Monday 31 December

I have spent all day in librarian mode – organising references and tidying up where I have got to so far. This is a little bit like colouring in revision timetables, in that it feels useful but doesn’t really get one on any further. However, as a good librarian I know that the more structure I put around my literature searching at these very early stages, the easier it will be to find and cross reference articles later. Noting why I think something is or isn’t relevant now will no doubt be very useful six or twelve months down the line when whatever reasons I had today have been lost in the mists of time.

I have generated a number of topic areas from the articles I’ve found from my less structured ‘Oh that looks interesting and I wonder if it’s subsequently been cited’ searching over the last couple of days. Well, it is holiday time.

So far, then, the literature I’ve found falls into one or more of the following categories:

• Traditional authority/ hierarchy and the internet
• Website usability and evaluation (but not yet found anything that looks at religious websites, it’s all ecommerce)
• Surveys and predictions (the Future of the Internet, as seen from 1995)
• Descriptions/ analysis of online religion and virtual communities
• Cross cultural comparisons
• Comparative areas – e.g. health websites/ public organisations/ PR
• Church use of the internet (this is the smallest pool so far and I wish it was the largest!)

Reading

I’ve been reading a 1996 Master’s dissertation related to my topic: ‘A study of internet use by Christian churches and organisations.’ It’s really interesting but what struck me most is how much it reads like a historical document – how the vocabulary, techniques and tools from 11 years ago seem very antiquated when compared to all this Web 2.0 malarkey.

Thursday 28th December … minor trauma

Today is the first day that I have set aside for working on the project. It is not going so well so far.

I have struggled to log in to databases via Athens – it took two hours to get a temporary fix. And I feel like I have been going round in circles all day… now it’s nearly 3pm and so far I have managed to arrange a noticeboard.

The things I need to do are:

• write up notes from the supervision meeting on 14th December
• write some blurb for my entry on the department’s website
• find the list of contacts from a meeting with the Church of England
• contact the librarian at All Nations (who is also a part time research student at Loughborough)
• generate a list of search terms for interrogating databases
• make a list of useful journals and their locations, and sign up for RSS feeds to those that use RSS publish their contents

Oh, and start running some meaningful searches.

Point of the blog…

I’ve just registered as a part-time PhD student at Loughborough University. My research is loosely described as ’stuff about religion on the internet.’ I’m creating this blog as a space to record progress, ask questions, ponder, and find the way forward.

Since it is the 21st century, and the research is about information and the internet, a blog seemed the way to go.