Are Students Succeeding with a Library Credit Course? C-EBLIP Journal Club, October 6, 2014

Posted on by

by Rachel Sarjeant-Jenkins
Client Services, University Library, University of Saskatchewan

I recently had the opportunity to lead our C-EBLIP Journal Club in a discussion of Jean Marie Cook’s article “A library credit course and student success rates: A longitudinal study” in College & Research Libraries 75, no. 3 (2014) (available at http://crl.acrl.org/content/75/3/272.full.pdf+html). This article had been sitting on my desk for a few months waiting for that magical moment when I found the time to read it thoroughly. Then came my turn to host journal club. What a perfect opportunity to finally delve into Cook’s article! And it couldn`t have come at a better time in light of our library’s focus on developing a programmatic approach to library instruction and the broader teaching and learning environment in which academic libraries currently find themselves.

Following some ‘proper’ journal club discussion about the article’s methodology and findings, Cook’s article proved a wonderful catalyst for a conversation about library instruction at our institution. Initially we were simply envious of Cook’s situation, where a library-focused course is one of the areas within her institution’s priorities. But then the questions started.

• Is there value in having a stand-alone library course or is it better to have instruction firmly embedded or integrated into academic program courses? (Of course, this question did not mean we ever stopped desiring that institutional commitment to information literacy — who would!?)
• How do you assess student learning? And, more importantly, how do you gauge the actual ongoing use of that learning by students?

We also talked about library value. The impetus for Cook’s work was institutional interest in ROI; the result was her quantitative research project.
• How, we asked, can qualitative data be used to support (and enhance) quantitative data when demonstrating library value to the parent institution?
So many questions, and only a lunchtime to discuss.

Not surprisingly, our hour just wasn’t enough. What that hour did do, however, was get us thinking. We talked about the known information literacy courses on campus and learned about pockets of embedded instruction by our librarians that we were completely unaware of. We had a lively debate about quantitative and qualitative research and the benefits of each. And of course we talked about assessment, not only that we need to do more of it and do it more consistently, but also the importance of knowing what we are trying to assess and therefore when we want to assess it.

Our journal club hour got me excited and primed for the next steps in developing our library’s programmatic approach to instruction. Cook’s article, and the energetic conversation it inspired, was an excellent beginning.

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.

On biting off a little more than you can chew

Posted on by

by Lorie Kloda
Assessment Librarian, McGill University

Advice requested: Currently writing two manuscripts, one from a sabbatical that ended two years ago, and another from a recently completed research study. Also, data analysis from a third project is almost complete, and just began data collection on a fourth. Grant application for a follow-up study due in a month. Recently attended a conference and connected with a stellar researcher who wants to collaborate on nation-wide survey in an emerging area. Is a sixth research project one too many? Asking for a friend.

Sound familiar? Or perhaps unimaginable? For some, once the research bug hits, it can be hard to stop. For others, the idea of working on multiple research projects seems impossible. I find myself in the former group, always saying yes to new opportunities, starting a new research study before the current project is wrapped up. Sometimes I stop and ask myself, why am I doing this? Am I not just adding to already busy workload? Can I really do good quality research if I am trying to manage several vastly different projects simultaneously?

I decided that, yes, for me, having multiple research projects on the go is possible, and even ideal. I will try to present the case for taking on as much as (or, maybe a little more than) you can handle, when it comes to research.

Learn from your collaborators. Working on research with colleagues, including fellow librarians and other researchers, from within or outside your organization, can lead to a lot of new knowledge and skills. It’s also an added opportunity to learn how to work with different teams, sometimes in very different time zones. You can use the knowledge from one project to inform another.

Learn from, and about, yourself. Different stages of the research process require different abilities. Working on a project solo, or being responsible for an aspect of the research allows you to discover how you work best – be it that you prefer writing in a quiet, dark room late at night, or that you do, in fact, like making graphs and tables. You can then take this knowledge into other aspects of your work, and other research projects.

Experience with different methods and different topics. The more projects you get to work on, the more experience you obtain with different methods, and on different topics. This guarantees that you will not only increase your expertise over time, but that you will not likely get bored.

Contribute to the evidence base. Some individuals lament the dearth of high quality research in librarianship. If research is as important for practice as we claim, then we need to make the time to do the research that could inform our practice. As suggested by Pam Ryan and Denise Koufogiannakis in Librarianship and the Culture of Busy, “If something is important to you, make time for it.” Many research ideas arise because they are timely ¬– to the profession, not to your schedule.

