Research on creativity and innovation has been bubbling up in many disciplines, including ours. Recently, Bergart and DElia (2010) applied insights from the literature of entrepreneurship to innovation in library culture, and Rowley (2011) provided a basic theoretical framework for identifying library creativity.
During my session, I would like to expand on this work by introducing my research leave project of constructing creativity narratives for individuals working in libraries. While institutional and professional contexts will be important to those narratives, my focus will be on the individual experience of innovation and creativity at and around work, right in our idea incubators. I will discuss how narrative research methods Im using may help us find common threads in the work of library innovators, or simply highlight elements of these personal stories that may provoke interest, reflection, disagreement or perhaps lasting change for the participants.
Learning Outcomes
At the end of my sessions, the participants will be able to:
– Identify and ,distinguish between, the streams of creativity research within the library and in other disciplines.
– Define basic concepts in narrative research methodology, a trending social science research method.
– Apply some narrative research concepts to their work, and create a thread in my research project.
