Author Archives: kmunro

Reflections on CoLIS 2025

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The end of May and start of June is always a busy time for conferences and this year has been no exception. Luckily, at the start of June, I was able to attend the International Conference on Concepts of Library and Information Science (CoLIS). CoLIS is a series of international conferences aiming to provide a broad forum for the exploration and exchange of ideas in the field of Library and Information Science, Information Studies, and related disciplines. The events took place in Glasgow and were hosted by the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Strathclyde, which rather neatly was where I studied for my MSc in Information and Library Studies, as well as my PhD. Proceedings included a civic reception at Glasgow City Chambers and a dinner and ceilidh at Oran Mor.

Keith Munro giving his presentation at the conference.

Keith Munro giving his presentation at the conference – Photo credit: Perla Innocenti

I was grateful to be able present findings from my PhD, where I discussed the wellbeing benefits observed amongst hikers on the West Highland Way and how they can be linked to concepts in information science, receiving thoughtful feedback and questions from expert researchers. I was also very fortunate to help facilitate a workshop on embodied information alongside Jenna Hartel (University of Toronto) and Laura Williams (University of Sheffield), and wonderfully led by Shannon Crawford Barniskis (University of Kentucky). This event featured everything from amateur (well certainly from me) dramatics, olfactory surprises (pleasant ones, in the form of essential oils), stretching exercises, vlogs about running, music playlist creation and more besides, highlighting in a short space of time the wealth of directions that future research on embodied information can take.

A photograph of the four facilitators of the embodied information workshop.

From left to right: Jenna Hartel, Shannon Crawford Barniskis, Laura Williams and Keith Munro  – Photo credit: unknown

The three keynote speeches were highlights of the conference and covered a wide range of concepts in Library and Information Science. Firstly, Jenna Hartel used Marcia Bates’ concept of the red thread of information to weave a fascinating, though-provoking picture of how consideration of the serious leisure perspective, the study of hobbies, interests and activities that people devote a great deal of their life to, can continue to generate new insight into information behaviour, symbiotically creating innovative research methodologies and novel ways to teach concepts in Library and Information Science. Their talk also showcased their skill as researcher and as a teacher, using multimedia elements to relate key concepts and meaningfully engage with their audience.

On the second day of the conference, Dr Adele Patrick gave a very inspiring talk about the history and present-day activities of the Glasgow Women’s Library. I greatly appreciated the way they described the care they gave to people in the library’s physical space and how it was experienced by visitors, this seemed to be of equal importance as the contents of the collection. This perfectly illustrates how the consideration of people’s bodies in library and other information spaces, is vital to making collections accessible, as well as being a practical example of how embodied information is not just an academic concept, but something that should be central to the provision of library services. I was also struck by how large institutions, such as national or university libraries, can learn from the best practice of independent organisations, where values and approaches are developed from grass-roots upwards.

Toma Tasovac delievering his keynote speech.

Toma Tasovac delivering his keynote speech – Photo credit: Keith Munro

The final keynote was given by Dr Toma Tasovac, Director of the Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities (BCDH) and Director of the pan-European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU), who took the opportunity to question whether libraries are still “imprisoned by the print mind”. This talk really resonated with me in my role in the Research Data Support team as it raised fascinating issues and concepts around whether library collections themselves are data, as well as what can be considered supporting digital data in the Arts and Humanities. I find the latter in particular to be an area of great interest, that there could be a wealth of supporting material for Arts and Humanities research that doesn’t get captured digitally because researchers think that data just means spreadsheets. Finding ways to advocate for the inclusion of novel research outputs, less commonly encountered types of data, is a means to promote a greater understanding of the value of researchers’ work in totality, rather than just by the metrics of publishing. This can help create archives that will be of significant cultural value as time progresses.

I also greatly enjoyed attending two of the conference’s alternative events on Information Art, organised by Andrea Kampen (University of British Columbia) and Rebecca Noone (University of Glasgow), and on information practices during transitional, life-changing events, facilitated by Jenny Bronstein (Tel Aviv University), Perla Innocenti (University of Strathclyde) and Jette Seiden Hyldegård (University of Copenhagen). Both had in common creative ways to encourage participants to engage with the concepts, from creating art using collage techniques to mapping from memory. These creative and collaborative activities were a refreshing way to engage the brain in a different way in between the many fascinating presentations.

