Category Archives: Adjunct Member

How Evidence Informed Practice Changed My Life… Or at least how I think about Twitter

Posted on by

by Christine Neilson
Information Specialist, St. Michael’s Hospital
Toronto, Ontario

And now for something completely different. Well, not COMPLETELY different. I was inspired by the C-EBLIP Fall Symposium – all those library professionals talking about their research, what inspires them, the highs, the lows – and decided that even though I couldn’t attend in person, I have the perfect opportunity to share my thoughts with everyone right here. I give you, How Evidence Informed Practice changed my life… Or at least how I think about Twitter. In cartoon format.

Hopefully I’ll see you all in person at a future symposium!

This following video gives the views of the author and not necessarily the views of St. Michael’s Hospital, the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.


Audio software: Audacity 2.1.1
Presentation software: Powtoon [http://www.powtoon.com/]

Digging Deeper: Decoding the Research Process

Posted on by

by Margy MacMillan
Mount Royal University Library

Archaeological Dig
Ben Salter, CC-BY https://flic.kr/p/56obwm

Recently colleagues Brian Jackson and Madeleine Vanderwerff proposed a great article on Decoding the Disciplines as the basis for Mount Royal University (MRU) Library’s Instruction Roundtable discussion. ‘Decoding’ is an extension of the threshold concepts discussions in higher education, aimed at making tacit disciplinary knowledge and problem-solving processes more explicit and more teachable. The process might be described as an archaeological excavation of one’s automatic disciplinary ‘moves’, led by a questioner with the relentlessness of a two-year old. Question follows question to dig through layers of assumptions, bringing the almost subconscious decisions we make as part of everyday work into the light.

The approach seems promising for exploring library processes to make them clearer to students (how DO you know what terms to search with?) and/or new librarians (how DO you decide which materials to acquire? which committees to volunteer for? how severely to weed your filing cabinet?).

The same technique can be turned to digging into research processes. ‘Decoding’’ sessions are most commonly and much more productively led by someone outside the subject’s discipline with some experience in the technique. However no one who fit that bill was handy over the holidays, so I enlisted an internal cranial archaeologist:

How do you decide what to research?
I see something interesting going on.
Do you mean interesting to you or interesting to other people?
Both I hope. But it has to start as something I’m interested in.
What do you mean by interesting? Can you be more specific?
Sometimes it relates to something I’ve been thinking or reading about for a while, often it’s something counter to expectations. Sometimes it’s an idea to transfer something from one context to another.
What do you mean by ‘counter to expectations’?
If I observe students doing something that’s contrary to what the literature reports, or if the results in an article surprise me, or are different from what I’ve observed – or if something I expect to go well bombs completely, or something small I change in a class turns out to have big results…

At this point the conversation went in multiple, intranscribable directions, from how I know something contradicts the literature to how I know an activity has bombed or succeeded and almost every thought in between.

One of the insights that arose from doing just this brief exercise is how many of these ‘moves’ might be mysterious or difficult for first-year students when we ask them to “do some research”. How would they know what was ‘interesting’ and would they consider ‘interesting’ to themselves or their instructors? How could they build on, transfer or contradict ideas from the literature when they are just beginning to read it?

I encourage you as part of the New Year’s new beginnings to sift through automatic actions, dust off disciplinary assumptions, and get down to the foundational strata of your own processes.

The following questions all good starting points for solo pondering, but there may also be opportunities for deeper decoding with others on your campus. I’m hoping to join an MRU group this year.

How do YOU decide what to research?
How do you decide what questions to ask?
How do you decide what methods to use?
How do you decide what data to use?
How do you decide when to stop expanding the literature review to include one more small-but-extraordinarily-significant subconcept (if you know, please tell me)?
How do you choose what journal or conference to disseminate results in?
How do you decide which of the reviewers’ contradictory comments to address?

References
Middendorf, J., & Pace, D. (2004). Decoding the disciplines: A model for helping students learn disciplinary ways of thinking. New directions for teaching and learning, 2004(98), 1-12. (Available from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.499.4107&rep=rep1&type=pdf). This is an excellent entry point to the concept, but there’s quite a bit out there in the literature, spanning many disciplines.

Salter, B. (2008). Archaeological dig. Retrieved from https://flic.kr/p/56obwm CC-BY.

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.

Peer Reviewing as a Foundation of Research Culture (Or, how not to be that peer reviewer)

Posted on by

by Heidi LM Jacobs
Leddy Library, University of Windsor

When you talk to published scholars, everyone has a horror story to share about a bad peer reviewer. Stories can range from the amusing to the incredulous. Over the years, I’ve had some excellent peer reviewers: these are readers who take the time to read my work carefully, see what I’m trying to do, and then find ways to make my article better. My work is always better because of those reviewers and I am grateful for them. But I’ve also had reviewers who lean more toward hurtful or harmful rather than helpful. Here are some of the comments I’ve personally received in the past few years that would fall into that “less than helpful” category:
• “Maybe you could talk to a faculty member on your campus who could teach you how to do research.”
• “Writing down your own thoughts about teaching is not research. You can’t just make statements about what you think. You need to use surveys and data to make claims.”
• Entire review: “Uninteresting. Unpublishable. Reject.”
• “I know very little about this area and don’t work in the area writer is talking about. However, if the writer explored [an entirely different topic] it would be a much more interesting article.”
I should note that all of the responses above are from peer reviews of articles that went on to be published and well-received elsewhere; one even made a “best instruction article of the year” list. As someone who has been sending papers out for over twenty years, I’m able to shrug those awful reviews off, send my work out again, and move on. Increasingly, however, what bothers me most about getting these reviews is imagining what it would be like to be a brand new scholar sending her or his work out to reviewers and receiving feedback like the above. It takes courage and trust to send our work out and when we receive harmful or hurtful feedback, the will and courage to send it out again diminishes considerably.

