Author Archives: vew908

Is there value in absent results?

Posted on by

by Angie Gerrard
Murray Library, University of Saskatchewan

There is a movement in the academic literature regarding the value of publishing negative research results. While the most accepted research tends to favour positive results, there is a growing call for a more holistic picture of the realities of research. This just makes sense. As a researcher and practitioner, I want to know what worked, for whom, in what context, but I also want to know what did not work, why it did not work, and what lessons can be drawn from that. There is obvious value in learning from other people’s so-called ‘failures’.

But what about those research findings that never see the light of day because they are not truly results, but rather the first few steps of the research process that simply failed? It is one thing to complete a research project and share the negative results but quite another when the research is stalled and there is nothing to share. Is there value in reporting a research experience that produced nothing in the most tangible sense?

This is my reality at the moment; a liminal state along the research journey. I am currently on sabbatical and part of my research program is dedicated to information literacy instruction; more specifically, trying to better understand faculty’s perceptions and practices of information literacy. My hypothesis is that while faculty are not likely consciously adopting information literacy in the curriculum, they are in fact incorporating many of the underlying principles encompassed within information literacy. Therefore, if librarians want to continue to play a key teaching and learning role on campus, we need to better understand what is being taught in the classroom. To begin to understand this, I proposed getting faculty together in focus groups to discuss how they perceive their undergraduate students’ abilities to access, use, and evaluate information and how, if at all, they teach these constructs and if so, is this is done in any scaffolded manner throughout the curriculum.

Thus began the design of my research project. A grant application was written and was successfully granted (yikes, this was getting real). A literature review was conducted and many, many articles were read and annotated. Focus group methodology was studied and a focus group question guide developed. Ethics documentation was written. A research assistant was hired. Ethics documentation was re-written and re-submitted. Focus group dates were set and a moderator was booked. Contact information was gathered for more than 500 faculty. Many, many Excel spreadsheets were developed. Six focus groups were created using stratified data from potential participants. Email protocols and procedures were written and finally, drum roll please, the initial call for participants was emailed in early March with a deadline to respond by mid-month.

And then I waited.

Crickets.

And then I “failed”.

Of the 180 potential randomized participants contacted, two people agreed to sit on our focus groups; a response rate too embarrassingly low to even report. In all reality, we received six total responses: two who agreed to participate (bless their hearts), one said thank-you but count me out, two reporting the time of year wasn’t good for them, and another reporting that he did not meet the eligibility requirements but offered some interesting input. We had planned for six focus groups, each with five to eight participants, where three groups were stratified by subject disciplines and the other three represented mixed disciplines. In the end, we had a total of two willing participants; not near enough for one focus group, let alone six.

So this a snapshot at where I am at the moment, with the most important part of my research project missing. I have carefully planned and budgeted for the next steps of my project, i.e., data collection, data analysis, dissemination and knowledge translation, but none of this can go forward. I have nothing if I have no data.

When I reflect back on all the work and time invested in this project to date, did I actually fail? Is there value in nothing? The jury is still out of this. While this process has taught me much about undertaking a large research project (or at least the beginning stages of such a project) and the joys of qualitative research involving human participants, this is not the kind of value you can take to the bank or in my case, represent in a promotional case file.

Reporting positive results remains king. It has rightfully earned its place at the head chair at the big table. Slowly but surely, negative results are now being invited to take a seat at this table. Is there a place for absent results? Well, for the time being, these research experiences may be best relegated to the kids’ table.

On a more positive note; I have drowned my sorrows and moved on to Plan B. With the sabbatical clock ticking, I have simplified both my recruitment approach and focus group compositions and plan to hold the discussions at a less busy time. Fingers crossed there will have tangible and valuable data to share.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

What if we talked about capacity for research, not research competencies?

Posted on by

by Selinda Berg
Schulich School of Medicine – Windsor Program
Leddy Library, University of Windsor
University Library Researcher in Residence, University of Saskatchewan

[For the first time, I am making a blog post that puts out ‘there’ some ideas that I have been working on, which will hopefully evolve into a published paper. In the past, I have been someone that has been hesitant to blog in this way, but I am pushing myself in a new direction.]

Lately, I have been studying and contemplating multiple theoretical frameworks that span the humanities, social sciences, and health sciences. Reading these works and their framing of complex and changing environments have led me to question the current emphasis on competencies in librarianship. In this project, I am considering the ways that librarianship may benefit from making a shift away from its focus on competencies and move towards adopting the concept of capacity. Whereas competency focuses on the abilities, knowledge, and skills to successfully complete a task, capacity is the faculty or potential for experiencing, appreciating, and adapting. Capacity is about growth: growth of the individual in knowledge and experience.

