Presented at LILAC 2024.

1. Gaining approval from the Prison Service (HMPPS) to conduct this research, as well as from two universities,
was a lengthy process! These approvals were granted at the end of January 2024.
Data collection began in February 2024 to cover the spring semester. Interviews with this cohort will take place
in May 2024, and the exercise will be repeated with a second cohort in the autumn semester.
05 Progress and next steps
This ongoing case study will investigate the
information practices of students who are released on
licence during the day to attend lectures on campus
return every day to incarceration in a UK prison.
There is significant research indicating that higher
education helps offenders to build better lives upon
release, increasing employment opportunities and
encouraging desistance from crime (Batiuk et al. 2005;
Davis, 2017).
However, a constellation of factors can prevent these
students from achieving their goals, including a lack of
access to academic information, especially from online
sources, and the skills necessary to navigate an
increasingly digital information world. So:
How do students who continue to be housed in
prison cope with the transition to a university
environment?
How can they best develop key graduate
attributes such as information and digital
literacies?
And how can universities (particularly university
libraries) support them to do this?
01 Introduction
Isabel Virgo
Doctorate of Information Science candidate
Robert Gordon University
Author
Professor Rita Marcella - Principal Supervisor
Konstantina Martzoukou - Second Supervisor
Acknowledgements
A collision of
two worlds:
The information behaviour of
incarcerated students
The researcher is coming from an interpretivist
perspective, aiming to use qualitative methods to
gain rich data and in-depth understanding of prisoner-
students' lived experiences of higher education in
prison.
This led to the adoption of a somewhat unusual
methodology - progress logs, based on the the diary-
interview method. Weekly progress logs will be
solicited over the course of a semester of study. The
entries will be semi-structured with prompts from the
researcher to investigate the phenomenon of
interest.
This will be followed up with interviews to further
explore the issues that have arisen in the diaries.
The author works as an academic librarian at a
university which has a partnership with a local
Category D (open) prison.
A small cohort of students attend campus from
9am-5pm on weekdays, studying alongside other
students, but they still face restrictions that impact
their ability to study, especially outside of these
hours.
Members of this group will be recruited as
participants in this qualitative case study.
03 Research setting
The aim of this study is to contribute to overcoming
obstacles to information access and use for prisoners
in UK Higher Education.
By means of a case study, I will:
critically explore the experiences of this group of
student-prisoners around accessing and using
academic information for their studies;
evaluate the support provided by academic
libraries to this group.
The main output will be best practice
recommendations for university and prison libraries to
enable prisoners to be successful students, which will
be disseminated appropriately.
Since this is a practice-focused doctorate, it is also
hoped that this will lead to the initiation of new
projects in my own workplace to better support this
disadvantaged group.
02 Aim/objectives 04 Methodology
Closed
Isolating
Risk averse
Restricted
Paper-based
Open
Collaborative
Exploratory
Independent
Technology-enabled
The university
environment
The prison
environment
Batiuk, M., Lahm, K., Mckeever, M., Wilcox, N. and Wilcox,
P. (2005) ‘Disentangling the effects of correctional
education’, Criminal Justice, 5(1), pp. 55–74.
Davis, S. D.L. (2017) 'Supporting learning on the inside:
Academic library services for students in prison. ACRL
conference, Baltimore, 22-25 March.
References
Example progress log prompts