Our goal as reviewers should be—above all—to be helpful: helpful to the writer by giving him or her concrete strategies to make their work better and helpful to the profession by encouraging, nurturing, and mentoring our peers to publish top-notch work.

By being “helpful,” I want to underscore that I do not mean that reviewers can only say positive things and avoid anything that points out limitations of the work. Not pointing out, for example, that the literature review needs work or that a paper lacks focus might seem “nicer” but is not helpful either to the writer if she or he wants to continue to publish certain kinds of articles or to the profession in whose best interests it is for us to produce strong, rigorous, well-crafted scholarship. That said, we need to be cognizant of the ways in which we give feedback and the impact of that feedback.

In recent months, I’ve talked to colleagues about what makes a good peer review. Here are a few things we have come up with:
• Respond to the article that the writer submitted and respond to the piece in front of you. Do not try to get authors to rewrite their article into what you would have written, explore a different topic, or use a different methodology.
• Remember you are responding to a person who was as nervous, anxious, and vulnerable as you were when you sent out your first article. Don’t hide behind anonymity and blind reviews. Never say anything in a blind review that you wouldn’t say if your name were known or you were talking to this author in person.
• Peer reviewing is not only about evaluating, it is also about mentoring, nurturing and building a community of strong scholars.
• Think about the peer review process as a teachable moment. Give writers concrete, specific feedback they can use to make their articles better. If the article lacks focus, say something like, “Your article could be better focused around a central argument. On page four, you write _____. This strikes me as a solid summary of your piece, perhaps you could organize the article around this central idea.” No one ever wants to be told they need to do more work but giving someone concrete suggestions on how to make improvements makes revisions seem much more do-able.
• Understand that, increasingly, library research uses diverse methods and approaches. It is true that quantitative and qualitative research methods have traditionally been the dominant mode of scholarship in our field but there is a place in our scholarly literature for all kinds of methods. Don’t reject a piece simply because of its theoretical or methodological approach. Our profession will be stronger if we embrace the diversity of methods and approaches.
• Use criteria that are both appropriate to the journal and to the method the author employs. If the author submitted a quantitative paper, by all means, examine their statistical methods and their findings. If the author submitted a theoretical piece, consider their ideas fully and the logic of their argument.
• A peer reviewer is not a copy editor. If you notice the article is full of awkward sentences and typos, it is not your job to go through and fully edit and proofread the piece. Rather, you should note to the author and to the journal editor that there are a significant number of typos and/or awkward sentences and that these must be addressed.
• Have and maintain high standards but find ways to help authors reach those high standards.
• Finally: generosity is key. Always find something good to say about a piece. Be generous with your expertise and your understanding of what makes an article great. Help others achieve excellence.

As librarians become more active in scholarship, more and more of us will be taking on roles as peer reviewers. In this development, we have an opportunity to build a strong, supportive network of reviewers who can help us build a stronger body of published scholarship and a strong research culture.

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.

Evidence Versus Intuition (Which is Really, de facto, Evidence)

Posted on by

by Gwen Schmidt
Outreach Coordinator, Saskatoon Public Library

I have never been a really great researcher. When I was in library school, our Research Methods class brought me to tears more often that I would have liked. Surveys and statistics and research papers, bah humbug.

What I am good at is patterns. Patterns in nature, patterns in process, patterns in human behaviour. A really intricate visual pattern will actually make the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I will be entranced. I have always been this way.

Lots of librarians find their way to this career of librarianship because they love books. Don’t get me wrong; I read so many books as a kid that the library was my second home. I still read a lot of books. But what attracted me to the library most is the patterns. Call numbers. Classification schemes. Interlibrary loan processes.

In my 20 years as a professional, I have become a person who “is good at deliverables”, as my last Manager would say. I can build a process that is lean, sensible, efficient, and understandable. I have also become a connoisseur of human behaviour. I enjoy watching the patterns, and I can get a lot done by anticipating how people will behave in certain contexts.

So, when someone says the phrase ‘evidence-based library and information practice’ to me, two things happen: first, I get anxious and hyperventilate about research papers, and surveys, and statistics, and then I stop myself and start to wonder if ‘evidence’ means different things to different people.

I would like to posit that intuition is as important as evidence in decision-making, and that intuition is, in fact, a type of evidence. If you pay close attention every day to the work that you do, your brain starts to see patterns in workflow, in policy interpretation, and in how humans interact with your work. This is the ‘ten thousand hours’ of attention or practice that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his book, Outliers – the attention and experience that make people really good at something.