We have recently seen an influx of documents addressing the competencies of librarians, including the research competencies of librarians (for example: see CARL, 2007). While these documents have value, they are one piece of a much larger puzzle. In this post, I want to consider the ways in which a shift towards a focus on capacity for research may initiate positive changes in our understanding and approach to research:

Embrace research as a learning process: There is no one static set of skills or abilities that will prepare someone to “do” research. The abilities, skills, and knowledge that I have gained by completing my PhD will not “set me up” for my next research study or for the research project that I undertake after that. I will have to learn new methods, try out new technologies, consider new theoretical frameworks, and certainly evolve my ideas. Research does not require a static set of skills and abilities (competencies), but rather the ability to continually evolve in our knowledge and abilities (capacity). As librarians, most of us have taken one, two, or three research methods courses. However published research, formal and informal conversations, and personal experience suggests that this framework of skills has not fully prepared us to successfully undertake research. We need to reframe our thinking and acknowledge that our greatest strength is our curiosity and our ability to evolve.

Encourage a research program: As noted above, research is not Rinse and Repeat. Our goal should not be to repeat the research that we have done before, but rather to develop a research program that evolves our ideas, builds off of our results, delves deeper into issues, and looks at questions at different angles and through different lenses. The realization that our success relies not on our current set of skills but our ability to evolve and grow our understandings will encourage us to push further and delve deeper into a topic and in turn, develop a strong program of research.

Empower librarians to know that we can: Embracing the idea that we have the ability to learn, to grow, and to adapt will move us away from conversations (within and outside of the profession) that focus on “Librarians were not trained to be researchers,” “Librarians do not have PhDs,” and “Librarians don’t have the skills to do research.” We need to embrace the notion that we can evolve and transform to meet the challenges presented by new research opportunities and we must take the time for these processes to take place. All researchers have to dedicate significant time to exploring and learning the context of a topic, to explore the wide of array of possible techniques for study, and to consider the way in which they can contribute a new understanding of a topic. It is quite possible that our first projects will not have the perfect research question, method, instrument or theoretical frameworks but from that, we should be motivated and inspired to learn and grow—to tap into our capacity.

Research success relies on more than a set of skills: While the skills and abilities to do research are important, capacity recognizes that there are factors at play beyond skills. Personal commitment, institutional commitment, resources to support research, and the allocation and dedication of time to transform and evolve are potentially as important or more important factors in fulfilling both personal capacity and institutional capacity for research. Capacity is the potential to grow and experience but it is critical to realize that potential requires more than a set of skills to complete a task.

Competencies are the skills we need to complete a task. But research is not a task, it is a process. Librarians, in all areas of their professional responsibilities, transform and evolve to meet the needs of the new challenges and opportunities. As librarians, we need to recognize that our biggest asset is our ability to learn and to grow–our capacity for research.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

How I’m Building Reconciliation

Posted on by

by Jaclyn McLean
Collection Services, University Library
University of Saskatchewan

On February 9, 2016, the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice hosted Ry Moran, Director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) for the Dean’s Research Lecture . Over the past few years, I’ve followed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but hadn’t really thought about what reconciliation meant to me. Ry’s lecture pulled some threads together that hit home, both professionally and personally. It felt like a punch to the gut, a personal call to action that I had to record.

Before I was a librarian, I was a historian. And I remember the last time I felt violated by the horrors humans inflict on each other. I also remember how far away those people and situations felt, and how relieved and privileged I felt to grow up in the time and the country I did, where I didn’t have to worry about institutions or individuals that went out of their way to make anyone “less than”.

Once I decided to study history, after a brief foray into early Canadian history, I focused on nineteenth & twentieth-century Europe. A course in European capitals of modernity found me in Berlin the same month the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe opened.
Interior Memorial Mar2016
An image from the interior of the Memorial, looking out.

It struck me then, and continues to now, the physical scars on the city of Berlin (and across Europe), and the mostly invisible scars on the people – scars imposed within a decade or so. Thinking about reconciliation in my own country has me right back in the thick of primary source research as documents from East Germany were released, and new information about the Holocaust came to light. A fuller version of history has been assembled from these primary source documents, survivor testimonials, and other sources. Much as these sources have contributed to healing in other countries, I hope we will be able to do the same. As the NCTR examines and figures out how to release the documentary evidence they’ve gathered, I hope we will, in the future, live in a country that has accepted its history. And that kids learn about it in elementary school, and researchers in all disciplines add to the conversation and as a country, we move towards reconciliation.

I grew up and went to school less than 60 kilometers from the last Residential School in operation in Canada (Lebret, in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan). And I didn’t realize it was there. I went through the public school system in Saskatchewan, the province that had the most Residential Schools in operation, and learned nothing about them. I studied Treaties and the making of this nation in my post-secondary education, and still nothing was discussed about Residential Schools.

Today, it clicked for me. I’ve studied and researched oppression and systematic attempts to eradicate culture and religion, and felt deeply those injustices. I have stood in memorials, in my own country and others, to people I never met, who died in conflicts that happened long before I was born, and felt their stories speak to me.

