Library and information studies in Norway 04-05

What's the buzz?

Tell me what's happening! For the benefit of IFLA participants we have collected information about current Norwegian research in library and information science. The bibliographic entries have been extracted from the database Frida. Only materials in English are included.

Frida is meant to cover all research output from the institutions of higher education that participate. At the moment Frida is used by Oslo University College and by four of Norway' s five universities: Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Tromsø. The fifth, Stavanger, only received university status this year.

Library studies

Norway's biggest library school, with about thirty staff members, is part of the Faculty of Journalism, Library and Information Science at Oslo University College. The school offers a three year bachelor and a two year master programme. The University of Tromsø has a Department of Documentation Studies, with a staff of eight, which also provides training in librarianship. Data oriented information management can be studied at the University of Trondheim.

Frida is a new, and very interesting, system for quality controlled author based registration of research publications and other types of research outputs. The driving force behind Frida is the new result based financing system for universities and colleges. The institutions now have to document what they do in order to get their proper share of government funding.

Frida became operational in 2004 and the user interface has not yet been translated into English. But those who want to try it out are welcome to visit the advanced search page, where you can specify language [språk] and institution/department [enhet].

Current research

The entries in my little survey comprise all registered publications and lectures (academic and popular) in English for the years 2004 and 2005:

• from the school of librarianship in Oslo
• from the Department of Documentation Studies in Tromsø
• from the three teachers of Information Management in Trondheim

With Frida available, such a survey can be made in a few hours. Note that the list is incomplete. Many publications from 2005 have probably not been registered yet. But tracing additional publications to fill in the holes could easily take a full working week.

I publish the list as it stands. It works as a rough snapshot of current research. Eighty percent of a sausage is better than none.