Some libraries live by a self-imposed rule that all of their decisions need to be evidence-based, and this often means an environmental scan nation-wide, reading research papers, doing surveys, crunching statistics, and writing reports, all before that decision is made. I would suggest that sometimes there is not enough time to do all of this, and then intuition and years of paying attention need to come to the fore. Neither one is always a better approach, but both approaches need to be in your toolbox.

This is why you might do a bunch of quality formal research before you build a proposal, but you also need to run it past the people down on the ground who work with the processes every day. They can tell you whether or not your proposal is grounded in reality, and whether it will fly or not. They live and breathe where those processes will play out.

Do you need examples to know what I mean? Let’s get granular. At the public library, I have created a lot of programs that resonate with people, and a lot of these I developed using my gut instincts.

I have been programming for years, and, let me say, there have been a lot of duds. Every well-attended or poorly-attended program is a learning opportunity, though, I always say. An opportunity to pay attention. Why did it work? Why didn’t it work? Why do other librarians’ programs work? What are the goals I am trying to accomplish in the first place, and how did this program accomplish those goals or not? What did library patrons say they wanted for programs, but also what programs did they actually show up for? What little things annoy people? Make no mistake: the intuitive approach needs to be fairly rigorous if it is going to work.

If people come to a program, I call that ‘voting with their feet’. After a few years of paying close attention to human behaviour related to programming, and also paying close attention to the things that annoy all of us, the patterns started to emerge for me. Here’s what I know.

Teens are way more engaged in a program if you give them lots of responsibility and make them do all the work. This sounds kind of unbelievable, but it’s true. They do not need us to deliver them fully-formed content to enjoy passively – they can get that from TV or the Internet, and it will always be better than anything we can do. What they need is a challenge or an invitation to create. Since we started to program for teens on this concept, my library has had amazing success with the “Teen Poetry Celebration” (teens write poems), the “We Dare You Teen Summer Challenge” (a literacy scavenger hunt and activity challenge), “Teen Advisory Councils” (teen library club), and most recently the “Book Trailer Contest” (teens make video trailers for books). We get good attendance numbers, and the teens build amazing things.

Other groups of people have patterns too. Most people are too busy to get to a program on a particular date, but they will start to trust you if the program happens repeatedly in a predictable fashion and they don’t have to register. I used to run one-off programs, and sometimes people would come and sometimes they would not. At the same time, a weekly drop-in armchair travel program and weekly drop-in children’s storytimes across the system would attract 20-90 people each time. Why wouldn’t I set up important programs in a weekly, drop-in (no registration hurdles) format? So that’s what we did. We built a weekly drop-in program called “BabyTalk”. Weekly drop-in works for moms and babies, because there is no stress if they miss it, and they can choose to attend at the last minute. I currently run a weekly drop-in program called “iPad Drop-In”, for seniors. The seniors tend to come over and over again, and start to get to know each other. They will also let us teach them things that they would never come to a one-off to learn (e.g. How to Search the Library Catalogue). We get about sixteen people each week with very little effort. It is lean, sensible, efficient, and understandable. The only other thing we need to do is to make sure that we deliver a great program.

These are only a few of the intuitive rules that I live by in my job. Intuition based on watching seniors vote with their feet, watching moms and babies get in the class or not get in the class, teens participate or not participate.

With current developments in neuroplasticity research and the explosion in social media use, there are a ton of popular psychology books out about paying attention, mental focusing, and intuitive decision-making. So, is intuitive decision making a form of evidence-based librarianship? I think so, based on all the patterns I’ve seen.

(I am currently reading “Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence” by Daniel Goleman.)

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.

The Historical Connections Among Academic Status for Canadian University Librarians, Academic Freedom, and the Requirement for Research and Scholarly Work

Posted on by

by Frank Winter, Librarian Emeritus
University of Saskatchewan

You know how the oddest things start to niggle in your mind? As I followed from afar the revision of the University of Saskatchewan Library’s Standards for Promotion and Tenure triggered by changes in the most recent collective agreement to a system of three ranks from four, I began to obsess about the “and” in the core requirement for an appropriate body of “research and scholarly work.” Grammatically, “and” is a coordinate conjunction used to join two equal things. Does the “and” mean that research and scholarly work are somehow different, not the same? If they are not different, why do we keep using both? Perhaps it is nothing to worry about because we share an unvoiced understanding of what research and scholarly work mean and how they are used in promotion and tenure cases?

I began re-reading the literature of research and scholarly work in Canadian university librarianship to determine how these words were used. It appears to me that the words “research” and “scholarship” or “scholarly work” have been used interchangeably in seminal work by, for example, Fox (2007) and Schrader, Shiri, and Williamson (2012). Broadening my reading to include work by scholars in other disciplines I noticed the same lack of distinction. The terms were used in a manner that was, it seemed to me, more stylistically than semantically meaningful.