I’m so grateful to those who fought very hard to bring to light what’s happened in my own country in our recent memory, and begun to take us down a path to reconciliation. I’m proud to work at a University that is now an official partner of the NCTR , and will be looking for ways to bring my curiosity as a researcher, but also as a citizen of Canada, to how I can make reconciliation. In the face of the bravery of the survivors of Residential Schools, how can I not be brave enough to face my own ignorance and take the gift being offered to me, to learn. I look forward to continuing my learning, and am starting with the 10 Principles of Reconciliation (see pages 3&4), and the 94 Calls to Action. Where will you begin your journey to reconciliation?

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

Futures Studies: What is it, and how can it be ‘evidence-based’ research?

Posted on by

by Tegan Darnell
Research Librarian
University of Southern Queensland, Australia

In March 2015, I started as a student in the Doctorate of Professional Studies (DPST) program. I wanted to find out why librarians are ‘doing’ information practice so far behind what is relevant in the current information environment. Obviously, we are all at different places and have different strengths in regards to our professional practice, but generally, as a group, librarians are, well, behind the information use of our clientele. Just admit it.

Scholarly communication has been transformed. The world in which information professionals operate has been disrupted, and embracing these changes allows for a much broader scope for the roles we play. I wanted, really, to shake things up. After reading tonnes of the literature, debating with myself, and arguing with the DPST Program Director about how I was going to address the problem, I was introduced to causal layered analysis (CLA).

CLA is a ‘futures studies’ methodology which was introduced by Sohail Inayatullah in 1998. The original paper can be found here. Professor Inayatullah is a practitioner of futures studies, the interdisciplinary study of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures. But how can this possibly be scientific? I mean, how can it be possible to collect evidence from a future that hasn’t happened yet? It is a paradox which has not been ignored by practitioners.

Futures studies is a growing transdisciplinary field which has embraced such fields as systems thinking, education, hermeneutics, macrohistory, sociology, management, ecology, literature, ethics, philosophy, planning and others. It is an integrated field ‘with many lines of inquiry weaved together’ to create a complex whole (Ramos 2002).
The discipline uses a systematic and pattern-based approach to analysing the sources, patterns, and causes of change and stability in the past (history, economics, political science) and present (sociology, economics, political science, critical theory) in an attempt to develop foresight and determine the likelihood of future events and trends.

De Jouvenel (1965), an early futures theorist, likened forecasting or ‘the art of conjecture’ to the science of the meteorologist. Weather forecasts can be prepared reasonably accurately for each of the next few days. A forecast for more than a month in advance can be based on patterns, such as normal temperatures and precipitation, and other factors which may affect these in relation to the average. There is no way for a meteorologist to, with any certainty, say what the minimum and maximum temperature and precipitation levels on a particular day one month in the future will be. The meteorologist may, however, be able to say that it is likely that we will have above average rainfall, or that temperatures will be below average. A futures study considers patterns of power and privilege, social institutions, religion, and history, to postulate possible future states that may recur.

The causal layered analysis method, specifically, is not used to predict the future, but rather to create ‘transformative spaces for the creation of alternative futures’ (Inayatullah 1998). It is an action research method for increasing the probability of a preferred future by examining the problems, systems, worldviews and myths of the present. It is about human agency – using what we know about the past, to act in the present, in order to create/shape the future we would like to see.

Just imagine librarians in your own workplace, critically examining their own current problems, existing systems, worldviews, and subconscious myths and mythologies, to transform their practice. Perhaps you are starting to see why I decided to use the causal layered analysis method in my research.

I’m currently preparing for Confirmation of Candidature. Professor Inayatullah has agreed to be one of my supervisors. I think that makes me a *ahem* futures theorist.

If you are interested in finding out more I recommend this article by Professor Inayatullah on Library Futures published in The Futurist magazine.

References:

Inayatullah, S 1998, ‘Causal layered analysis: Poststructuralism as method’, Futures, vol. 30, no. 8, pp. 815–829.

De Jouvenel, B 1965, The Art of Conjecture, Trans. by Nikita Lary. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London.

Ramos, JM 2002, ‘Action Research as Foresight Methodology’, Journal of Futures Studies, vol. 7, no.1, pp. 1-24.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

Describing a phenomenon through experience: C-EBLIP Journal Club, February 16, 2016

Posted on by

by Carolyn Pytlyk
Research Facilitator
University Library, University of Saskatchewan

Article:
Forster, M. (2015). Phenomenography: A methodology for information literacy research. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 1–10. doi: 10.1177/ 0961000614566481.

Way back in October at the C-EBLIP Fall Symposium, Margy MacMillan from Mount Royal University talked about phenomenography as a new methodology for conducting research on information literacy. Phenomenography is “the empirical study of the limited number of qualitatively different ways in which various phenomena in, and aspects of, the world around us are experienced” (Marton quoted in Forster, p. 1). Margy’s enthusiasm and excitement for phenomenography certainly piqued my interest. In my conversations with library researchers, research methodology is often to topic of discussion when planning research projects, applying for grants, or developing research budgets and can sometimes be a stumbling block for researchers. As such when it came my turn to convene Journal Club, I thought Forster’s review article might be a good opportunity to explore phenomenography as a viable library research methodology for library researchers.

