Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Fallen behind in blogs

You know when you focus so much on the essays, the analysis papers, the mini-exams, and the group work....and you forget about your participation mark? Well that is what has happened to me this semester. It has been a tough semester for me both personally and academically, and while that is no excuse for my poor blogging and what will surely be a poor participation grade, I extend that my lack of posting is not because of the course.

As such, I will now be giving a daily dose of Christie!! (Meaning, a daily blog about my progress and my struggles with the research proposal.)

My research proposal builds on my SSHRC mock proposal; patient libraries as useful and necessary in hospital environments, and asks the question "are librarians needed in a patient library?" My research proposal builds on former research. Patient libraries have been around for centuries and have been proven to aid in rehabilitation. However, while this research was good for the shortened SSHRC proposal, I have had to expand on the topic for the purposes of this assignment. Not only will I now build on former research detailing why patient libraries are necessary in hospitals for rehabilitation purposes, I will be researching if the traditional patient library should be upgraded to a digitized "library" (books, stories on iPads, Kindles and their equivalents; portable laptops with wireless connection to take into patient rooms etc.)

Since I argued that librarians are vital in patient libraries in my SSHRC mock proposal, I will build them into the new research questions as well by questioning if they would be more as beneficial to a new "digitized" patient library as they are in the traditional one.

All in all, this proposal is extending and I feel that if I'm not careful I'm going to go off-track.

I will be looking closely into the materials provided by Dean Sharpe over the next few days as I am feeling slightly overwhelmed by this assignment. I am currently sifting through the guidelines on key informant interviews (http://www.research.utoronto.ca/ethics/pdf/human/nonspecific/guidelines_on_interviews.pdf) I find that recognizing the "degree to which individuals are in the public eye," and their "Degree of vulnerability" in a public personality to be of particular interest. Many of the interviewees that I feel are necessary to interview for this proposal would be the Toronto Public Library City Librarian, and several key employees of the hospital boards.

wow...got a lot of work to do!

Christie

"I have CDO: It's like OCD...only the letters are in alphabetical order
...as they should be!"

No comments:

Post a Comment