A useful discussion is contained in an article published by Ruth Neumann (1993). Her work describes findings from interviews of a group of senior Australian academic administrators from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds on their perceptions of “research and “scholarship.” The paper’s abstract reports that,

‘Research’ has three major attributes: new knowledge, enquiry and publication of results and views. ‘Scholarship’ was perceived to be part of the research process, providing the context for good research by adding the element of breadth to the depth of ‘research’. In addition, ‘scholarship’ describes the manner of pursuing a serious, sustained line of enquiry as well as the dissemination process. (Neumann, 97)

Neumann’s paper was published after Boyer’s widely discussed reframing the discourse of scholarship and research in his report entitled Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate (1990). Boyer’s report briefly documents the rise of research in the evolving mission of the American university and the effects of this rise on the system of American higher education. As is well known, he suggests reframing scholarship into four “separate but overlapping functions… the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship of integration; the scholarship of application; and the scholarship of teaching.” The scholarship of discovery is what is traditionally known as research. For Boyer, faculty must “first establish their credentials as researchers.” (Boyer, 16)

I began to investigate if I could determine how research and scholarly work came to enter the standards for promotion and tenure for Canadian university librarians. I was greatly assisted by papers by Leona Jacobs and Jennifer Dekker in a recently published collection entitled, In solidarity: Academic librarian labour activism and union participation in Canada (2014). It turns that that there is a long and interesting history that is intimately connected to Canadian university librarians’ quest for academic status.

The Canadian Association of College and Research Libraries, predecessor of the Canadian Association of College and Universities Libraries (CACUL) flagged research as an essential component of academic status for librarians at least as early as 1969. CACUL continued to advocate for academic status throughout the 1970s. During this time the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) became university librarians’ most effective advocate and ally (Dekker, 2014). This work came to fruition with the joint CAUT/CACUL Guidelines on academic status for university librarians (1976). The Guidelines use the phrase “research and scholarly work.”

CAUT/CACUL Guidelines Part I Appointments, Section F: Criteria for Permanent Appointment and Promotion Section 3: Other criteria to be included should include: (a) Research and scholarly work. (20)

Part IV Salaries and Benefits, Section C: Research and Travel Funds, 1 Librarians should have access to research and travel funds on the same basis as other academic staff, 2 Librarians should have access to released time for research projects mutually agreed upon by the librarian and the library administration. (21)

Propogated by the CAUT/CAUCUL Guidelines and CAUT’s model clauses, “research and scholarly work” starting appearing as a category in Canadian collective agreements and standards for promotion and permanent status (or tenure) from the 1970s onwards. This formulation, with the later addition of “creative work,” continues to the present day.

Even after considering the discussion above, does that “and” matter all that much? In a bracing paper entitled “Librarians as teachers, researchers and community members,” Meg Raven, Francesca Holyoke, and Karen Jensen write in their discussion of librarians as researchers,

The [CAUT] Model Clause [on Scholarly Activities of Academic Librarians] serves two purposes. The first is the inclusive understanding of ‘research, study, educational and other scholarly activities’ which ‘brings benefits to and enhances the reputation of the University, the profession and the individual librarian.’ This understanding permits setting aside the discourse on research as a type of scholarly activity: here the assumptions will be that scholarly activity and research are synonymous. (2014, 133)

Well, this position is certainly arguable but I would be concerned if it muddies the fact that some original published research is going to be required of individual librarians as one of the components of their promotion or tenure cases. Research and scholarly work have a long and important place in the history of the struggle for academic status for Canadian university librarians. Academic status and academic freedom have, over a much longer period of time, been understood to involve published research. For librarians, academic status, academic freedom, and research (and thus publication) have been inextricably connected for decades. You cannot have one without the other two.

Discussions such as those by Boyer and Neumann make it clear that, although they are intimately related, there is a meaningful distinction between how research and scholarship are understood and how they are used in promotion and tenure documents. And I know that there is also a growing grey literature of other documents associated with existing collective agreements and promotion and tenure standards explaining what is meant by each category and giving examples of what would be considered research and what would be considered scholarship.

It is clear also from the discussion above and reflected powerfully in an editorial by Scott Walter (2013) that university librarians are only one component of a dynamic university environment. Research and scholarly work in their overarching meanings, how they are understood for the varied disciplines on each campus, and the specific language of collective agreements and tenure and promotion standards have evolved over time and continue to evolve. There is, however, a bedrock understanding of the place of and the consequent requirement for research and scholarly work in the academy. In conclusion, then, I would argue that the “and” is meaningful. Both are required although they serve both overlapping yet distinctive functions.

References

Boyer, Ernest. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Canadian Association of College and Research Libraries/ Association canadienne des bibliotheques des college et d’universitie. (1969). Position classification and principles of academic status in Canadian university libraries. (Ottawa: Canadian Library Association).

Canadian Association of College and University Libraries and Canadian Association of University Teachers. 1976. Guidelines on academic status for university librarians. CAUT Bulletin ACPU 24(5) (March 1976) 19 – 22.

Dekker, Jennifer. (2014). Out of the “library ghetto:” An exploration of CAUT’s contributions to the achievements of academic librarians. In Jennifer Dekker and Mary Kandiuk, eds., In solidarity: Academic librarian labour activism and union participation in Canada. (Sacramento, CA.: Library Juice Press), 39 – 60.

Fox, David. (2007). The scholarship of Canadian research university librarians. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 2 (2). Available at https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/305.

