IAML (UK & Ireland) Guest-Blogpost
At last year’s Annual Study Weekend of my professional organisation (the International Association of Music Libraries, UK and Ireland Branch), I spoke to members about my experiences of successfully seeking research-grant funding. And now here’s my guest-blogpost reminding colleagues about it:-
via Pathways, Outputs and Impacts: Being a Librarian-Researcher Today
At a time when all researchers earnestly and diligently record and submit outcomes and 
outputs for ResearchFish, I wonder how I could intimate the activities that have been initiated for 2019 as well?! This month, I’ve submitted abstracts in response to FOUR conference calls for papers. I’ve started thinking about another potential project. But I’ve also got several things already in the pipeline, written during the research grant for Claimed From Stationers’ Hall – and indeed, a few that have been in the pipeline for much longer than that! (Inspired by ResearchFish – not that this particular piece of writing has anything to do with my present research – I have just enquired about some encyclopedia entries that I wrote in 2016, and was relieved to hear that publication is (in encyclopedic terms) imminent. It’ll be good to strike them off my “pending” list!)
Isn’t it frustrating when your outputs are significantly greater than have actually reached fruition or publication!
Ah well, back to ResearchFish, and I’ll see if I’ve missed anything off the present list!
When one is awarded a grant by a major research body, obviously accountability is a very important consideration. To that end, activities have to be logged on the poetically-named but very definitely serious Researchfish website. All big scholarly funders use it, asking for details of such matters as publications arising out of the research, further funding, engagement activities (there’s quite a bit I can enter here!) and so on.
At first sight, it’s a bit intimidating, but once I’d downloaded a list of “Common Outcome Types with sub-types”, and crossed out the columns in which no-one would remotely expect me to have outputs (Medical Products, Interventions and Clinical Trials, or such Research Tools as Biological samples, or human models of mechanisms or symptoms), it didn’t look quite so bad. I do feel a bit like a little fish in a big pond compared to people winning major awards to find cures for horrific diseases, design new space rockets, or solve the greater political and social conundrums of our age. Still, one has to start somewhere!
So, my activity for the rest of today will be to go through the list I’ve already compiled, and add the various presentations, blogs and guest-blogposts, and so on, and just see how far I get! For one-and-a-half days a week over 13 months, it looks okay – well, in my opinion, at any rate! As I’ve said often enough before, watch this space.
This weekend, it’s the Annual Study Weekend for British and Irish music librarians, members of IAML(UK and Ireland). The study weekend is at the University of Edinburgh, so it’s not far for me to travel!
I was invited to talk about my research project, but I needed a new slant on it, since I gave a presentation about my St Andrews research (“Ghosts of Borrowers Past”) back in 2016. This time, therefore, I’ll be talking about the whole process of finding grant funding for projects. My talk (“Pathways, Outputs and Impacts”) is at 20.45 on Friday – after dinner, news and updates and another paper – so I hope I can be sufficiently entertaining to keep everyone interested. (In my mind’s eye, I see myself doing a quick tap-dancing routine, but sadly, I cannot dance at all …)
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 