where I came away with mixed feelings. I attended because I have a very strong interest in research, and in particular, encouraging new voices and new graduates to write and research in the professional literature. Two committees I’m currently involved with have a goal to encourage new graduates to engage with research.

One of the aims of the seminar was to bridge the practitioner-academic gap, but I’m not sure that was achieved. On the first day, many of the papers were from practitioners who work in research roles in libraries, or who are currently pursuing research degrees. Day two was dominated by academics. There was praise of the move to group based research work in universities, but the members were all from the same school within the faculties.

The struggle to find funding for research was raised several times, but I didn’t hear anyone mention seeking or getting funding from beyond their university or the Australian Research Council. Given recent reforms to ARC and constant rumours about its demise, it is worrying that the entire field of LIS in Australia is almost entirely reliant on one funding source.

For me, as someone who is a predominantly a practitioner (though I have a MA research in LIS) it was frustrating that the issue of funding and support wasn’t addressed more generally. The research I do is at my own time, cost, and with very limited resources. One project I’ve been working on for over two years, on and off, is a content analysis of libraries in the media. Why so long? The scope of the project is massive – I anticipate having over 5000 items for preliminary analysis once I’ve finished the data collection phase. It really is too big for me to do alone. But do I have any chance of getting a grant, an assistant or even software to help me? There are some research grants provided by ALIA but I wouldn’t apply for one for this project – they should go to researchers with travel needs in my opinion.

One excellent paper by Gaby Haddow described the need for more practitioners to engage with the literature. That’s the first step towards new researchers. Ben Hinton is one of those new researchers – his presentation on ‘the travelling librarian’ was inspiring. And it was great to hear a presentation on the importance of library history from Jean Preer from Indiana University, especially since library schools in Australia have dropped LIS history courses.

Knowledge management reared its ugly head – and the academics asked why we are not seen as leaders in this field. Another pointed out that, quite rightly, KM is owned by IT and HR. I am one of those who believes KM is still a fad, though it is now slowly dying and we should instead concentrate on what we do well – information management.

What’s another reason why we’re not seen as knowledge managers? An academic said that the cost of attending KM conferences is too high but really we are still preaching to the converted – it takes publishing in disciplines outside LIS and presenting at those conferences to make an impact. This applies to all fields that LIS feels it should have a say in.

Overall, it was an interesting couple of days. It’s important to have events like RAILS, but I couldn’t help but hope for more.