Jacobs, Leona. (2014). Academic status for Canadian academic librarians: a brief history. In Jennifer Dekker and Mary Kandiuk, eds., In solidarity: Academic librarian labour activism and union participation in Canada. (Sacramento, CA.: Library Juice Press), 9 – 37.

Neumann, Ruth. (1993). Research and scholarship: Perceptions of senior academic administrators. Higher Education, 25, (2), 97-110; doi:0.1007/BF01384743.

Raven, Meg, Holyoke, Francesca, and Jensen, Karen. Librarians as teachers, researchers and community members. In Jennifer Dekker and Mary Kandiuk, eds., In solidarity: Academic librarian labour activism and union participation in Canada. (Sacramento, CA.: Library Juice Press), 127 – 149.

Schrader, Alvin M., Shiri, Ali, and Williamson, Vicki. (2012). Assessment of the research learning needs of University of Saskatchewan librarians: a case study. College & Research Libraries 73(2) 147-16;, doi: 10.5860/crl-235.

Walter, Scott. (2013) The “multihued palette” of academic librarianship. College and Research Libraries 74, 223-226; doi:10.5860/0740223.

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.

All a-Twitter: #librarian #discovery

Posted on by

by Tasha Maddison
Saskatchewan Polytechnic

I recently started as a #copyrightlibrarian @saskpolytechlib. With a new job comes change; from organizational culture to strategic direction to the educational mandate. What I had not anticipated was that the methods used to communicate with colleagues would be so dramatically different nor how I would learn about my new field and the ever evolving world of copyright.

In my past life, I lived and breathed by email. You might say it bordered on addiction as I was constantly checking my email; sick days, evenings, weekends, vacations, whenever. My experience @saskpolytechlib is that my colleagues don’t rely on email in the same manner. The communication options vary, perhaps because the campuses are distributed across the province. We use email, phone (seriously, people call one another), Microsoft Lync and Twitter. Lync was new to me, but so was the fact that others use Twitter to post their whereabouts, note meetings and conferences they are attending.

I have been on Twitter since participating in @CPD23 (the ’23 Things’ program). I was originally a reflective tweeter, completely defeating the purpose by tweeting several days after an event. At times, I just didn’t see the point. Too concise, too cryptic; anyone can follow you and you can follow anyone – that all seemed wrong, #notfacebook.

My experience with Twitter changed upon arriving @saskpolytech. I discovered individuals like @mgeist, @relkatz, @copyrightlaws, @howardknopf, among others who tweeted almost daily about important copyright issues like #TPP, @googlebooks #fairdealing, #happybirthday, #beatlemania, to name but a few.

My information seeking behaviour has also changed in regards to conferences, including those that I am not even attending. The University of Toronto recently hosted a one day conference on copyright. I followed the conference with great interest, #CopyCon2015. I then started following pretty much everyone who shared their thoughts throughout the day. Later in October, I attended #ceblip2015 and totally broke out of my shell. I always take comprehensive notes during conference presentations, #keener. Since attending my first library conference as a librarian, I have shared those notes on my blog, #lessonslearned. I occasionally tweeted about a conference but it was either reflective (see above) or it was to note my general excitement about an upcoming event. At #ceblip2015, I took notes on my iPad and tweeted about each presentation on my iPhone simultaneously. This enabled me to file away information for future review. I found like-minded librarians in the audience who I didn’t necessarily speak with in person, but started following on Twitter. I expanded my knowledge and my #social network.

As a presenter, I have always felt apprehensive at the thought of real-time comments via Twitter. I was always slightly scared to later check the audience’s reaction (or lack of) to my presentation. Recently, I have used Twitter to see what resonates with listeners. I am curious and delighted to see what the audience believes are my key takeaways. Twitter is useful at conferences to start a dialogue with presenters or audience members as they share their experiences. You can clarify points, share thoughts and impressions, as well as seek further information.

Three months into the job I don’t check my email as often outside of work hours. I do however frequent Twitter. I retweet quite a bit. I follow with great interest the evolving trends in scholarly communications, open access and the wonderful world of copyright.

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 to be an effective peer reviewer

Posted on by

by Kristin Hoffmann
Associate Librarian, University of Western Ontario

Peer reviewing is one of my favourite ways to participate in the librarian research community, because it combines two things that I find professionally rewarding and interesting: editing and mentoring.

In our academic writing and publishing system, peer review is a key part of the process, so it’s important that we do it well. However, there isn’t always a lot of guidance for those who are new reviewers. I’ve reviewed for some journals that have detailed reviewer guidelines, and for others that give reviewers a form to complete and not much else. I’ve reviewed book proposals that came with minimal direction, and I’ve reviewed conference proposals where the reviewer’s form was almost as long as the proposals themselves.

In all of those cases, reviewing was an individual activity. I’ve received almost no feedback on my reviewing, and I have had only occasional conversations with others about the process of reviewing.