All of the reasons above are good reasons to conduct research. But why get involved with multiple projects with overlapping timelines?

Research takes a long time. Anyone who has conducted research knows that there are times where the project stalls or is delayed: waiting for research ethics board approval, waiting for responses to a survey, waiting for a draft manuscript to be returned by a co-author. And, some stages of the research can be more appealing than others. When managing multiple projects, it is more likely that some aspect with engage you at a given moment. Use this momentum to push you in your other research projects. Because some research can take a lot a long time to complete, shorter projects can also provide a rewarding boost to one’s sense of accomplishment. Beginning a research study is a daunting undertaking, but being able to experience different stages of the research process at the same time can be stimulating.

In the grand scheme of things, juggling several research projects may not be the best strategy for everyone. But for some, it may be just the thing to get motivated. If you’ve had an idea bubbling away on the back burner for some time, or if you’ve been tempted by a colleague’s invitation to collaborate but always thought you should wait until that older project is finished, I would encourage you to reconsider.

My “friend” is still accepting advice, by the way.

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.

C-EBLIP Fall Symposium: Librarians as Researchers – A Synopsis

Posted on by

by Virginia Wilson
Director, Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (C-EBLIP)

On Wednesday, October 15, 2014, the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice at the University Library, University of Saskatchewan, held its very first Fall Symposium with the theme of Librarians as Researchers.

Wow, I say! The speakers were inspiring, the food was excellent, the door prizes were fun, and the atmosphere was convivial. Let me give you quick synopsis of the day.

Registration opened at 8am with Carisa and Crystal checking everyone in and making sure everyone had what they needed, including an entry form for the door prize draws. At 8:45, I welcomed participants to the longest room ever (the Marquis Private Dining Room on the U of S Campus is a long rectangular space that turned out to work well for our group with plenty of room for the food and coffee table at the back). I was pleased to be able to introduce the Fall Symposium’s keynote speaker, Margy MacMillan from Mount Royal University, who spoke about the interactions between the what and the why of research. You can check out the keynote abstract and Margy’s bio right here. Margy’s talk involved some interactive work as we thought about and shared our first research questions as well as our most memorable research questions.

IMG_1025resizeLongRoom

The day’s single-track session stream was a good format for this one-day symposium. Presenters had 20 minutes to speak and entertain questions. Session topics were broad and interesting, and the full range of abstracts can be found here. A feature of the symposium was ample time for connecting and networking. The morning break, lunch, afternoon break, and post-symposium social offered a chance for participants to talk and share amidst a plethora of food. My motto is: better too much than not enough. Although from my perspective, the food seemed just right! Ask any attendee about the granola bars.

After the sessions were finished and the door prizes were awarded (door prizes donated by the U of S Campus Computer Store, U of S Bookstore, University Library, and McNally Robinson Booksellers) symposium-goers retired to the University Club for a restorative beverage and even more food. It was an excellent wind-down to a wonderful day.

I’ve got a few thank yous to extend, so here we go. Thank you to:

  • Our 54 symposium attendees from BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and the US. It was wonderful to meet and see you all!
  • Keynote Margy MacMillan and all of our session presenters: fabulous job!
  • C-EBLIP Fall Symposium Planning Committee who joined me in constructing this caper: Carolyn Pytlyk, Charlene Sorensen, and Rachel Sarjeant-Jenkins
  • Session Facilitators: Carolyn Pytlyk, DeDe Dawson, Charlene Sorensen, Shannon Lucky
  • Registration and Set-up: Carisa Polischuk and Crystal Hampson
  • Photographer: David Bindle
  • Also to Finn’s Irish Pub, where we held the CARL LRI social on the evening of Oct. 14, Marquis Culinary Services, eMAP, FMD, Dean Vicki Williamson and the University Library Dean’s Office, C-EBLIP Members, and the University Club. (I hope I haven’t missed anyone!)

You can access the Storify of the day’s tweets here: https://storify.com/VirginiaPrimary/c-eblip-fall-symposium-librarians-as-researchers

Let’s do it again next year, okay?

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.

