Information Commons Study

Information Commons The full title of my dissertation is "Investigating how the Theory of Change approach can inform the evaluation of a learning space: Sheffield University's Information Commons" and I am conducting an evaluation of the Information Commons, the impressive blue building pictured on the right of the screen.

My data gathering phase is nearly completed, and I have conducted interviews with students and staff at the University of Sheffield. If you participated, I will be providing feedback as the project continues, so keep checking your email.

My project is looking 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 are 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. Analysis of the two sets of interviews is ongoing.

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