Seventeenth-century village astronomers, missionary meteorologists, Victorian amateur botanists, industrial investigators, modern-day think tankers, local archaeologists, freelance family historians, internet bloggers and debaters, and many others - through a range of fascinating cases complemented by overview analysis, this multi-author volume reveals the extent and vitality of the often invisible researchers who operate outside the university.

It provides a startling rebuttal of the conventional notion that the university is the primary site for knowledge production or that 'research' can and should be delimited within academically policed boundaries. The most creative and untrammelled researching today may be outside the universities, among other things exploiting the dialogic space of the Internet to bypass traditional academic controls over the production and validation of knowledge.

This interdisciplinary and transhistorical volume will interest - and challenge - all readers concerned with the theory and practice of higher education and lifelong learning; the organisation of research; the sociology and history of knowledge; and the implications and research of 'the knowledge society'

'I found the book informative and in parts fascinating, and I recommend it to others concerned with the professional/amateur divide'. - Rosemary Moore, Quaker Studies

Note on Contributors
Preface
Introduction: Looking Beyond the Walls; R.Finnegan
PART 1: LOOKING BACK
To the Heavens from Rural Lancashire: Jeremiah Horrocks and his Circle, and the Foundation of British Astronomical Research; A.Chapman
Collectors Harnessed: Research on the British Flora by Nineteenth-Century Amateur Botanists; D.E.Allen
Scientific Inquiry and the Missionary Enterprise; D.N.Livingstone
Listening and Learning: Audiences and their Roles in Nineteenth-Century Britain; S.Forganthe State, 1916-1939; K.Vernon
PART 2: OUTSIDE AND ACROSS THE WALLS
A Brief History of Field Archaeology in the UK: The Academy, the Profession and the Amateur; A.J.Hunt
Inside Out or Outside In? The Case of Family and Local History; M.Drake
Community Historians and their Work Around the Millenium; J.H.McKay
Researching Ourselves? The Mass-Observation Project; D.Sheridan
Science with a Team of Thousands: The British Trust for Ornithology; J.J.D.Greenwood
Think Tanks and Intellectual Authority Outside the University: Information Technocracy or Republic of Letters?; D.Cummings
PART 3: OPENINGS AND CHALLENGES THROUGH THE WEB?
Everyday Domestic Research in the Knowledge Society: How Ordinary People Use Information and Communication Technologies to Participate; B.Anderson
Building Knowledge Through Debate: Opendemocracy on the Internet; C.Melville
Blogging: Personal Participation in Public Knowledge-Building on the Web; M.Brady
Using the Internet as a Research Tool: Between Information and Communication; W.Davies
PART 4: REFLECTIONS: ARE THERE LESSONS FOR THE PRESENT?
Research, Universities and the Knowledge Society; F.Webster
Re-Opening Research: New Amateurs or New Professionals?; R.Barnett
Index

RUTH FINNEGAN, FBA, is Visiting Research Professor and Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University, UK. In her long and distinguished career she has served for nearly thirty years in universities including University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Rhodesia, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, University of the South Pacific, Fiji, and the Open University, UK. She was joint founding editor of the journal Family & Community History and is the author or editor of more than fifteen books. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1996, awarded an OBE for services to Social Sciences in 2000 and made an Honourary Member of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth in 2002.