Hi there and thanks for visiting!
The Blog
I’m actually a veteran blogger of many years – This blog started off as a series of reflections on the challenges, issues and events shaping, defining and influencing modern academic librarianship. Now I’ve changed direction – so has the blog. The focus is now on recording my experiences as a PhD student. It’s designed in part to help me reflect on my learning and research experiences over the three or so years I’ll be going through the process. I hope as well it might chime with some of my fellow PhDs around the country and make them feel like they’re not quite so alone! And naturally I’d love to hear from any of you. I make no great claims as to the academic validity, nor readability of posts; though I strive to avoid the perils of the rant post! But that said, I hope you do find them engaging – if at times a bit lengthy (sorry, trainee-academic here!).
This site is recognised by The Guardian’s Higher Education Network as a valuable academic professional development blog with “with useful resources on personal and professional career development, academia and opinions”.
The (Research) Llama
I’m currently a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University in the glorious East Midlands in Great Britain. I’m based in the College of Arts and Humanities specialising in English, Communication and Media; with a smattering of politics and social science thrown in for good measure. I guess this makes me an arts student, which is a bit of a shock as I started out my higher education career two decades ago a a biomedical technologist; evolving then into an information manager.
Until very recently I used to work as an academic library manager in UK Higher Education, who also happened to be Chair of the UK Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) and also the Forum for Interlending and Document Supply (FIL). However, my burning desire to research further into various fields I’ve been working in has led me to start working in late 2012 towards a doctorate – specialising in the areas of open access (OA), access to knowledge (A2K), advocacy and influence.
I’ve published in various books and journals and spoken at numerous conferences over the years (which for some strange reason I seem to love doing). I’ve written about such diverse elements as open access, edutainment, movie making, scripting, repositories, comic books, interlending, scifi and copyright. In my spare time I’m a film maker, writer, small holder, chef, scratch-builder, voice artist (for hire!), comic book and scifi fan, LARPer and social media enthusiast.
The Personal Brand
- Email me at: gareth.johnson2012 @ [delete_this]my.ntu.ac.uk, removing spaces and the bracketed text.
- You can read more about my publications on my Academia.edu profile.
- You can follow me on Twitter
- Why not view my pretty pictures photoblog
- Enjoy my cooking and DIY blog too
- Or if you’re a fan of scifi, comedy and puppetry – try my videos out
Terms and Conditions
All material on this blog is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Scrape it and try selling it, and I’ll get very hot under the collar. You don’t work in the field of copyright, IPR, free culture and open access as long as I have without being fairly sharp on my legal rights. Be thee duly warned!
Disclaimer
All opinions stated in the blog are mine, and have no legal, moral or ethical reflection organisations of which I might be a member, point’s of view. They’re solely mine; which probably means they’ll be more than a little half baked and left field; with just a hint of Devil’s Advocacy about them at times. And above all – honest and spin free!
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