Mind the Gap ...

To my mind, the biggest hurdle in writing a professional-level literature review is understanding what a literature review is: how it should be written, what it will accomplish, what it should contain, etc ...

Whole books have been written on the topic!

                                   (-- unfortunately, they were all checked out when I needed them last week)

Thankfully, many articles have also been written, and just about every book about writing a thesis, dissertation, or research report has a chapter devoted to the literature review. So by cobbling together a paragraph or two from a half-dozen or so of these, I was able to discover just about everything I needed to know.

A literature review is like a cross between an annotated bibliography and a formal essay. It is an attempt to sound out the boundaries of, and summarize the history and key theories of, the literature in your chosen area of study. An effective literature review proves that you are familiar with these resources and that you not only understand them, but can find parallels, disparities, common themes, etc. Most importantly though (especially if you are writing a thesis or dissertation), a literature review proves that there is a significant gap in the literature, and that your research will help to fill that gap.

In other words: if you can't find a gap, you're probably not breaking any new ground.

Since I'm not writing a thesis for my SFPL internship, I don't have to be as mindful of the gap as I would have otherwise. In fact, my original "gap" didn't need me to discover it at all: it was handed to me by SFPL, who asked me to fill it with a recommendation report.

But as I've spent more time researching digital policy, I've come to see that there really is a gap in the literature that needs filling, and I hope that my literature review will highlight that. I've found many resources for digital planning and policy for academic libraries, but very few for public libraries. Public libraries and academic libraries have many similarities, but they also have important differences -- and so the advice given in academic library policy guides isn't always transferable to public libraries. So there's a real need for digital resource policy literature for public libraries, too.

Knowing that there's an under-explored area out there -- a gap that needs filling -- that I've located, that has the potential to become an interesting thesis: it makes me very happy! Now the gears have begun turning ...

"... At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, `When I grow up I will go there ..."

                                                                           -- Joseph Conrad
                                                                               (from "Heart of Darkness")