The majority of our conversation revolved around whether phenomenography was indeed a useful new methodology for conducting library research or not. For the most part, we agreed that from the perspective of the review article, it seemed a rather complex and involved methodology. However, in the end, we couldn’t really tell without actually following a researcher through the process. This review article was a fairly good introduction to and overview of phenomenography but to really understand its complexity, we agreed that we would need to read research employing phenomenography as a methodology to see how it works and if it is really as complex as it seems at the outset.

While presenting an intriguing and possible methodological alternative, this article left us with many more questions than answers. Some questions stemming from this review article include:
1. Is this a useful methodology? Would library researchers use it?
2. Is it a methodology about how we think?
3. How do researchers unobtrusively interview people without priming the participants? Is it even possible?
4. Is it a complex methodology, or does it just seem like it?
5. What are the steps involved? How does someone actually do it?
6. Could it be appropriate for library research other than information literacy (like usability or librarians as researchers)?
7. What other methodologies are out there in other disciplines that are possible for library research?
8. What sorts of learning/training would researchers need before undertaking phenomenography?
9. Do researchers have to be experienced interviewers to use it?

Still, despite the numerous unanswered questions, we were not deterred and were in agreement that we are all keen to learn more about it and its process.

Finally, we rounded out our conversation with the value of review articles, although not all of us are keen on them. (Don’t worry; I won’t name names.). Forster’s article not only opened our eyes to phenomenography as a new methodology; it also opened our eyes to the value of review articles as providing overviews of new methodologies, both as consumers and producers of knowledge.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

It’s a horse, of course! Expanding Your Research Output by Curating an Exhibition

Posted on by

by Jill Crawley-Low
Science Library, University of Saskatchewan

While working in University Archives & Special Collections at the University of Saskatchewan and being exposed daily to a wealth of published and unpublished materials from diverse subject areas, I felt challenged to volunteer to curate a display for the library’s exhibition program. At the University of Saskatchewan, curation is a form of artistic research which is reportable on faculty CVs. This was an opportunity to try out a new form of research while combining a professional interest in library collections with my personal passion for horses. The result was an exhibit called It’s a horse, of course! celebrating the enduring bond between humans and horses through the collections of the University Library shown from August – October, 2015.

Academic libraries typically use exhibitions and displays to showcase their collections to the campus community and outreach to the larger community. At the U of S, the exhibition program serves this purpose and also creates opportunities for librarians to link their professional practice to the subject of an exhibit. To support this form of research on behalf of librarians, the University Library has a purpose-built exhibition space in a high traffic area in a busy branch. Materials in a variety of formats are selected from general and archival collections. While displays of print materials are fleeting, published supporting materials such as exhibition catalogues and digital projects provide a long-term record. The Exhibitions Committee is chaired by the Special Collections Librarian and technical support for guest curators is provided by employees from the University Archives & Special Collections unit. The Committee’s terms of reference include periodic calls of interest to potential guest curators to participate in the exhibits calendar.

In curating exhibits, a useful rule of thumb is “less is often more.” A narrow topic with carefully selected items allows a focussed story to unfold, which may appeal to a wider audience than a broader topic. The collection itself determines the scope of the exhibit unless additional materials are borrowed and displayed. Although the curator determines the overarching theme of the exhibit, it is in the process of carefully selecting items that context and linkages among items appear and begin to shape the storyline. Being open to these possibilities increases the creativity and effectiveness of the exhibit.

At some point during the curation process I discovered that parts of the exhibit were evolving spontaneously; this may be analogous to collecting data using other research methodologies and following where the data lead. Two display cases organized themselves, one with materials about the heavy horse industry in Saskatchewan and the second to showcase horse breeds in general.

It is well known on campus that the university has several animal herds on a variety of farm sites for research and teaching. In the past, heavy horses in particular routinely worked on the university campus farm. While browsing the archival fonds from the College of Agriculture for materials relating to heavy horses, I came across the story of a young stallion whose history eclipsed all other potential stories. The story of Bonnie Fyvie emerged through a series of letters written and exchanged by parties interested in reinvigorating the heavy horse industry in Saskatchewan. The correspondents included William Rutherford, the first dean of Agriculture; Walter Murray, the first president of the university; representatives of the Saskatchewan government and horse breeders in the province; and the American Clydesdale Association.

Bonnie Fyvie was a two-year old purchased with government funds from an established Scottish Clydesdale stud farm to reside at the U of S. He had the potential to create a herd of prize-winning Clydesdales at the U of S and to offer stud services to approved mares within the province. Disaster struck when Bonnie Fyvie developed a neurological condition called stringhalt that precluded all but limited breeding. Bonnie Fyvie’s story played out in letters that ranged from hopeful optimism to sadness and finally acceptance. Although he would not sire generations of Clydesdales in Saskatchewan, the university purchased a ready-made Clydesdale herd from an American businessman, and some of those horses went on to win prizes at agricultural fairs on behalf of the university and province.

