期刊名称:Library Information Research : Research into Practice for Information Library Services
印刷版ISSN:1756-1086
电子版ISSN:1756-1086
出版年度:2008
卷号:32
期号:100
页码:29-34
出版社:CILIP Library & Information Research Group
摘要:One afternoon in July 1978 I was sitting at a pavement table outside a café on the
Boulevard St Michel in Paris. This may sound like a ‘What I did on my holidays’
story, but in fact I was working on a small qualitative research project. Earlier that
afternoon I had done an interview with a scholar just around the corner in the
Sorbonne. I had not taped the interview, and had only scribbled a few words and
names into my notebook whilst it was in progress. What I was doing in the café
was writing up an account of the interview (on paper in those pre-laptop days).
Whether this was the first interview I had done in this way I can’t remember, but I
do know that I was very happy with the results that my simple technique
produced. It certainly wasn’t what the contemporary manuals on research
technique advised, but I found that it worked. In what follows I shall offer some
thoughts about LIS research methods from the perspective of someone who has
much more faith in the qualitative than the quantitative, and who believes that the
imaginative devising and matching of methods to circumstances in the field is a
skill that should be encouraged. Since you will find that I concentrate very much
on the downside of LIS research in this little paper, I should say at the outset that I
do encounter a great deal of very good output from all sorts of sources, but that’s
not really what I will write about here.