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Research

We focus on asking and answering questions to understand systems-level shifts within the knowledge landscape.

“consulting Educopia’s Research program is critically curious about how organizations and collaborative communities are shaping and responding to broad social and field-level trends that affect knowledge production and information management.

Our Research projects are typically designed with participation from people and groups representing a range of stakeholder perspectives, bringing “the system into the room.”

View Research Project Directory

Educopia partners with existing and emerging organizations and communities within the knowledge ecosystem to identify research questions aimed at exploring, describing, explaining, understanding, or predicting activities and trends. This type of research often clarifies the needs of diverse practitioners within the field, leading to applied research with cross-professional and inter-institutional partners to assess, evaluate, and ultimately increase the impact of their work.

Our research centers collective action, field-level capacity strengthening, and knowledge equity with a focus on:

  1. Knowledge Production
  2. Knowledge Sharing
  3. Knowledge Preservation

Questions we are asking in collaboration with other mission-aligned institutions:

  • How do we design organizational governance models and relational infrastructures that ensure that groups most impacted by the work are actively visioning and co-designing strategy, including during periods of change and transition?
  • How do knowledge communities that were funded, founded, and normed in the U.S. and other areas of the Global North meaningfully and equitably redistribute leadership and resources internationally?
  • What are the existing and emerging models for collaborative knowledge production? How do the models of collaborative knowledge production that we employ create or undermine knowledge equity?
  • How do we facilitate and structure collaborations between organizations to best ensure that what is documented and preserved is representative of the diversity of human experience?

Examples of the methods & frameworks we use:



Research Frameworks

  • Community based action research
  • Participatory Action Research (PAR)

Outputs

  • Toolkits and trainings
  • Webinars and community forums
  • White papers
  • Best practices and recommendations
  • Pilot workflows and products

Data Collection

  • Semi-structured interviews
  • Workplace observation
  • Ethnographic methods
  • Workflow analysis
  • Narrative-storytelling
  • Focus groups
  • Survey design
  • Usability testing

Analysis

  • Close reading of technologies
  • Trace analysis
  • Quantitative Analysis
  • Social Network Analysis
  • Qualitative coding
  • Workflow analysis

Research Project Directory

Project Title

Research Area

Year

Next Generation Library Publishing: Pilot to Production
Knowledge Sharing
2023-2025
An implementation project to expand digital infrastructure options for library publishing programs that are values-aligned, open source, and community-led.
DPSC Planning Project: Sustainable Community-Owned Partnerships in Digital Preservation
Knowledge Preservation
2022-2024
Articulating the need for values-driven, community-supported distributed digital preservation service options and to propose a service model for collaboration that ensures the authority, sustainability, and viability of these options.
Library Publishing Workflows
Knowledge Sharing
2019-2022
A two-year project to investigate, synchronize, and model a range of workflows to increase the capacity of libraries to publish open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals.
Next Generation Library Publishing
Knowledge Sharing
2019-2022
Working to advance and integrate open source publishing infrastructure to provide robust support for library publishing.
BitCuratorEdu
Knowledge Production
2018-2022
A three-year effort studying and advancing the adoption of digital forensics tools and methods in libraries and archives through professional education efforts.
Carolina Digital Library Network
Knowledge Sharing
2019-2021
Pilot project to enable small to mid-sized academic libraries in North and South Carolina to explore the possibilities of new digital scholarship services for their researchers.  
Developing a Pilot Data Trust for Open Access Ebook Usage
Knowledge Production
2020-2021
This two-year project acted upon the recommendations documented within the “Exploring Open Access Ebook Usage” white paper published by the Book Industry Study Group in 2019. The international project team and its advisors developed and tested open infrastructure, policy and governance models to support a diverse, global data trust for usage data on open access (OA) monographs.
OSSArcFlow
Knowledge Preservation
2017-2020
Investigating, synchronizing, and modeling a range of archival workflows for born-digital content
Next Generation Library Publishing: Pilot to Production
Knowledge Sharing ·
2023-2025
DPSC Planning Project: Sustainable Community-Owned Partnerships in Digital Preservation
Knowledge Preservation ·
2022-2024
Library Publishing Workflows
Knowledge Sharing ·
2019-2022
Next Generation Library Publishing
Knowledge Sharing ·
2019-2022
BitCuratorEdu
Knowledge Production ·
2018-2022

Have a Research project in mind?