Information School News

Services for Student Well-Being in Academic Libraries: Three Challenges   Our Director of Research and Senior Lecturer, Dr Andrew Cox, has published a new article alongside Dr Liz Brewster at Lancaster University. There has been a wave of interest in UK academic libraries in developing services to support student well-being. This paper identifies three fundamental and interrelated issues that need to be addressed to make such initiatives effective and sustainable. Firstly, well-being has to be defined and the impacts of interventions must be measured in appropriate ways. Secondly, there is a need to identify the true nature of the underlying social problem around well-being. Thirdly, relevant approaches to the issue need to be located within the professional knowledge base of librarianship. To read the article, click here.

Information School Senior Lecturer Dr Andrew Cox has been involved in a collaboration to edit a major new collection of papers about Information and the body for the journal Library Trends. The centrality of embodied experience in all aspects of human life makes the relative neglect of the body in information behaviour studies surprising and potentially problematic. Two special issues of Library Trends bring together an international group of researchers interested in embodied information, including how we receive information through the senses, what the body knows and the way the body is used as a sign that can be interpreted by others. Contributing authors include Professor Marcia Bates. The first of the two issues has just been published. The second issue is due out later in the year, and includes a paper by former student Kondwani Wella, with Senior Lecturer Sheila Webber. Read the full text here.