New homegrown groups such as iDiversity call attention to the important and essential role that student-based groups play in promoting cultural competency within their own institutions and the profession at large. The iDiversity story outlines (1) how student engagement can be transformed into leadership and action by diversity focus within the…

Surveys some of the theoretical positions that underlie various qualitative research methods and discusses the methodological issues raised by those positions for use in library and information science research. Contextualization, understanding, pluralism, and expression are discussed; and qualitative research methods are compared with a…

Introduces this journal issue which is a symposium on the theory, methods, and applications of qualitative research in the field of library and information science. Highlights include a definition of qualitative research, models of qualitative research, distinguishing features of research practice, comparisons with quantitative research, and…

Presents a model of four factors differentiating significant from routine research--behavioral patterns of problem formulation, economic analyses of information seeking, psychological schemes of optimal effort, and basic dilemmas of the theory-practice gap. Within this context, four myths dominating the research process in library and information…

Critiques the model of information literacy as a central purpose of librarianship. Reviews the appropriateness of the "learning methodology" of the information literacy model. Outlines the challenge of relating information literacy to workplace competencies. Proposes that information literacy be refocused away from information toward learning, and…

Discussion of positivist and interpretive approaches to research and postpositivism focuses on two studies that apply interpretive research in different ways: an exploratory study of user-developed computing applications conducted prior to a positivist study and a study of end-user searching behaviors conducted concurrently with a positivist…

Discusses use of the grounded theory approach to derive models of the information-seeking patterns of academic researchers. The background to the development of qualitative approaches to information studies in the United Kingdom is described, and the results of four studies of the information-seeking patterns of researchers are outlined. (Contains…