Hello. I'm a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Health, Arts, and Design at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. My supervisors are Professor Lisa Given and Dr. Kim Thompson. I also work as a librarian at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
This page offers highlights. For more information, please see my CV.
My research interests focus on articulating information practices, including information organization and searching practices, which are often unexamined, tacit, or assumed to be mundane. In my thesis research, I work with people to create video and other forms of data capturing everyday food activities and the information practices within them.
News:
- October: "Interdisciplinary concept development as a path to impact: 'Vicarious sensory engagement' and YouTube food videos," at the 2019 SIG-USE Symposium, Melbourne, Australia.
- June: "Holistic approaches to research: from rhetoric to paradigm," at the 10th international Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS) conference, in Ljulbljana, Slovenia. With Lisa M. Given.
I'd be happy to hear from you! spolkinghorne@swin.edu.au
Publications
New publications include:
- "Treading Water: Results from the Longitudinal Study of Information Literacy Instruction in Canadian Academic Libraries, 1995-2017," in the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 42 (1/2). With Heidi Julien. [Link]
- "The 'user turn' in practice: Information behaviour researchers’ constructions of information users," in Information Research. With Heidi Julien, Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie, and Roger Chabot. [Link]
Presentations
Recent presentations include:
- Finding information at the intersections of gender (2019, October). With Carolyn Carpan and Virginia Pow. Workshop, Working at the Intersections of Gender Fall Conference: [Link]
- Things nobody taught me: influences that shape a researcher (2019, March). Inaugural lecture in the Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians Research and Scholarship Committee Online Lecture Series: [Link]
Practice
The core of my work as a librarian is managing several aspects of monograph collections at the University of Alberta, including ebooks, approval plans, demand-driven acquisition, and assessment.
Before becoming a collections librarian, I worked as a public services librarian for more than a decade. In that role, I helped people find and use information, manage research data, and work through processes such as making their publications openly available.
Service
Recent service commitments include:
- Co-chairing the Canadian Association for Information Science 46th annual conference, Diversities on the data landscape: connecting information science with data studies (with Sharon Farnel and Ali Shiri)
- Reviewing for the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, and others
Awards
Recent awards include:
- New Leader Award, Association for Information Science and Technology (2018)
- Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Award, Association for Information Science and Technology (2018)
- Best Overall Paper, Canadian Association for Information Science (with Lisa Given and Lauren Carlson) (2017)
Curriculum Vitae
My CV is available to view or download.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Banner image by Kelly Tindall.