Traditionalists, Progressives and the Gone-Away World

Posted on by

by Frank Winter, Librarian Emeritus
University Library, University of Saskatchewan

The question of what the role and mission of academic libraries and librarians should be has occupied my attention for a long time. My answers have evolved over time as circumstances have evolved. Underlying my answers, however, is my belief that every important factor in the evolving mission and role of university libraries is exogenous. We have no meaningful control or influence over the ecosystem of scholarly communication where Elsevier and its ilk and Google are the dominant players. In the Canadian context, the librarians responsible for data services, GIS services, and government documents saw their respective areas of responsibility restructure almost unrecognizably in real time over 3 years because of the exogenous forces of Open government information, Open data and Open GIS. Government goals for universities and university mission statements are developed without input from libraries. We react and try to shape these factors as best we can to meet our own values and goals based on the mission of the Library within the University.

Successfully engaging with these factors requires a clear understanding of how we interpret them and act on those interpretations. In this context, the rise to prominence of the work of cognitive scientists with respect to decision-making is important. In his Presidential Address at the 2013 annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (published as “Policy, politics and political science,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 46(4), 751-772. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S000842391300084X) Dr. Michael Atkinson identified numerous decision-making pitfalls including framing, prospect theory, status quo bias, loss aversion, overconfidence bias, confirmation bias, my-side bias and recency bias. These pitfalls ought, in his opinion, to be much more formally incorporated into the theoretical underpinning of policy studies and political science. Atkinson notes, “In addition, we draw conclusions based on personally evocative but statistically dubious evidence.” As in policy studies, so in librarianship, I suggest. I would like to focus on another of these pitfalls – mindsets, the mental models of how the world ought to run – that each of us carries in our head.

At the present time, my thinking has focused on two different mindsets: the Traditionalist and the Progressive. Traditionalists are those librarians who believe that the overarching importance of the Library in the University is its local collection (consisting predominantly of published, almost exclusively English-language, secondary academic monographic literature, balanced and representative, and assembled for current and future scholars) and the services that support that local collection.

Progressives are those librarians who view “the Library” and its contributions to the host institution as a bundle of services of which the local collection (a subset of the collective collection) is one of the services.

When discussions arise that challenge a Traditionalist’s mindset, my experience is that evidence-based conclusions and proposals arising from those conclusions are often met with a combination of normative responses (“well, even if that is accurate it shouldn’t be given any weight given on this, that, or the other principle”) and heuristic, anecdotal empiricism (“I know my faculty members”) which are challenging to engage with.

As always, however, things are not black and white. It is quite possible, for example, that life science liaison librarians, for example, are Progressives by this definition and meet the needs for their users very well while humanities liaison librarians are predominantly Traditionalists because the relevant faculty members and graduate student users are traditionalists themselves. There is nothing wrong with that and this arguably is the correct approach to take. So perhaps, at a minimum, more precision and segmentation is needed when discussing options, not just referring to an undifferentiated lump called “the Library.”

But the heading that I now use when thinking about Traditionalist and Progessive mindsets is “the Gone-Away World.” This phrase is taken from the title of a very funny/ sad 2008 science fiction novel by Nick Harkaway. You can read the book yourself but in essence the title refers to a fearsome weapon (called the Go-Away weapon) developed to bring an end to an endless, ugly war between evenly-matched opponents. The weapon – some sort of entropy device – would cause the enemy to just “go away” by, as far as I could understand this narrative MacGuffin, causing information to decohere in the objects it is aimed at. Well, unintended consequences and all that (I think the author intended to show how the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the law of conservation of matter interacted in unexpected ways) but half the book deals with the results of deploying this weapon – the Gone-Away World.

I think, getting to the point, is that our Traditionalists are living (mostly) in a Gone-Away World. The traditional rationale for and way of delivering local collection-based services, traditional reference, traditional information literacy and so on has, for the most part, gone away but they act as if it were still in existence or perhaps are expecting a cyclical return to the status quo ante. Meanwhile, the Canadian tri-council granting agencies, planning processes from the university-wide to the local unit level, and professional bodies such as CARL, OCLC, and Ithaka S+R, among many others, have tried to explain why that world is no more and what roles libraries and librarians might play in the evolving world.

