Information Commons Study

Information Commons The full title of my dissertation was "Investigating how the Theory of Change approach can inform the evaluation of a learning space: Sheffield University's Information Commons" and can be downloaded from the title link. It conducted an evaluation of the Information Commons, the impressive blue building pictured on the right of the screen.

My project looked at the Information Commons using the Theories of Change approach. This approach looks at the planning stages of a project in order to establish the criteria for judging its success, and in order to ascertain whether the project's successes occur by the intended means.

There were two phases to the data collection, establishing the Theory of Change through interviews with staff about the planning of the IC, and learning about use of the IC through interviews with students in which they gave me tours of the IC from their own perspective. Due to the constraints of the academic year, the student interviews were conducted first, in May 2009, followed by the staff interviews in June / July 2009.

This project was approved via the Information Studies Department's ethics review procedure.