ORCID
0000-0002-8944-178X
Document Type
Article
Date
10-3-2018
Keywords
research through design, librarianship, library science, research methodologies
Language
English
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Kristen Shinohara for her valuable feedback.
Disciplines
Library and Information Science | Other Computer Sciences
Description/Abstract
“How we done it good” publications—a genre concerning project-based approaches that describe how (and sometimes why) something was done—are often rebuked in the library research community for lacking traditional scientific validity, reliability, and generalizability. While scientific methodologies may be a common approach to research and inquiry, they are not the only methodological paradigms. This research posits that the “how we done it good” paradigm in librarianship reflects a valid and legitimate approach to research. By drawing on the concept of research through design, this study shows how these “how we done it good” projects reflect design methodologies which draw rigor from process, invention, relevance, and extensibility rather than replicability, generalizability, and predictability. Although these projects implicitly reflect research through design, the methodology is not yet explicitly harnessed in librarianship. More support for these types of projects can be achieved by making the legitimate design framework more explicit and increasing support from publication venues.
ISSN
0740-8188
Recommended Citation
Clarke, Rachel Ivy, "How We Done It Good: Research Through Design as a Legitimate Methodology for Librarianship" (2018). School of Information Studies: Faculty Scholarship. 179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2018.09.007
Source
submission
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
