Sarah Polkinghorne
Hello!
I'm a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Health, Arts, and Design
at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.
I also work as a librarian at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
My CV is available via this link.
I'd be happy to hear from you. spolkinghorne@swin.edu.au
Research
A brief introduction
My research focuses on information practices, including information organization and searching practices, which are unexamined, tacit, or assumed to be mundane. My research illuminates how people's everyday information practices are not mundane at all; they are complex, meaningful, and co-constitutive with identity.
I also have an abiding interest in how language choices, such as those of information professionals, reflect power relations, norms, and ways of thinking. I'm moved to explore and document information experiences that are often taken for granted, and to question how such practices are predominantly or habitually discussed.
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. I also have a track record as a researcher in library studies, particularly in the area of information literacy.
Teaching
Upcoming and recent
- Human Information Interaction, Winter 2021, for the University of Alberta's School of Library and Information Studies. An exploration of how people experience information.
- Information Resource Discovery, Fall 2020, for the University of Ottawa's School of Information Studies. An introduction to information services, information practices and experiences, and search.
Publications
In progress and recent
- "Love is a lens: Finding love in library and information studies." With Mary Greenshields. Under review.
- "Holistic approaches to research: From rhetoric to paradigm." With Lisa M. Given. Under review.
- "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
- "Interdisciplinary concept development as a path to impact: 'Vicarious sensory engagement' and YouTube food videos." (2019, October). Symposium of SIG-USE (the Special Interest Group for Information Needs, Seeking, and Use), at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Melbourne, Australia.
- "Finding information at the intersections of gender" (2019, October). Working at the Intersections of Gender Fall Conference, Edmonton, Canada. [Link]
Practice
As an academic librarian
The core of my work as a librarian is leading 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. I helped people find and use information, manage research data, and work through processes such as making their publications openly available.
Service
Recent and ongoing commitments
- 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 Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, Library Trends, and others
Curriculum Vitae
The more complete chronicle
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Banner image by Kelly Tindall.