Re-reading these paragraphs I realize that I sound rather preachy. I have no reason to expect that I am any more insightful than any other person. There are lots of other opinions out there from some very informed, very engaged librarians and others who are engaged with issues of the library in the communities that they serve who see the world differently. But you can see some of this impact of these changes in many support staff positions lost over the past few years at MPOW. Many were dealing with physical stuff – stuff that has just Gone-Away. If the local collection of printed scholarly books by-and-large just Goes-Away as a useful and important service, what choice will we have as university libraries and university librarians but to adapt? Evidence-based solutions will be increasingly necessary for good decisions in this environment.

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.

Oh, the Humanities: A Literature Scholar Turned Librarian Ponders the Art and Science of Librarianship

Posted on by

by Heidi LM Jacobs
Leddy Library, University of Windsor

When librarians with humanities backgrounds have an opportunity to meet and talk, I am struck by how we seem to cling to each other, relieved and grateful to have someone to talk with who understands us. It also strikes me as strange that while there are many, many academic librarians with backgrounds in the humanities, we feel so alone within LIS.

It seems unchallengeable that LIS is a social science: indeed it is and there is nothing at all wrong with this. Yet I often wonder what would happen if we thought about librarianship as a humanities endeavor, bringing together, as Denise Koufogiannakis writes, “the art and science of our profession”:

“We need to embrace both the science and the art of evidence based practice — otherwise, we will overlook important elements of the whole situation that practitioners work within. Doing so is not neat and tidy, but does that really matter? LIS is a social science, and the “social” implies “messy” because people and real-life situations are not easily controlled. The art of our craft allows us to embrace the messy situation, find ways to be creative, put our professional judgments to use and find the best solutions to meet the needs of individual users by applying the best of what we find in the research literature together with the best of what we know is likely to help this person.” (49)

I’m not at all disagreeing with Denise and the countless others who have called LIS a social science, but I do want to raise this question: what would happen if we called LIS a humanities subject? How would our ideas of evidence change? What kinds of evidence would we use? What kinds of evidence would inform the questions that we ask? Our decisions? Our profession?

In 2013, John Horgan published an interesting blog post on the Scientific American site called “Why Study Humanities? What I tell Engineering Freshman.” This post raises ideas that pick up on points I made in my last blog post and helps me think more fully about what the humanities could offer librarianship in terms of both research and practice.

Horgan writes, “We live in a world increasingly dominated by science. And that’s fine. I became a science writer because I think science is the most exciting, dynamic, consequential part of human culture, and I wanted to be a part of that.”

“But,” he goes on to argue, that “it is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you’re given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, “This is how things are.” They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt, skepticism.”

“The humanities,” Horgan tells his students, “are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. . . The humanities are more about questions than answers, and we’re going to wrestle with some ridiculously big questions in this class.”

I’m particularly drawn to Horgan telling his students that they are going to “wrestle with some ridiculously big questions.” It seems to me that if we focus our research and our inquiry into things that we can count or quantify or that we can collect a particular kind of evidence about, then we’re scaling back the questions we can ask about our practice and our profession.

Literature students are trained to ask questions, look for fissures in logic, notice how meaning can hang on a single word or the placement of a comma. We look for the silences and gaps that reveal significant things through omission or silences. We are taught to question continuously. We are taught that never arriving at an answer is perfectly fine as the journey of asking questions is not only valid, it’s vital. In short, we are taught that things that you cannot count do count.

As an information literacy librarian, I continually bring questions to my students: where is this information coming from? Who wrote it? Who is presenting or sponsoring this information? Who is benefitting from having this particular kind of information published? What kinds of information aren’t we finding, why might that be? While we cannot always answer these questions definitively or answer them without a qualifier like “it depends,” it is imperative that we ask these questions of them and with them.

I want our profession to embody what we teach our students about information: doubt it, question it, be skeptical, be critical. It is not that I am against quantifiable evidence but I want to ensure we are using it carefully and critically and not complacently. And also that we don’t exclude other kinds of evidence that – though it cannot be counted – still counts.

Horgan concludes his essay arguing the point of the humanities is that they “keep us from being trapped by our own desire for certainty.” Librarianship is at a point where we are bombarded by “some ridiculously big questions” and if we limit our inquiries to what we can answer, prove, quantify, and chart, we’re doing ourselves and our profession a disservice.

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.