It is hard to narrow down all the interesting talks I heard, but I would like to at least briefly mention the following, in no particular order: Genre knowledge: a metacognitive approach to exploring document practices in science by Samuel Dodson; The knowledge organisation of sub-subgenres: the curious case of the collaborative works of Gilbert and Sullivan by Deborah Lee (University College London); Geographical information ranges: conceptualising holistic information landscapes by Kaitlin Montague (Humboldt University); Reciprocity in information exchange: how social exchange enriches collaborative research partnerships by Joann Cattlin (RMIT University) and Lisa Given (RMIT University); Informational self-deception: deconstruction and reconstruction within philosophy of information by Juliana Mestre (Rutgers University); ‘It’s a wide cluster of noise’: experiencing and describing information from environmental sounds by Owen Stewart-Robertson (McGill University); and The multispecies perspective in library and information science by Niloofar Solhjoo (Charles Sturt University). I haven’t even touched on the wonderful posters I saw, but in the interest of some attempt at brevity, I will stop here. I encourage you to look at the proceedings online.

Conference chair, Ian Ruthven, giving a welcome speech to the conference attendees. He is wearing a hat that looks like a traffic cone, in reference to a statue in Glasgow that has a traffic cone on it. An introdcutory slide from a presentation is on the screen.

Ian Ruthven giving the welcome speech – Photo credit: Keith Munro

Thanks go to the Conference Chairs, Ian Ruthven, Perla Innocenti and Emma Nicol, as well as the wonderful team of volunteers from the PhD and Masters programmes from the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Strathclyde. Congratulations on such a memorable, rewarding experience for all!

All the full and short papers from the conference can be viewed through the following link: Vol. 30 No. CoLIS (2025): Proceedings of CoLIS: 12th International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science – University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, 2nd-5th June 2025 | Information Research an international electronic journal

The abstracts for the alternative events, papers and posters can be viewed in the following link: Adjunct Proceedings of CoLIS : 12th International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science

Keith Munro,
Research Data Support Assistant

DataShare spotlight: Debates on slavery and abolition held by student debating societies at the University of Edinburgh, 1765-1870

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The best part of my job is looking through the new datasets submitted to DataShare, our open-access data repository. One of the first datasets that gripped me was; Debates on slavery and abolition held by student debating societies at the University of Edinburgh, 1765-1870.

This dataset is really cool because as well as being a valuable resource for future research projects, it’s extremely interesting to read, even as someone who doesn’t know anything about historical research. This readability is what makes humanities dataset submissions so fun to process.

This dataset summarises debates on chattel slavery and abolition by two of the University’s debating societies during roughly the last hundred official years of the Transatlantic slave trade. It includes motions and outcomes of the debates, as well as information about the people participating and the positions they took.

It’s easy to tell ourselves that people in the past caused unimaginable harm because they didn’t know any better. Maybe this impulse is a form of self-preservation, a way to deny our ancestors’ agency to protect them – and ourselves – from blame. The dataset reminds us that even at the height of the slave trade there were many people publicly voicing their opposition. The data give us some insight into how these men understood their own complicity in slavery and their responsibility in upholding or abolishing it.

It’s interesting to see, for example, that some debate outcomes were pro-abolition, but against immediate abolition. Or how a debate on whether it would be sound policy to abolish the African slave trade had a unanimously pro-abolition outcome in 1792, yet full emancipation didn’t come for over forty years.

Sample from table of data

A preview of ‘University of Edinburgh Dialectic Society debates on slavery and abolition, 1792-1870’. From Buck, Simon; Frith, Nicola; Curry, Tommy. (2024). Debates on slavery and abolition held by student debating societies at the University of Edinburgh, 1765-1870 [text]. University of Edinburgh. Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/7841.

The dataset comes from The Decolonised Transformations Project which aims to take a critical look at the University’s complicity and investment in slavery and colonialism, confront the legacies of these choices, and make concrete recommendations to address present-day structural racism. The project is a great example of how Humanities research can be translated into a wide array of resources to maximise its utility and reach. As well as traditional outputs like publications and reports, the research team has published datasets, done podcasts, and held workshops and talks for the wider community.

