Calling engineering librarians!

Recently, I passed an exciting milestone in my PhD journey: I received ethics approval for my study, and I also passed my year 1 confirmation review! This means that I will soon be able to start collecting data.

For my data collection, I plan to recruit and interview female engineering undergraduates from a number of universities around the country. Recruitment is a little way off yet, as I plan to first conduct a pilot study with students from the University of Huddersfield (my employer), which I will do in the autumn term of 2024-25. I plan to conduct my main study in the 2025-26 academic year.

However, I would like to start getting a sense now of which other UK institutions might be interested – which is where I am hoping the wonderful network of engineering librarians could come in! I was at the LILAC conference this week, presenting a poster about my research, and had several great conversations with other librarians who thought their institutions might be interested. I am also going to be speaking at the University Science & Technology Librarians Group (USTLG) annual meeting in May, so am hoping to chat to a few more engineering librarians there.

So if this research sounds interesting to you, and you think your institution might be happy for me to recruit their students for my study, please get in touch! At this stage I am just trying to put together a list of contacts, so it may be some time before I approach anyone at your institution.