The other case that organized itself focussed on the topic of horse breeding. Preserved in the pages of a personal diary from the collection, the story was told from the perspective of two Victorian adventurers. The author, Lady Anne Blunt, was an aristocrat who travelled with her husband, Wilfrid, four times to the Middle East to negotiate with Arabian horse breeders. This was an age when the world that was safe and acceptable for tourist travel was relatively small. It did not include the deserts of Arabia where the Blunts travelled to meet Bedouin tribesmen and sheiks who bred Arabian stock. The Blunts used their knowledge of horse confirmation and breeding to select only the finest specimens of the Arabian breed, which they shipped back to their stud farm in Sussex, England. Lady Anne’s careful recordkeeping and the preservation of her story in the published diary means that 90% of all purebred Arabians alive today trace their lineage back to the horses that the Blunts exported from Arabia to England. I found this to be a more personal and interesting depiction of a horse breed than a case full of images of breeds.

I would heartily recommend a stint as a guest curator in order to experience a new form of research and the creative and, often, unpredictable result. Curation as a form of artistic research is an occasion for librarians to apply their subject knowledge and professional practice to develop an exhibit that reflects and promotes the library’s varied collections. Developing an exhibit is an opportunity to unearth the “hidden” treasures in the collections and a way to educate audiences about the more practical functions of preservation and accessibility in libraries.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

What “counts” as evidence of impact? (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on by

by Farah Friesen
Centre for Faculty Development (CFD)
University of Toronto and St. Michael’s Hospital

I work at the Centre for Faculty Development (CFD), a joint partnership between the University of Toronto and St. Michael’s Hospital, a fully affiliated teaching hospital. CFD is composed of educators and researchers in the medical education/health professions education field.

As a librarian who has been fully integrated into a research team, I have applied my training and skills to different aspects of this position. One of the areas for which I am now responsible is tracking the impact of the CFD.

While spending time tracking the work that CFD does, I have started to question what “counts” as evidence of impact and why certain types of impact are more important than others.

So what exactly is impact? This is an important question to discuss because how we define impact affects what we count, and what we choose to count changes our behaviour.

We are all familiar with the traditional metrics that count as impact in academia: 1) research, 2) teaching, and 3) service. Yet the three are not treated equally, with research often given the most weight when it comes time for annual reviews and tenure decisions.

What we select as indicators of impact actively shapes and constrains our focus and endeavours. If research is worth the most, might this not encourage faculty to put most of their efforts into research and less into teaching or service?

Hmm… does this remind us of something? Oh yes! Our allegiance to research is strong and reflected in other ways. Evidence-based practice also purports a “three legged stool” comprising 1) research evidence, 2) practice knowledge and expertise, and 3) client preferences and values,1 but research is often synonymous with evidence and most valued out of the three types of evidence that should be taken into consideration in EBP.2,3 It is not accidental that what is given most weight in academia is the same as what is given most weight in EBP: research. We have established similar hierarchies of what counts that permeate our scholarly work and our decision-making in practice!

Research impact is traditionally tracked through number of grants, publications, and citations (and maybe conference presentations). Attention to altmetrics is growing, but altmetrics tends to track these very same traditional research products, but speeds up the time between production and dissemination (the actual use or impact of altmetrics is a whole other worthy discussion).

Why is it that an academic’s impact (or an academic department’s impact) is essentially dependent on research impact?

There are practical reasons for this of course: research productivity influences an institution’s academic standing and influences the distribution of funding. As an example of the former, one of the performance indicators used by the University of Toronto is research excellence,4 and is based on comparing the number of publications and citations generated by UofT faculty (in sciences) to faculty at other Canadian institutions. For an example of the latter, one can refer to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) which assesses “the quality of research in UK higher education institutions”5 and allocates funding based on these REF scores.

While these practical considerations cannot be ignored, might it not benefit us to broaden our definition of impact in education scholarship? (Note that the comparisons of research excellence above are based on sciences faculty only. We must think critically about the type of metrics that are appropriate for different fields/disciplines).

This is tied to the question of the ‘value’ and purpose of education. What is it that we hope to achieve as educators and education researchers? The “rise of measurement culture”6 creates the expectation that “educational outcomes can and should be measured.”6 But those of us working in education intuit that there are potentially unquantifiable benefits in the work that we do.

  • How do we account for the broad range of educational impacts that we have?
  • How might we better capture the complex social processes/impacts in education?
  • What other types of indicators might we choose measure, to ‘make count’ as impact, beyond traditional metrics and altmetrics?
  • How do we encourage researchers/faculty to start conceiving of impact more broadly?