Decolonised Transformations – Confronting the University’s Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism

The datasets have been downloaded multiple times since they were shared in November, so I’m sure other people are finding this data as interesting as I am.

Evelyn Williams
Research Data Support Assistant

DataShare spotlight: Human MotionLess Dataset (HuMoLs) and the creative potential of research data

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For the second installment of the spotlight on DataShare blog posts, I would like to showcase a fascinating item containing videos of people not doing anything!

The dataset in question is titled “Human MotionLess Dataset (HuMoLs)” and was created by researchers Longfei Chan, Muhammad Ahmed Raza and Robert Fisher, who are based in the School of Informatics’ Institute of Perception Action and Behaviour. While on the face of it, people being still might not seem very dynamic, the research behind this dataset is trying to solve a difficult problem with a very useful outcome. Simply put, how do you tell when someone is lying still because they are doing something like sleeping, or if it is because they are unwell or have fallen? The videos in this dataset aim to try and train healthcare monitoring systems to help determine whether it is the former or the latter of these possibilities, with the priority being to uncover any critical medical conditions or to analyse chronic conditions.

A selection of still images taken from the videos in the dataset.

What struck me while reviewing the videos for submission was that beyond the usefulness of these videos to the research project, there was the potential for them to be adapted creatively. The videos have a deliberately “uncanny valley” aspect, due to using AI to deepfake participant’s faces in order to preserve their anonymity. The amusingly odd character to the videos made me imagine them being used in an Adam Curtis documentary, or in an Aphex Twin music video. Possibly even in an Adam Curtis documentary with Aphex Twin music over the top of it.

This raises the fascinating idea that there are rich sources of research data stored in open access repositories that could have a life beyond being reproducible, but could also be reused, repurposed and remixed into creative new pieces, adding value to both the research itself, and to the repositories where the affiliated data is stored. To demonstrate this possibility, I have edited some of the videos together, see below, and set them to music. The piece of music, “Redolescence” by Other Lands, has a dreamlike quality to it which both complements and recontextualises the videos into something beyond their originally intended use.

What other audio and visual materials are there contained in research data repositories waiting to be repurposed in a creative manner? Time (and much more talented creators than me) will tell!

The full dataset can be found on DataShare: Human MotionLess Dataset (HuMoLs)

The paper which the dataset supports: OPPH: A Vision-Based Operator for Measuring Body Movements for Personal Healthcare

Permission to use the music featured in this video was kindly granted by Gavin Sutherland, performing here under his artist name of Other Lands. The album which contains this track can be purchased on Bandcamp: Other Lands – Riddle of the Mode 

Outstanding Library Team of the Year – Times Higher Education Awards 2024

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This is a guest blog post written by Dominic Tate, Associate Director, Head of Library Research Support

The University of Edinburgh’s Library Research Support Team, of which the Research Data Service is part of, won the ‘Outstanding Library Team of the Year’ category at the Times Higher Education Awards 2024 in Birmingham on 28th November. The team plays a central role in the institution’s transition to open research, with the impact of its work spreading far beyond the Scottish capital. The team created and implemented a UK-first rights retention policy, enabling scholarly work to be published in an open-access format while the authors retain the rights to their work.

Members of the Library Research Support team receiving their award on stage.

Across the UK, 30 other universities have since followed Edinburgh’s lead, and the library team has also presented its work in India, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The team has already saved its university more than £10,000, with hundreds of thousands in savings anticipated in the years to come and millions expected across the broader university sector.

The library team’s new Citizen Science and Participatory Research Service, meanwhile, aims to boost public trust in science while facilitating research that depends on lived experience. By providing library spaces to researchers and community groups, the service enables collaborations on research projects, while the public can also access heritage collections and other library resources. The team endeavours to connect researchers with the communities around them, helping them answer research questions of public concern.

Members of the Library Research Support team standing with the award.The judges applauded the Edinburgh library team’s initiative, commending its efforts to “share its experience with the wider sector” alongside its “emphasis on community access”. Its work, they said, “demonstrated a collaborative approach between the library research support team, academic and professional services staff, students and the local community that is scalable to other parts of the sector”.

You can read an e-book profiling all the winners.