Quality Assurance of Knowledge The Digital Researcher 2012 #dr12vitae http://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers/315321/Digital-Researcher.html

1. Quality Assuring Knowledge
Alan Cann, University of Leicester bit.ly/AJCann

2. Quality Assuring Knowledge
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
Kipling

3. What is “quality” ?
Subjective feeling or objective fact?
Endless attempts to measure (REF, RQF, etc)
Size? Depth? Relevance?

4. Why does it matter?
Effectiveness, efficiency
Respect, reputation
Authority?
www.rin.ac.uk/social-media-guide

5. How should we measure “quality”?
Funding?
Ethical approval
Publication - peer review
Citation
“Impact”
Social:
Crowdsourcing – serendipitous discovery,
tagging (Everything is Miscellaneous)

6. It’s not information overload,
it’s filter failure

7. When?
Pre or post publication?
Filter on the way out –
conventional peer review
is based on a scarcity model

8. The Digital Scholar

9. Where?
Journals (online, eToCs, RSS) – filtered content
Tools – many examples:
• Social networks – Twitter as Librarian?
• Wikis – collaborative knowledge building
• Social bookmarking, citation & annotation

10. Who?
Your Personal Learning Network (PLN)
- the people who filter for you.
- you’re only as smart as your network?
Loss of authority?

11. Workshop Questions
1. What tools do you currently use?
2. Authority – good or evil? How can you tell?
3. How do you find the unknown unknowns?
Talk to me