Counting What You Cannot Count Or, A Literature Scholar Turned Librarian Ponders the Meaning of Evidence

Posted on by

by Heidi LM Jacobs
Leddy Library, University of Windsor

The first sentence I wrote for this blog post was this: “Perhaps this isn’t the best way to start a blog post for C-EBLIP but I have a confession to make: I am deeply suspicious of evidence.” The more I wrote, the more I realized that everyone is (or should be) deeply suspicious of evidence. We need to think about it carefully and critically and ask the difficult questions of it. The more I wrote about my distrust of evidence, the more I realized that it wasn’t evidence per se that gave me pause, but how evidence is generally defined and approached in LIS.

I think what I really meant when I said “I am deeply suspicious of evidence” is that I am deeply suspicious of numbers and the concept of “indisputable facts.” There are always, I think, more sides to the story than numbers can convey and when I see charts, figures, and graphs, I am always looking for the other parts of the story, the absent narratives, the “random dots,” the findings off the grid. What are the things these numbers aren’t telling us?

My feelings toward evidence could easily be explained by the fact that I am a literature scholar turned information literacy librarian. In both fields, we are trained to look at “evidence” in particular ways. My next blog post will consider what humanities-based modes of thinking could contribute to evidence based library and information practice (EBLIP) but in this post I’d like to pick up something that Denise Koufogiannakis (2013) raised in her EBLIP7 keynote. She observed that “EBLIP’s focus to date has been on research evidence and how to read and understand research better. This is a good thing (I certainly do not want to diminish the importance of the work that has been done in this respect)–but it is not the only thing–and we must begin to explore other types of evidence” (9).

Like Denise, I do not want to diminish the importance of the work being done in EBLIP and my questions about EBLIP are not to challenge or undermine the work done in this area. Rather, in this blog post, I want to respond to what I read as an invitation from Denise to “explore other types of evidence.” What other evidence types might there be? And what might these other types of evidence contribute to EBLIP, to research, and to librarianship? In this and my next blog post, I will be pondering some of these issues and invite others to join me in thinking through these ideas.

As I read in the field of EBLIP, I often wonder where librarians like me, with ties to the humanities, might fit in with evidence-based work. But as I write this, I pause because it’s not that my research, practice, teaching, and thinking aren’t informed by evidence—it’s just that the kind of evidence I summon, trust, and use is not easily translated into what usually constitutes “evidence,” formally and informally. Perhaps I am the kind of librarian who Denise (2012) describes here: “The current model may be alienating some librarians who feel that the forms of evidence they are using are not being recognized as important” (6). One cannot quantify theoretical thoughts or chart reflective practice; some researchers might view this kind of evidence as soft at best, inadmissible at worst.

For a while I thought it might make sense, as the song says, for me and EBLIP to call the whole thing off. However, the more I think about EBLIP the more I think there might be something worth considering. I realize that it’s not that I distrust evidence: I am skeptical of a certain kind of evidence. Or, phrased another way, I trust a different kind of evidence, a kind of evidence I don’t often see reflected in EBLIP.

My argument is not that EBLIP needs to change so that those of us with humanities backgrounds and humanities ways of thinking feel personally included or intellectually welcome in EBLIP endeavours. My argument is, instead, that humanities ways of thinking about evidence could offer EBLIP perspectives and approaches that might take us in new directions in our thinking, research, scholarship, and practice.

For those of us working with students and information literacy, we know that we can attempt to understand their experiences quantitatively or explore their thoughts and habits qualitatively. But again, to my mind, these kinds of studies are only part of the information literacy story: findings need to be contextualized, studies problematized, evidence questioned, “random dots” explored, premises and practices reflected upon and theorized. When we consider students—or any segment of user communities—in library scholarship we need to remember that we are studying complex, changeable people who themselves cannot be reduced into charts and graphs. Any “answers” we may find may raise more questions, and arguably, they should.

EBLIP’s suitability for helping us make decisions has been well-explored and theorized. I’m wondering if we could also use evidence—writ large—to help us ask new questions of our practices, our selves, our research and our profession.

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.

