Developing Research Excellence and Methods (DREaM) Conference

 

 Image from jbelluch

In July (apologies for late posting!) I attended a one day conference at the British Library on “Developing Research Excellence and Methods” (DREaM) in Information Science. The conference was the last in a series which had the aim of developing a network of LIS researchers across the UK.

It was chaired by Professor Hazel Hall (Edinburgh Napier University).

There were a number of speakers and a “one minute madness” session which I participated in.

Professor Carol Tenopir from the University of Tennessee gave the keynote presentation on “Building evidence of the value and impact of library and information services: methods, metrics and ROI.” She focussed on journal collections and reading and scholarship but the project covers many areas including learning and teaching and digitisation. She talked about how value is defined and a number of methods and metrics that can be used to measure this.

Full details on this project can be found at http://libvalue.cci.utk.edu/
Dr Louise Cooke from Loughborough University gave a presentation on network analysis and showed how she had mapped the network of attendees across all the DREaM events and how the network had evolved.

Dr Ben Goldacre (of “Bad Science” fame) gave a presentation on the problem of publication bias in evidence based medicine. He spoke about the difficulties of finding all the evidence when some results are never published and some data from RCTs are published partially in different formats (e.g. conference presentation, protocol, journal article, trials registers etc). and the difficulties of trying to work effectively as a doctor when the evidence is hidden. He also mentioned a project he wants to get going “all trials.org” which would pull together these bits of partial information to create a fuller picture of medical research. He invited Information Specialists to contact him if they wanted to contribute ideas or volunteer their time to work on this project.

Full details on all the presentations, contact details and more information on “all trials.org” available at http://lisresearch.org/event-5-presentations/