While considering these questions, we must be wary of the pressure to produce and play the tracking ‘game,’ lest we fall into “focus[ing] on what is measurable at the expense of what is important.”7

Part 2 in June will examine some possible responses to the questions above regarding alternative indicators to help (re)define educational impact more broadly. A great resource for further thoughts on the topic of impact and metrics: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/

I would like to thank Stella Ng and Lindsay Baker for their collaboration and guidance on this work, and to Amy Dionne and Carolyn Ziegler for their support of this project.

  1. University of Saskatchewan. What is EBLIP? Centre for Evidence Based Library & Information Practice. http://library.usask.ca/ceblip/eblip/what-is-eblip.php. Accessed Feb 10, 2016.
  2. Mantzoukas S. A review of evidence-based practice, nursing research and reflection: levelling the hierarchy. J Clin Nurs. 2008;17(2):214-23.
  3. Mykhalovskiy E, Weir L. The problem of evidence-based medicine: directions for social science. Soc Sci Med. 2004;59(5):1059-69.
  4. University of Toronto. Performance Indicators 2014 Comprehensive Inventory. https://www.utoronto.ca/performance-indicators-2014-comprehensive-inventory. Accessed Feb 10, 2016.
  5. Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). REF 2014. Research Excellence Framework. http://www.ref.ac.uk/. Accessed Feb 10, 2016.
  6. Biesta G. Good education in an age of measurement: on the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education. Educ Assess Eval Acc. 2009; 21(1): 33-46.
  7. Buttliere B. We need informative metrics that will help, not hurt, the scientific endeavor – let’s work to make metrics better. The Impact Blog. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/10/08/we-need-informative-metrics-how-to-make-metrics-better/. Published Oct 8, 2015. Accessed Feb 10, 2016.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

You have WHAT in your Special Collections?*

Posted on by

by Stevie Horn
University Archives and Special Collections, University of Saskatchewan

A question we are frequently asked at our front desk is why we hold certain things within our special collections. How are our collection choices made? Is the idea to restrict access? And why oh why are some books that were published as recently as last year considered too ‘special’ to be taken out of our closed stacks?

If we were to play a game of association, and I were to say “special collections library”, what would flash into most peoples’ minds is the image of the centuries-old manuscript, bound in leather, with crumbling pages that smell faintly of vanilla. But that only paints a part of the picture. What a special collections is, and what a special collections can be runs much, much deeper–and may look far different overall.

For example, at the University of Saskatchewan Archives and Special Collections, we have four main collection areas for rare and special books, each with its own distinct collection mandate. Our Rare Books collection contains primarily those things one would expect to find in a special collections library: medieval texts scrawled out in Latin, Victorian novels, first editions. The University Authors collection is just as self-explanatory — we endeavor to collect published works by University Faculty in order to have as complete a collection of the significant research outputs of the University of Saskatchewan as we can.

We also are home to the Neil Richards Collection for Sexual and Gender Diversity. Certainly one of our most interesting book collections (and the second largest overall), the objective of the Richards collection has been to gather LGBTQ2 materials, with a particular focus on popular culture, pulp novels, queer mysteries, and Canadian queer texts. The Richards collection has grown to be the largest of its kind in Western Canada.

All of these collections have some overlap with our largest special collection of books: The Shortt Collection of Canadiana. The mandate for this collection has been looser over the years than those applied to the other collections (the Shortt collection ambitiously attempts to absorb Canadian-themed fiction and non-fiction primarily by Canadian-based authors, with a specific focus on Western Canada and Western Canadian History) In this diverse collection users can find everything from local history books (nearly one from every town in the province) to the novels of Gail Bowen, to church cookbooks, to 18th century explorers’ accounts, to current aboriginal interest newspapers, and more. While some of the items may seem too recent, or too widely or too locally distributed to be considered ‘special,’ it is the collection as a whole that has meaning, and which provides the greatest research value.

One recent addition to the Shortt collection which may fall into the “you have WHAT in your special collections?” category is two boxes of:

Alpha Flight
Alpha Flight. New York, N.Y. : Marvel Comics Group, 1983- SPECIAL COLLECTIONS-SHORTT PN6728 .A4 1983-1993 v.1 no.1 — v.1 no.120**

Alpha Flight? Never heard of it? And isn’t Marvel comics American anyway? Surely a sub-mandate of the Shortt Collection of Canadiana cannot be to collect comic books from the 1980’s. Isn’t that an odd fit?

This is true–comic books have not been an area of focus within the Shortt collection. Typically, any incoming comic books have been earmarked for Richards. Perhaps this is because queer comic book heroes are, in this time of the graphic novel, easier to find than Canadian ones (the Canadian comic book golden age ended in 1946, according to John Bell in his book Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe (2006)). Whatever the reason, we have fewer Canadian-centric comic books in the Shortt collection than we might like, and are working to remedy that situation.