In this post, I’ll give some suggestions for how to be an effective peer reviewer, in the hopes of helping novice reviewers and starting a conversation about reviewing:

  1. Think of peer reviewing as asynchronous, (usually) anonymous mentoring. A mentor is “an experienced and trusted advisor” (New Oxford American Dictionary), and a peer reviewer is an experienced and trusted advisor for someone else’s research. This is especially clear in open review processes, where the reviewer and author know each other’s identity, but it’s true of blind reviewing, too.
  1. Always find something positive to say about the piece you’re reviewing. Tell the author what worked well in their paper.
  1. Give specific, constructive suggestions. If you think the piece isn’t organized well, give the author ideas of how to re-structure it. If you think the analysis could be more robust, suggest additional aspects for the author to consider.
  1. When making substantive suggestions or pointing out flaws or concerns, do so in a way that shows you want the end result to be a better paper, and not that your goal is to assert your own superior research abilities. For example, “it would help if the Introduction included a stronger rationale for why this study is significant,” is better than, “this study is pointless and a monkey could have written the paper.”
  1. Remember that reviewers recommend, and editors decide. If you aren’t sure about your recommendation, tell the editor why you’re uncertain. They will look at your feedback along with that of the other reviewer(s) and make the best overall decision for the piece.
  1. Resist the urge to copy-edit. The editor needs you to comment on the submitted article as a whole, not the individual sentences. If the writing is hard to follow, or if the author consistently makes the same grammatical mistakes, then give a general comment about that. But remember that punctuation or sentence structure might change as a result of other, more substantial changes to the paper, so don’t put unnecessary work into copy-editing.

These are the main principles that I keep in mind as I’m writing reviews, but this isn’t an exhaustive list. I’d love to hear from Brain-Work readers: What other suggestions would you give to peer reviewers? What questions do you have about peer reviewing?

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.

Writing for Scholarly Publication: Mastering Basic Punctuation

Posted on by

by David Fox
Librarian Emeritus, University of Saskatchewan

WARNING: This article contains Oxford commas!

I confess to being a punctuation nerd – or, to use Lynne Truss’s slightly more dignified term, a punctuation stickler (1). I consider a well-punctuated paper to be akin to a fine work of art. Now, I realize that Brain-Work followers are superior in every way, and so I apologize in advance if some may feel that they already know it all when it comes to punctuation. If you don’t need this column, gentle reader, then I suspect you know someone who does.

Why is punctuation important? Good punctuation, usually without our realizing it, helps to convey meaning, promote understanding, and allows a piece of text to be read quickly and efficiently. Bad punctuation does the opposite. Any reputable scholarly journal will want to adhere to accepted standards of punctuation. Authors may help speed up the processing of their manuscripts by paying careful attention to their punctuation.

One would think that most librarians who aspire to be writers have already mastered the art of basic punctuation. However, over four years as Editor-in-Chief at Partnership, I found that almost all manuscripts submitted to the journal needed a large number of punctuation corrections. Some of these corrections were due to minor lapses of attention, but in many cases it was obvious that the writer was making the same error consistently, demonstrating a lack of awareness of basic punctuation rules.

Some punctuation practices are well established. Others are optional and subject to the author’s or editor’s preference. This blog post will deal with the basics of commas and semi colons: two of the most commonly misused punctuation symbols.

The comma

(One of the clearest and most concise punctuation guides I’ve found on the Web is the University of Sussex Guide to Punctuation by Larry Trask. According to Trask, “There are four types of comma: the listing comma, the joining comma, the gapping comma and bracketing commas” (Summary of Commas).

A listing comma, as the name implies, separates words, phrases, or clauses in series.

Edwin has published many articles in journals, books, and conference proceedings.

The most common pitfalls involve surveys, the analysis of qualitative data, and the omission of human ethics permissions.

A joining comma combines two independent clauses and is followed by one of the connecting words: and, or, but, yet or while.

The journal accepts online submissions in MS Word format, and authors must register on the system in order to submit.

This may seem an obvious point, but it is a significant one.

A gapping comma can be used to avoid repetition of words that have already occurred in a sentence.

It was obvious that the writer was making the same error consistently, demonstrating a lack of awareness of basic punctuation rules.

instead of

It was obvious that the writer was making the same error consistently; it was obvious that the writer was demonstrating a lack of awareness of basic punctuation rules.

Bracketing commas usually come in pairs. They set off a weak interruption which could be removed from the sentence without changing its meaning substantially. A single bracketing comma can also appear at the beginning or end of a sentence.

If you don’t need this column, gentle reader, then I suspect you know someone who does.

Good punctuation, usually without our realizing it, helps to convey meaning.

Amanda exercised admirable self-control, for the most part.

The semi-colon
Semi-colons are easy. They have only two main uses:
1) To join two independent clauses without the use of a coordinating conjunction:

Errors in methodology will almost certainly undermine the results of a research study; serious flaws may render a manuscript unpublishable.

NOTE, however –
Three or more independent clauses should be joined using commas.

Originally the plantations were rather small, there were fewer slaves than colonists, and social discrimination was less harsh than in the eighteenth century (MLA 86).

(This is an example of the use of the listing comma.)

2) To separate items in a series when one or more of those items contain commas:

The library strategic plan contains measures to promote tenure and performance standards; reimbursement for research expenses, research days, and release time; development of research competencies, lecture series, and workshops; and measures to disseminate the research of librarians.

A common mistake with semi-colons is to use them where a colon should be used instead. A colon is meant to indicate that what comes next is an elaboration of what came before.

