Week 4: Bedraggled Daisy-Rose

It is unfortunate that I consider myself to be severely lacking in the realm of creativity and artistic skill. Usually I dread activities where I am required to draw, but I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that Luker’s “bedraggled daisy” exercise was very useful in trying to conceptualize my research question. While I didn’t create a daisy or connect my petals in the way that I’m sure Luker intended, I feel that this visualization has been beneficial in mapping out my questions and concepts.

Research Questions:

1) What Knowledge Management strategies can be implemented to preserve the tacit and explicit knowledge of librarians, archivists and curators when they retire or face institution-wide downsizing?

AND/OR

2) Is oral history an effective tool for collating and managing the ‘knowledge ecology’ of art galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) as a means of preserving institutional knowledge and memory?

Initial brainstorming

I started by writing out my concepts in blocks. In this preliminary stage I thought of using the PICO method that I’ve learned from working at a Health Sciences Library:

P—Patient/population (art/museum libraries & archives—special libraries)

I—Intervention (knowledge management policies—succession planning—knowledge transfer—oral history as a KM tool)

C—Comparison (N/A)

O—Outcomes (N/A, outcomes should never be included in a search because they can introduce bias)

This structure forced me to think about my specific concepts and searchable terms. I then realized I had certainly not drawn a daisy, or any form for that matter, so I tried to use the terms I had listed to complete Luker’s exercise. 

As I was sitting at my desk I noticed my calendar, which for the month of February features a beautiful mouthpainted picture of roses by Jung Eon Hwang. Then I thought—maybe my daisy is actually a rose! There are layers that seem to expand outwards and this is how I am visualizing my questions at the moment.

Bloom of Pink, Jung Eon Hwang

So I made my first rose, which I have titled Angelique’s Rose Map (get it? Roadmap, Rose Map?):

Each layer of a rose represents a different concept. There are 3 flowers attached by one stem as I see my concepts as being connected, yet distinct. Then I added my ORs and ANDs as I see them. As I continue to think about my questions by rephrasing them and adding new elements to them, I imagine that my rose map will change too. So while I am clearly lacking in technical artistic ability (my roses look more like lollipops than anything), I feel pretty satisfied with my “bedraggled daisy-rose” and I’m hoping it will help me connect the research dots along the way.