So what better place to begin than with Alpha Flight? This team of Canadian superheroes, headed by James Macdonald Hudson (aka Vindicator, aka the Man with the Most Canadian Names), originally appeared in the late seventies as a part of the backstory to Marvel’s most well-known Canadian, Wolverine. The fact that the Alpha Flight team had its own decade long run of books within the Marvel universe is itself significant, given Marvel’s dominant role in the comic book industry, and given the minimal role Canadian superheroes have historically played within that industry.

The Alpha Flight books provide an amusing window on how Canadians were viewed by our American neighbors at this point in time. With characters like the Montreal-born Jean-Paul and sister Jeanne Marie Beaubier (aka Northstar and Aurora), a large hairy Sasquatch named Walter Langowski, and Eugene Judd a roughly puck-shaped bouncer from our own Saskatoon, Alpha Flight makes a caricature of Canadian-ness. Even the heroes’ costumes look like Team Canada’s Winter Olympic speed-skating apparel.

With Canada experiencing a recent resurgence of acknowledgement on the world stage (according to the New York Times, we’re “hip” now), collecting materials on what it is to be Canadian, what it was to be Canadian, and how Canadians have been viewed over time will become more important than ever. We are a nation that is constantly feeling out its own identity, and collections like the Shortt Collection of Canadiana provide a basis for that understanding.

Sources:
Alpha Flight. New York, N.Y. : Marvel Comics Group, 1983- SPECIAL COLLECTIONS-SHORTT PN6728 .A4 1983-1993 v.1 no.1 — v.1 no.120
Bell, John. Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe. Dundurn, 2006.
“With the Rise of Justin Trudeau, Canada Is Suddenly … Hip?.” The New York Times, Jan. 16, 2016

*this blog post has been modified with permission from the author from a posting on the blog What’s That, UASC? on January 19, 2016.

**Copying and/or duplication of the above image without express and written permission from the copyright holder is strictly prohibited.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

Useful, Useable, Desireable: C-EBLIP Journal Club, January 7, 2016

Posted on by

by Jaclyn McLean
Collection Services, University Library
University of Saskatchewan

At our first journal club meeting of 2016, I chose an article from Weave; a new peer-reviewed, OA, web-based journal, to start a discussion about usability principles and teams in academic libraries:

Godfrey, K. (2015). Creating a culture of usability. Weave: Journal of Library User Experience, 1(3). http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/weave.12535642.0001.301

I’ve been reading a lot in the areas of usability and user experience (UX), especially in libraries, as I build a foundation of knowledge for my program of research. This article seemed like an interesting introduction for those less familiar with usability principles, and the idea of a culture of usability across the library intrigued me. I also like the Weave editorial philosophy, especially their primary aim “to improve the practice of UX in libraries, and in the process, to help libraries be better, more relevant, more useful, more accessible places.” This aligns well with some of the reasons I picked usability and UX for my research, and ideas I keep in mind in my practice as well. And before I dig into the article, and our discussion, I just want to mention something about usability and UX. Weave is a journal aiming to improve UX, but the article we read was about usability teams and principles. Usability and UX are not the same (though you’ll see the terms used nearly interchangeably at times, incorectly).

Godfrey’s article could be divided into two broad sections: a description of usability and usability teams, and an examination of the local experience at Memorial University Libraries. In the first section, she frames her discussion with a literature search on usability principles and practices, and the newer concept of standing usability teams in libraries. She also discusses the importance of making usability a core concept in all areas of library development – physical, virtual, and service. She describes the core concepts of usability, and how Memorial is consciously applying the idea of examining pain points and other concepts usually confined to online environments, to their physical spaces. The challenges of creating a culture of usability (or of changing any culture), and especially the concept of join-in rather than buy-in when attempting such a significant change were very interesting to think about.

The second section gives an overview of the Memorial University Libraries context, and how the implementation of a usability team went there. Godfrey outlines how the team was formed, what’s been done so far, and some plans for the future. She identifies the creation of their usability team as “the first step to creating a culture of usability and improving the user experience.”

Our discussion ranged widely, from the style of the article, to ideas of usability beyond the web, concepts of building culture, and beyond. Several of us were hungry for more – details of the actual projects undertaken by the usability team and their outcomes – but recognized that this wasn’t the article we had in our hands. This article felt more like an introduction to the concept of standing usability teams in libraries, an overview of usability concepts, and some local experiences rather than a full case study or assessment of a usability team in a library.

The bulk of our discussion focused on local context. We already do a lot of talking about our different cultures and how to build them here, and have focused recently on building cultures in the area of leadership, project management, assessment, and EBLIP. How many cultures can one workplace consciously foster, we wondered? Could we honestly see something like a standing usability team happening here? In the end, we thought that adopting usability concepts and ideas into work we already do, and good standing committees that are already in place would be more successful in our context. In that way, we specifically talked about EBLIP – because by it’s very definition, EBLIP takes into account our users. So maybe rather than adding a new culture shift to our agenda, it’s more about keeping the user aspect of EBLIP in mind when we implement or assess services and programs – and use that as a reminder to stop assuming we know what our users need, or as a reminder to check in with our users on a regular basis.