IR You Open? How Institutional Repositories and Open Access Publishing Benefit Universities

Posted on by

by Shannon Lucky
Library Systems & Information Technology, University of Saskatchewan

As we begin planning for Open Access Week (Oct 20 – 26, 2014) at the USask University Library, I have been thinking about institutional repositories (IRs) and the role they play in open access culture at universities. A well-managed, user friendly IR can be a great publicity piece for an academic institution, but not all post-secondary institutions have IRs and those that do don’t always require their faculty to contribute to them. Universities’ interest in IRs is growing, especially now that some major granting agencies require scholarly output be made available through these kind of services, and it is very often academic libraries that take the lead on developing and supporting these projects. CARL is active in promoting IRs in Canada and maintains a list of current universities that have IRs. There are even university IRs that any academic can contribute to if your institution does not have one. Libraries and IRs seem like a natural fit, libraries are the information and research specialists on any university campus, but it takes a larger institutional commitment to make these projects successful.

IRs are services provided by a university to its members to support the management and dissemination of intellectual output in a digital format. This can include digital documents and/or metadata for journal articles (preprints and postprints), monographs, theses and dissertations, instructional materials, admin documents, or other digital assets. The goal is to bring together all of the relevant intellectual output of an institution in one place and make it accessible based on the ideal of digital interoperability and open access. In a digital publishing environment where it has become increasingly easy to search and share articles, researchers are still often stymied by publisher paywalls and copyright issues. There has been no shortage of criticism about the current state of academic publishing relating to cost, bundling of journal subscriptions, library e-book lending, and using publication metrics to gauge faculty performance. While not a silver bullet, IRs are a useful way to make research more easily accessible while still working within recognized publication authority structures.

Alma Swan published a briefing paper in Open Scholarship (2013) that listed the ways universities benefit from developing IRs.

  • Opening up outputs of the institution to a worldwide audience;
  • Maximizing the visibility and impact of these outputs as a result;
  • Showcasing the institution to interested constituencies – prospective staff, prospective students and other stakeholders;
  • Collecting and curating digital output;
  • Managing and measuring research and teaching activities;
  • Providing a workspace for work-in-progress, and for collaborative or large-scale projects;
  • Enabling and encouraging interdisciplinary approaches to research;
  • Facilitating the development and sharing of digital teaching materials and aids, and
  • Supporting student endeavours, providing access to theses and dissertations and a location for the development of e-portfolios.

It is a persuasive argument, but large scale uptake in IR use is still a work in progress.

An IR that is actively embraced by the members of an institution and used to its full capacity is an incomparable advertisement for the quality and diversity of the research being done there. This is often a major selling point for institutions who choose to implement these large scale projects. It makes the institution look good and it raises the profile of all of their members who contribute to it. While this is often reason enough for a university to implement an IR project, the most powerful function of IRs is the interoperability protocols that will aid discovery and visibility. IRs are great ambassadors for institutions to show off all of the fantastic work their members do, but individual IRs are not meant to be siloed digital storage. The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) aims to connect institutional repositories together, using shared protocols, to create a seamless layer of content across Canada and around the world. This would mean the ability to search a network of international IRs providing open access to the combined published intellectual output of all participating institutions. Imagine what a fully developed system like this could do to support cross-institutional collaborative research, rapid dissemination of findings, and discovery of useful sources (not to mention increasing the discoverability – and citation numbers – for shared publications).

While I find all of this potential for sharing information thrilling, there are very real issues institutions need to confront. The process of setting up an IR framework is not difficult (there are a number of open source and proprietary software packages available) but working with institutional culture can be challenging. Encouraging buy-in and participation of researchers is critical to the success of an IR, without a critical mass of content an IR may as well be simple cloud storage. I have heard concerns that making work open access, particularly preprint articles or research data and findings that have not yet been published in a peer reviewed journal, could open academics up to being scooped on their research. There is also the concern that IRs might break copyright agreements with publishers. On top of these legal and intellectual challenges, academics are busy people and asking them to jump through one more hoop to enter their work in an IR once it has been published may not endear IR proponents to their colleagues.

To deposit or not to deposit, that is the question.

By Roche DG, Lanfear R, Binning SA, Haff TM, Schwanz LE, et al. (2014) [CC-BY-4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I believe that these concerns can be resolved, but it will mean improving the design, workflow, and understanding of the benefits of IRs within the university community. Following copyright agreements and protecting unpublished research is already accommodated in many IRs by embargoing publications and using integrated tools to track copyright permissions. Self-archiving can be an empowering and extremely beneficial practice, but it is much easier when you have the best tools to do it. A lack of interest and participation can cripple an otherwise well planned IR project, which may be one of the reasons some institutions make submitting work to their IR compulsory. Many universities now require graduate students to submit their theses and dissertations to an IR, for example. Requiring researchers to deposit their publications in an IR can get them more actively engaged in the copyright agreements they sign with publishers. While making IR contributions compulsory can work, it would be so much better if we didn’t have to strong-arm people into participating.

