Updates on my doctoral research and conference presentations

It has been a little while since I last updated this blog! Since my last post, I’m happy to report I have now completed my data collection and my analysis is underway.

I have also been lucky enough to present at three conferences in the past year. The first was LILAC, the annual UK information literacy conference, held this year in Cardiff, Wales. I have been to LILAC every year since 2016, and I very much consider it my professional home. Having presented a poster at LILAC in 2024 when I was starting to recruit for the study, this year I was proud to share some emerging findings from the pilot stage of my data collection. My slides can be viewed on the LILAC archive.

The second was the American Society for Engineering Education’s (ASEE) annual conference, held in Montreal, Canada in June 2025. I was very excited for this conference, partly because I’d never visited Canada before! Montreal is a wonderful city, I would love to go back again some time. But I was also excited because this conference was an opportunity to present outside of my usual professional circles.

The ASEE has several internal divisions for people interested in engineering education from different perspectives. Of most relevance to me with my librarianship background was the Engineering Libraries Division (ELD). I have been a member of ELD for just over a year now, having discovered their existence while doing my literature review for this doctoral study. As far as I’m aware, there isn’t an equivalent professional body for engineering librarians in the UK. Engaging with the ELD virtually over the past year, and being lucky enough to meet many of them in-person at ASEE in June, has been a really positive experience and certainly beneficial for my research. 

I was delighted to give a short presentation about my research methodology at the conference in June, and to publish in their conference proceedings. The ASEE conference proceedings came up repeatedly as a key source in my literature review, so it seemed important to add my voice to the conversation happening through this organisation. This paper elaborates on the pilot findings I discussed in my LILAC presentation.

My final conference this year was the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL), held in Bamberg, Germany. Bamberg is an utterly beautiful location. It looks like the kind of German town that you’d find illustrating a Christmas card or a tin of posh biscuits! Looking closer than the picture-perfect scenery, I also really appreciated the amount of anti-fascist graffiti visible around the city. 

At ECIL, I presented about my research in progress in the doctoral forum. This was a return visit for me: I had presented in the doctoral forum in 2023, in Krakow, Poland. Returning in 2025 gave me the opportunity to give an update on my progress, and address some of the development points that had been raised after my 2023 presentation. 

I found the experience of presenting at the doctoral forum for a second time incredibly valuable. The chairs and audience had some really interesting, thought-provoking and challenging questions for me about my research approach, which helped me to reflect on some areas that will inform my data analysis.

I am planning my next few conferences, as I progress through my data analysis and begin to have some more data to share. I have submitted an abstract for LILAC 2026, which will be held in my own home location of the University of Sheffield! I unfortunately can’t make the 2026 ASEE conference, but I’m already eyeing the 2027 conference. I have also seen that the UK’s Practical Engineering Education conference makes a return in 2026. Having presented a poster at the 2024 conference, when I was recruiting for the study, it would be interesting to return and share my findings.