Text by: Chris
Librarians rely on reading the library and information science (LIS) literature to improve their practice and generally stay up to date with the latest developments in the profession. This means that we rely on library professionals taking the time and effort to conduct research and report on their findings.
As an academic librarian in Hong Kong, I have been thinking recently about the local research scene. In this post I share some preliminary findings from a review of the literature that I am conducting to explore this.
Scope of review
In order to keep the review manageable, I used the following selection criteria:
Peer-reviewed journal articles only.
Published in English.
Publication year between 2011-2021 (inclusive).
Any topics relating to the practice of academic librarianship in Hong Kong.
Authored by Hong Kong librarians, LIS faculty, or LIS students.
Search procedure:
Two databases were used: Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) and Scopus.
The following search statement was used in both databases: (academic librar* OR universit* librar*) AND Hong Kong
After applying search limits for date range and peer-reviewed journal status, 142 results were found in LISTA while 70 were found in Scopus.
Each list was reviewed in its entirety against the search criteria above, with 57 eventually being included.
Analyzing the corpus
After collecting all of the papers using EndNote 20, I exported them all into NVivo for further analysis. If you’re interested, this video from QSR demonstrates how to do this, and further explores how NVivo can be used for literature reviews.
Once the papers had been imported, I did some simple coding and classification to try and answer questions about the collection of articles.
What topics have been researched?
I coded each article with a high-level topic, and tried as far as possible to create as few codes as possible. Additionally, each article was only coded to one topic. Even using this approach, the end result was 17 separate topics for the 57 articles in the corpus. This provides some idea of the range of different research interests of library professionals in Hong Kong.
The top two topics with 7 articles each were social media and library collection usage. These were closely followed by space planning and facilities (6 articles), usability and user experience (5 articles), and library programming and events (also 5).
The treemap below further illustrates the diversity of topics addressed:
Which institutions have more librarians with published articles?
To enable further analysis, I created cases in NVivo for both articles and the individual authors and have started adding a variety of case classifications. One such classification for authors was their institutional affiliation (as shown on their most recently published article).
The treemap below visualizes these affiliations. HKUST had the most individual library professionals with at least one publication (10), followed by HKBU (8), and then by HKU and CUHK (both with 6).
It is interesting to note that two smaller universities (HKBU and Lingnan) are well represented in this analysis. Of course, being affiliated with HKBU myself, it is no surprise that I would highlight this observation!
Next steps
The above two examples obviously only scratch the surface. I am looking forward to interrogating the literature more closely to see what other observations can be made, and if they hold any potential actionable insights.