Correct: It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak and another to hear.

Incorrect: It takes two to speak the truth; one to speak and another to hear.

(A semi-colon joins two independent clauses. In the incorrect example above “one to speak and another to hear” is a sentence fragment, not an independent clause.)

Another mistake is to use a semi-colon where a comma would suffice.

Incorrect: The library strategic plan contains measures to promote tenure and performance standards; reimbursement for research expenses; development of research competencies; and measures to disseminate the research of librarians.

Correct: The library strategic plan contains measures to promote tenure and performance standards, reimbursement for research expenses, development of research competencies, and measures to disseminate the research of librarians.

(In the above example, semi-colons are not necessary as the items in series do not themselves contain commas.)

The serial or “Oxford” comma
Authorities differ concerning the use of a comma preceding “and” or “or” before the final item in a list. I have used serial commas throughout this article.

Edwin has published many articles in journals, books, and conference proceedings.

The most common pitfalls involve surveys, the analysis of qualitative data, and the omission of human ethics permissions.

However, typical British practice is to omit the final comma.

Hungarian is spoken in Hungary, in western Rumania, in northern Serbia and in parts of Austria and Slovakia. (Trask)

Personally, I would prefer a comma after “Serbia” in this sentence.

Those who argue against the serial comma claim that it is redundant and contrary to conventional practice. They reason that one shouldn’t need both a comma and a conjunction. Others maintain that consistent use of serial commas helps to avoid ambiguity.

Regardless of one’s opinion on this controversy, a number of leading writers’ manuals, including The MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, the Chicago Manual of Style, and the Oxford Style Manual all recommend use of the serial comma (Serial comma). With such widespread endorsement, it makes sense to adopt the practice of using serial commas – especially when writing for a journal that uses any of these major style guides.

In Conclusion
There are four standard ways to join two independent clauses:
1) Use a semi-colon

Information literacy is essential for developing critical thinking; it is also important for cultivating lifelong learning.

2) Use a comma and a conjunction

Information literacy is essential for developing critical thinking, and it is also important for cultivating lifelong learning.

3) Use a main clause and dependent clause joined by a conjunction

Information literacy is essential for developing critical thinking and is also important for cultivating lifelong learning.

(In this example, “Information literacy” is the subject of both clauses. A comma is not required before the conjunction “and”.)

4) Use two separate sentences

Information literacy is essential for developing critical thinking. It is also important for cultivating lifelong learning.

I would guess that nearly half of the punctuation corrections I have made as an editor involve misuse of options 1, 2, or 3 above. “What’s the big deal?” you might say. It matters because reputable journals care about these small details; the more attention an editor needs to give to the mechanics of a paper, the less time there may be to consider its actual content. This is not rocket science. It’s just as easy to do it right as to do it wrong. Unleash your inner stickler!

Works Cited

MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, 3rd ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008. Print.

Serial comma. Wikipedia. 16 Oct. 2015. Web. 25 Oct. 2015.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma>

Trask, Larry. Guide to Punctuation. University of Sussex, 1997. Web. 25 Oct. 2015.
<http://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/>

Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves. New York: Gotham Books, 2003. Print.

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.

EBLIP and Public Librarians: A call to action!

Posted on by

by Pam Ryan
Director, Collections & Technology at Edmonton Public Library
pryan@epl.ca / Twitter: @pamryan

As a former academic librarian, I’m often asked what the biggest differences are between public and academic libraries and librarianship. My short answer is usually something about having only worked for one (each excellent and probably non-standard) example of each so it’s difficult to know if the differences I’ve experienced are more organizational or sectoral. However, an increasingly concerning difference is the relationship that public librarians have with the research and evidence base of our profession.

Low public librarian participation in research and publication is not a new phenomenon nor is the small overall percentage of LIS research articles about public library practice. Research in 2005 showed that over a four year period just 3% of article authors in North American LIS journals were employed in public libraries. Even in Public Library Quarterly, only 14% of the authors were public librarians. An earlier study in 2001 showed that only 7% of LIS research articles were public library orientedi.

The recommendations in the 2014 Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel report on Canada’s libraries call for increased sharing of research and statistics to support evidence-based practice in public libraries. The recommendations specifically include a call to action for public libraries to make their work visible by posting evidence-based studies on library websites for the benefit of the entire library community, in addition to continuing to share statistical data freely with CULC and other organizationsii.

These recommendations follow from the fact that public libraries are increasingly called upon to show their value and prove their impact yet we are not actively in charge of telling our own story by sharing our organization practice findings or enlisting our librarians to share their work outside of internal operational functions. We need to heed this call to action both as organizations and as individual professionals. I am keenly aware of all of the good program evaluation and assessment work that goes on in public libraries to inform services and innovation yet it is too frequently not taken the step further, to openly available publication, to build our evidence-base, inform our collective practice, and be available to tell our stories.

Of particular note in this call to action is to openly and freely post this work of our public libraries and librarians. A very distinct and frustrating difference between academic and public librarianship is access to the literature behind paywalls. I am well-aware of how frequently I beg sharing of PDF articles of academic colleagues and also, embarrassingly, how less frequently I dip into the literature because access to it isn’t as seamless as it was when I was an academic librarian. Open Access publishing options for our own literature needs a much higher profile than it currently has and is something our entire sector needs to work on.

