Academic Librarians’ Lived Experiences of Practitioner Research: Narrative Interview Study, 2023-2024

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The aim of the Once Upon a Narrative Professional Practice Fellowship was to explore librarians’ personal, social, continuous, and relational experiences of undertaking practitioner research providing a window for the Library and Information Science (LIS) profession to consider their needs and how best they can be met. The research objectives were to: • Understand the barriers and facilitators that participants encounter during their practitioner-research and consider how these shape and reshape their experiences • Discover participants’ transformational moments on their practitioner-researcher journey • Highlight recommendations to inform the future design of interventions for novice practitioner-researchers Key topics covered in the interviews were as follows: motivation, learning and researcher development, identity, research culture and professional practice. Key findings from the research were presented as 62 narrative poems which re-tell participants' experiences. Collectively, these narrative poems reveal two key insights for the LIS sector’s reflection: 1. The way barriers and enablers are experienced in LIS practitioner research is highly contextual. Each participants’ motivations, emotions, prior learning and institutional context influenced how they interacted with these barriers / enablers throughout their research journeys. 2. There is an evident tension between the practitioner world and the academic world. This was visible in participants’ shifting perspectives through the cycle of their research. Institutional culture (positive or negative) contributed to this academic practitioner divide and it plays a key role in the stories of LIS practitioner researchers.

The Once Upon a Narrative professional practice fellowship explored librarians’ personal, social, continuous, and relational experiences of undertaking practitioner research through a narrative inquiry method. By so doing, it provided a window for the Library and Information profession to consider what are the needs of practitioner-researchers and how best can they be met. The research project involved repeated in-depth interviews with 4 academic librarians over the course of their practitioner research journeys.