Responsibilities

Research Associate in CERLIM, and lecturer in Department of Information & Communications.

Background

Research

Copac Usability: Usability Study of the Copac service, a physical union catalogue of about 35 major University, Specialist, and National Libraries in the UK and Ireland.

EThOS Evaluation: an Interim evaluation of EThOS: Electronic Theses Online service form the British Library, for for Imperial college, London, and JISC.

M-Learning Project: a study to identify current developments in mobile Learning in UK higher education, to assess the use and viability of learning objects delivered via mobile technologies, and developments in other educational areas to identify future expectations from the next generation of students entering UK HEIs.

eMapps.com: Motivating Active Participation of Primary Schoolchildren in Digital
Online Technologies for Creative Opportunities through Multimedia.  The project will investigate the use by school children of mobile technologies (handheld PCs, PDAs, smartphones) in teaching and learning. It is funded under the European Commission (EC) Information Society Technologies (IST) 6th Framework Programme (FP6), and runs from October 2005 to March 2008.

CALIMERA - Cultural Applications: Local Institutions Mediating Electronic Resource Access. A project to ensure that local cultural institutions - public libraries, museums and archives - and their users - ordinary citizens, are able to benefit from and contribute to the goals of the European Commission Information Society Technologies (IST) research programme 2002-2006.

COINE - Cultural Objects in Networked Environments. A project to harness information technology to help people use information, photographs, audio recordings and other objects of interest to them in new ways. The COINE Project is part-funded by the European Commission Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme.

EDNER - Evaluation of the DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource). The Project addresses the formative evaluation of the DNER over the period 2000-2003 academic years, and will assess the impacts made by the DNER.

PRIDE - People and Resource Identification for Distributed Environments, a project to develop a broker service to support the identification and delivery of information services over the global information infrastructure (1998-2000)

AGORA - a project to build a hybrid library software system (1998-2000)

NewsAgent for Libraries - whose aim is to create a user-configurable electronic news and current awareness service for library and information users (1997-2001)

NARD - National Agency for Resource Discovery, a scoping study with the aim of defining a service to facilitate effective access to the UK scholarly resource (1997)

Department of Health database - Health and Older People from Minority Ethnic Communities (1996-97)

ENAE - European Network on Age and Ethnicity, a database of details of organisations, projects and practice in the field of ethnic elderly people across Europe (1995-96)

BIBDEL - Libraries Without Walls: the delivery of library services to distant users (1995), which established the bi-annual series of Libraries Without Walls conferences

Qualifications

BA in Business Studies, and MSc in Business Administration & IT.

Work experience

Geoff has worked on various JISC-funded studies as well as several European Commission funded IT-based research projects. For more than a decade he has researched the delivery of library and information services via the Internet and World Wide Web. Before joining CERLIM in 1995, Geoff worked in the management of warehousing and distribution, and motor engineering, where the emphasis was the provision of service to user customers in the private sector. This commercial background outside the academic research environment has provided different views and experience to the CERLIM.

Publications

2008     Butters, G., Markland, M. and Davies, R (2008) Public libraries, mobile learning and the creative citizen, in [OU M-libraries conference proceedings, to be published by Facet]

2008     Butters, G. and Davies, R. (2008). Public libraries, learning and the creative citizen: a European perspective. In: Brophy, P., Craven, J. and Markland, M. (eds.) Libraries without walls 7: Exploring `anytime, anywhere` delivery of library services: Proceedings of the Libraries Without Walls conference, 14-18th September 2007. London: Facet Publishing. ISBN 978-1-85604-623-7.

2007    Butters, G. and Brophy, P. (2007). Creating a research agenda for local libraries, archives and museums across Europe, New Review of Information Networking, Vol. 13, no. 1, Pages 3 – 21. ISSN: 1361-4576

2007    Butters, G., Markland, M. and Brophy, P. (2007). The History of the Future: evaluating projects and service developments before they begin. Performance Measurement and Metrics, Volume 8 Number 1 Pages: 34 – 40. ISSN: 1467-8047

2007    Butters, G., Hulme, A. and Brophy, P. (2007). Supporting creativity in networked environments: the COINE project. Ariadne, Issue 51 [online] April 2007 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue51/

2004    Kelly, M and Butters, G. (2004). Cultural Objects In Networked Environments, in Brophy, P., Fisher, S. and Craven, J. (eds) Libraries without walls 5: the distributed delivery of library and information services: Proceedings of the Libraries Without Walls conference, 19th to 23rd September 2003. London: Facet Publishing. ISBN 1-85604-511-0

2003    Butters, G. (2003). What features in a Portal? Ariadne, Issue 35 [online] http://www.ariadne.ac.uk /issue35/butters/