I propose a less stick, more carrot approach that would make keeping your IR profile up to date appealing by having additional tools that can export formatted publication information directly into institutional CV  templates or automatically update departmental or personal webpages with your most recent academic output. If an IR is designed with the needs of both searchers and contributors in mind it can become an invaluable resource for multiple aspects of disseminating your academic work, not just another tedious institutional task.

 

References

Swan, Alma. “Open Access institutional repositories: A Briefing Paper”. Open Scholarship. Retrieved 05 September 2014.

 

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.

 

Taking Time for Research

Posted on by

by Kristin Hoffmann
Associate Librarian, University of Western Ontario

Usually I have to make time for research in my daily work life. This past year, I was fortunate to be able to take time for research by going on a sabbatical leave. I highly recommend a sabbatical for any librarian who has the opportunity to take one.

In a study conducted by Leona Jacobs of the University of Lethbridge and presented at the 2007 CLA conference, librarians who had taken sabbaticals said that their experience was “refreshing,” “fabulous,” and “energizing.” They also said that it was “hard work but … quite interesting.” My sabbatical experience was definitely all of those things!

Kristin Hoffman

Here are a few specific things that I realized about research from the process of doing my sabbatical:

A sabbatical is a good time to really delve into an area. I had done a research project related to the development of librarians’ professional identity, and I knew that I wanted to continue to focus on professional identity. As I was thinking about possible professional identity-related projects, I kept telling myself, “I’ll need to do more background reading before I can write my application.” Finally I realized that I could use the sabbatical to do the background reading. That was a good choice: I now have a much fuller sense of my research agenda, and I feel more like a ‘real’ researcher, knowing that I have such an intimate familiarity with my research areas.

A sabbatical is also a good time to try something new. I focused on research areas that weren’t new to me (librarians as practitioner-researchers, as well as professional identity), but my previous research had been with qualitative or quantitative approaches and during my sabbatical I wanted to try synthesizing my background reading with a critical/theoretical approach. It was a big stretch for me—my undergraduate education was in Engineering Physics—and it was frustrating and difficult at times, but I felt like I had really achieved something by breaking out of my research comfort zone.

Know your work style and make sure you can work that way on sabbatical. For me, this meant that I needed to have people with whom I could talk about my research, because I often develop my thoughts much better through conversation. Working with co-researchers was one way I did that, and I am fortunate to have a partner who is an academic, was also on sabbatical, and is interested in my research. I also attended conferences where there was a fit with my research interests, and had some great conversations with conference presenters and attendees.

Doing research is one of my favourite things about being an academic librarian, and the chance to focus on research during my sabbatical was wonderful. I learned a lot about myself as a researcher, and as a librarian.

If you have taken a sabbatical, how did it affect your research? If you are planning one, what are you hoping to achieve with your 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.

The Library Researcher Series: A Team Approach to Planning and Teaching

Posted on by

by Tasha Maddison
Engineering Library, University of Saskatchewan

During the summer of 2012, a chance meeting of two science liaison librarians led to the creation and development of the initial Library Workshop Series for Scientists and Engineers. DeDe Dawson was eager to address the needs of graduate students and faculty – often these two groups do not receive library instruction and could benefit from sessions on literature searching and research productivity skills. I had just started as a liaison librarian and was eager to begin providing instruction and expand my contacts within the College of Engineering. The idea of providing a series sounded like a perfect opportunity for both of us. Although we acknowledged that the initial course offerings might appeal to a broader audience, we focused our pilot project on our primary areas of liaison work and targeted these graduate students and faculty members specifically in all promotion and marketing initiatives of the series. The series was launched that fall with an initial offering of four classes. All sessions were taught collaboratively and the series was repeated with two additional classes in the winter semester.