Where to start? As examples, Edmonton Public Library (EPL) recognizes that research and its dissemination are integral to being innovative. EPL provides two recent librarian graduates from the University of Alberta’s School of Library and Information Studies with one year research internships. These new professional librarians conduct research that is invaluable to EPL’s future planning. Recent assignments on digital public spaces and open data; digital discovery and access; 21st century library spaces; and analyzing the nature and types of questions received at service desks have also included the expectation of openly sharing internal reportsiii via the EPL website, as well as publication in Open Access forumsiv v vi vii. Librarians working on innovative projects are also encouraged to share their practice and findings openlyviii ix. Providing the encouragement, support, time, and expectation that sharing need be an integrated part of public librarian practice is something all libraries can foster. We need to collectively take responsibility for changing public library culture and take ownership of telling our own stories and sharing our evidence.
________________________________________________________________
iRyan, Pam. 2012. EBLIP and Public Libraries. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. Vol 7:1. https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/16557/13672

iiDemers, Patricia (chair), Guylaine Beaudry, Pamela Bjornson, Michael Carroll, Carol Couture, Charlotte Gray, Judith Hare, Ernie Ingles, Eric Ketelaar, Gerald McMaster, Ken Roberts. (2014). Expert Panel Report on The Future Now: Canada’s Libraries, Archives, and Public Memory. Royal Society of Canada, Ottawa, ON. Pg. 120. https://rsc-src.ca/sites/default/files/pdf/L%26A_Report_EN_FINAL_Web.pdf

iiiPublications. Edmonton Public Library. http://www.epl.ca/about-epl/news/publications

ivArnason, Holly Kristin and Louise Reimer. 2012. Analyzing Public Library Service Interactions to Improve Public Library Customer Service and Technology Systems. EBLIP and Public Libraries. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. Vol 7:1. https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/11654

vWortman, Beth. 2012. What Are They Doing and What Do They Want: The Library Spaces Customer Survey at Edmonton Public Library. Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research. Vol 7:2. https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/1967/2633#.Vh1gAU3lu70

viDaSilva, Allison. 2014. Enriching Discovery Layers: A Product Comparison of Content Enrichment Services Syndetic Solutions and Content Café 2. Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research. Vol 9:2. https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/2816#.Vh1p4U3lu70

viiCarruthers, Alex. 2014. Open Data Day Hackathon 2014 at Edmonton Public Library. Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research. Vol 9:2. https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/3121#.Vh1f3U3lu70

viiiHaug, Carla. 2014. Here’s How We Did It: The Story of the EPL Makerspace. Felicter. Vol 60:1. http://www.cla.ca/feliciter/2014/1/mobile/

ixCarruthers, Alex. 2015. Edmonton Public Library’s First Digital Public Space. The Library as Incubator Project. January 20, 2015: http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=15914

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.

Some Musings on Metrics

Posted on by

by Marjorie Mitchell
Librarian, Learning and Research Services
UBC Okanagan Library

As the first few weeks of the new academic year wrap up in Canada, academic librarians can now shift their focus from orienting new students back to supporting faculty and graduate students, especially research focused support. Many researchers are preparing grant funding applications for the fall round of deadlines and the systems for assessing these applications is becoming ever more complex.

As research funding becomes a global competition, how are funders to decide which research deserves their support?

Over the past few years, global discussions regarding various metrics determining research impact have increased. Within their institutional research communications, administrators use impact metrics to compare their institutions to others, either nationally or internationally. Within their funding applications, researchers use impact factors to indicate the importance and worthiness of their research. One real appeal of metrics is that they are tangible, objective measures of the real use of a product of scholarly research. Or are they?

Since the 1950s, bibliographic citation databases have been in continuous development and have formed a broad base for different publication metrics, especially article and journal metrics. These metrics have not been without issues, not the least of which is the variation in citation patterns between disciplines and the potential for researchers to attempt to “play” the system to make it appear that their research has had greater impact than it actually has had.

Coined in 2010 by Priem, “alternative metrics” measure the impact of newer, non-traditional forms of scholarship published and discussed outside academic journals or conference proceedings. Digital humanities, community-involved research, and emerging forms of scholarship prove challenging for grant funding bodies and administrators to assess. Interestingly, books have neither been extensively covered in the bibliographic citation databases nor have been the subject of computerized citation analysis to the same degree as journal articles or new, non-traditional forms of scholarly publications. All of these instances are fertile ground for conversations led by librarians.

Does this matter?

Institutionally, librarians can help both researchers and administrators to gain a fuller understanding of the uses, and potential pitfalls from misuse, of metrics of all varieties. The broader the understanding of the subtleties of metrics, the less likely they are to be misunderstood and/or misrepresented. Ultimately, this greater understanding could form the basis for a more balanced and equitable story of research happening within our universities.

Priem, J., & Hemminger, B. (2010). Scientometrics 2.0: New metrics of scholarly impact on the social Web. First Monday, 15(7). Retrieved September 21, 2015, from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2874/2570

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.