Libraries have a bad reputation of looking inward and forgetting about our users – so even broad discussions of user preferences and initial user consultation could be a significant improvement. I know from my own area of work (technical services), a key example of how we fall down on user consultation is when a discovery system needs to be reconfigured, and only library staff are consulted for needs/preferences, rather than users.

In the end, this article made us hungry for more. As practitioners, we were immediately curious about the how and the what of the work. We wanted to see the outcomes of the iterative testing, the aggregated responses from the survey, and the results from this standing team. We hope that Godfrey is planning a follow-up with more of the details from on the ground, so we can continue to learn from what seems to be a unique project. Krista, if you’re reading this, I hope that you are planning to share more about the work you’ve done so far and what’s planned next!

Advocating for Change in an Unsustainable and Inequitable Journal Publishing Market

Posted on by

by DeDe Dawson
Science Library, University of Saskatchewan

I’ve been thinking a lot about how librarians can most effectively support researchers in their scholarly communications activities and bring about meaningful change in a largely dysfunctional academic journal market.

In a recent planning meeting at my library, the topic of advocacy for open access (OA) came up. It has always seemed to me to be a natural role for academic librarians. We know the underlying issues better than most, and have the professional responsibility to raise the awareness of these issues among our faculty colleagues on campus. Indeed, librarians at many institutions have led the way in advocating for OA for more than a decade now. And much progress has been made: OA is quickly becoming the default (for journal articles at least) and there is no going back – especially now that major national funders are mandating it.

So, do we really need more advocacy for OA?

OA now seems to have a life of its own. We no longer need to advocate for it so much as support the researchers at our institutions in complying with the mandates of their funders to make their research outputs (publications and data) openly available. There are many practical tools and resources that librarians can introduce researchers to that will help them in this. And of course there are still many persistent myths and misinformation about OA that need to be countered. Roles for librarians abound! So, awareness-raising and practical support for compliance – but what of advocacy?

Lately, I am coming to the conclusion that our advocacy efforts need to be redirected to pushing for more fundamental changes in the journal publishing market. Let me explain:

Academic librarians have always been some of the strongest proponents of OA simply because we can clearly see the unsustainability, and inequity, in the current commercial journal market better than our any of our campus colleagues.

The system is unsustainable:

Publishers have increased subscription fees beyond inflation for decades, and make “obscene” profits from selling research papers produced by faculty at our institutions back to us. Library budgets have not grown at the same rate as journal subscription increases. For many years librarians have been able to maintain these subscriptions by reducing expenses in other areas and cutting spending on monographs – but this can only go on for so long. To make an unsustainable system even worse, many commercial publishers are now co-opting OA for their own financial gain. With “hybrid” journals, publishers charge authors high article processing charges (APCs) to make their individual papers OA, and yet continue to charge libraries subscription fees to that same journal (i.e. “double-dipping”). Publishers have essentially found a lucrative additional revenue stream in OA – this is not the outcome that the original proponents of OA had in mind! Currently our low Canadian dollar makes this unsustainable system even worse (since most subscriptions are paid in U.S. dollars). Libraries are at the breaking point.
The system is inequitable:

This is also an ethical problem. Much of the research locked up behind commercial publisher paywalls is taxpayer funded, yet taxpayers cannot read the results without paying again. Taxpayers also largely fund the salaries of university faculty who peer-review and serve on editorial boards of these journals. The publishers generally do not pay these individuals for their services, nor do they pay the authors of the papers. To be blunt: commercial scholarly journal publishing is a racket. The tax paying public loses, practitioners and patients lose, independent researchers and journalists lose, academics in developing countries lose, scholars and students at poorer institutions lose, and now those at even the richest institutions are losing too. I could go on.

So, returning to the advocacy piece…

I believe we now need to advocate for more radical change in the entire scholarly publishing market. Imagine the millions of dollars per year that each institution could save if they could cancel all of these subscriptions. A portion of this money could be redirected to support innovative new OA publishing models, or simply support scholarly societies to take back their flagship journals from the commercial publishers (e.g. Cultural Anthropology). And the rest could be redirected to support research and student scholarships, or many other worthy needs on campus.

I’m not naïve. I realize this is not a straightforward task. But it is essential to the future of higher education and research institutions. And there are innovations already taking place (I list some below), but the key in this equation is outreach to researchers. They are the authors, the reviewers, the editors. They are the colleagues that sit on tenure and promotion committees. They are also often in administrative roles at universities. They have the real power to effect change. But, they are generally unaware of the full extent of the dysfunction in the system. Librarians have an opportunity, and a professional obligation, to raise their awareness on these issues, and advocate and support them in changing it to more sustainable and equitable OA models.

A few examples of innovative models of scholarly OA journal publishing:
• SCOAP³
• PeerJ
• Overlay journals
• Open Library of the Humanities
• Open Access Network

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.