Simon Wakeling

Simon is a Lecturer at the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University.

He received his PhD from the University of Sheffield’s Information School in 2015, having previously completed an MSc in Electronic and Digital Library Management. He also holds a BA in English Literature  from Durham University (1999) and an MA in American Literature from the University of Sheffield (2006).

Before joining CSU in 2019 Simon was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield’s Information School, and prior to that he held various project and operations management roles in the telecoms and vocational training industries.

I have previously taught on topics including digital libraries, library management and strategy, library systems, bibliometrics, and knowledge management.

At CSU I am subject coordinator for INF321 (Introduction to Research) and INF447 (Research in Practice).

I have three main research interests:

* Scholarly Communications

My research has focused on issues relating to the Open Access (OA) dissemination of scholarly work. Most recently I have collaborated with Prof. Stephen Pinfield and Prof. David Bawden on an AHRC-funded project investigating the relationship between theory and practice in OA. Prior to that I was involved in a project exploring the impact of mega-journals on the scholarly landscape, and how such journals and other OA publishing models might evolve in the future. My work in this area has incorporated bibliometric, survey, interview and focus group methods.

* Interactive Information Retrieval

In particular I am interested in better understanding the information seeking and information search behaviour of the users of library systems, and how IR systems can better support these users. I am also interested in how mixed-methods can be best utilised to address IIR related research questions. I have previously worked on topics including recommender systems, and relevance assessment for test collection development, including the collection of crowd-sourced relevance judgements.

* Graph Literacy

The age of Big Data has led to data visualisations becoming an increasingly common presence in people’s lives. My work has aimed to better understand the extent to which people can interpret and use different types of visualisation, and how information creators and providers can ensure that their data is understood.

• Associate Editor for Research Articles, Library and Information Research (2014-19)
• Committee member, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) Libraries and Information Research Group (2016-18)
• iFutures Conference Committee, Chair (2013) and Vice-Chair (2014)