Building upon the initial success of the fall semester, the Library Instruction Interest Group piloted a concurrent series that offered RefWorks training in the winter semester of 2013. Based on the initial pilot project, the collaboration with the Library Instruction Interest Group, a planning team was formed and the Library Researcher Series was born. DeDe Dawson, Carolyn Doi, Vicky Duncan, Angie Gerrard, Maha Kumaran and Tasha Maddison are the founding and current members of the planning team. The team members represent five of the seven library branches which includes discipline coverage in the Sciences, Social Sciences, Education and Fine Arts. Due to the interdisciplinary approach to planning, the team is able to offer a series with a broader scope, as well as an expanded breadth and depth than the original pilot project. The team continues to utilize a collaborative approach to teaching, reaching out to librarians and other instructors in the university community to offer sessions as part of the series.

A core element of each series since the beginning has been the collection of statistics and feedback associated with each session. This evidence has shown us which sessions are popular and should be offered again, what additional sessions could be developed based on comments received, and how best to market our series. The data collected has also allowed us to document our successes! Since the fall semester of 2012, we have seen an increase in attendance each subsequent semester. Most recently, in the winter of 2014, we averaged 13 participants per session. We also worked hard to brand our series last year, creating a logo and consistent promotional materials such as posters and advertisements in On Campus News, the University of Saskatchewan’s newspaper. Our most successful marketing tool remains the direct emails which are sent to faculty and graduate students from liaison librarians.

Planning is currently underway for the fall of 2014 with a roster of approximately 21 classes being offered with topics such as: Comprehensive Literature Review (Part A – Subject Searching, Part B – Keyword Searching), Plagiarism, Scholarly Identity, Making the most of Google and Managing Citations Series (RefWorks, EndNote, Mendeley and Zotero). We are also exploring live streaming and recording some sessions. Part of each planning meeting is dedicated to a review of existing classes, deciding which ones to keep and when is the most suitable time for them to be offered again. We have generated a list of new topics which are added to the series when appropriate. Expressions of interest are also requested from our colleagues and instructors within our University community. Some classes are favourites and are offered every term, while others come and go from the series.

For more information, please see: http://libguides.usask.ca/LibraryResearcherSeries

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.

Perpetual Access, Perpetually Confusing? C-EBLIP Journal Club, August 25, 2014

Posted on by

by Charlene Sorensen
Services to Libraries, University of Saskatchewan

I’m really enjoying the C-EBLIP journal club and I’ve been trying to figure out why since I’ve never been one for book clubs. It certainly helps that journal articles are short but that isn’t the whole reason. I find all areas of librarianship so interesting, but I don’t have enough time to explore areas outside of my own (technical services and collections). So the exposure to others’ article selections, combined with the small time commitment to read the articles and attend the meetings, is very exciting to me.

The third meeting of the C-EBLIP Journal Club was held on August 25, 2014 to discuss this journal article of my choosing:

Bulock, Chris. “Tracking Perpetual Access: A Survey of Librarian Practices.” Serials Review 40, no. 2 (2014): 97-104
http://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2014.923369

I chose this article because it was from the area of the library literature that I typically follow but would probably be a topic unfamiliar to the journal club members. It was also relevant to a project I am involved in and it was short (do you see a theme here?). I also liked it because the research study was pretty straightforward and was an example of what any one of us might undertake.

The author undertook a survey that asked librarians about their practices with respect to tracking perpetual access to e-journals, e-books, and multimedia resources. That is, even if perpetual access is contained with a license agreement, the perpetual access entitlements must then be tracked and holdings must be adjusted if changes occur. The author concludes that librarians seem committed to securing the perpetual access rights, but they were less dedicated to maintaining the access as evidenced by the fact that a great many weren’t actually tracking the access.

The conversation started out innocently enough. We identified a couple of inconsistencies in the paper and yearned for better definitions of some of the concepts. But the discussion took off from there and we wondered if the advent of electronic resources has changed our perspective on long-term access of any online resource. Libraries struggle with electronic resources every step of the way, from selection and acquisition, to description and discovery, right through to current and long-term access. We are so very good at managing these processes for print materials, but are nowhere near having the same control over e-resources. BUT maybe we just can’t have the same ‘control’ over these materials and should dial back our expectations. For example, I have a shoebox of letters I received throughout my life up until 1996, when email came along and now correspondence with friends and family is regularly deleted. Many of us have photos on our phones that will be deleted accidentally or on purpose. Maybe history matters less now that it’s harder to preserve?

But are libraries supposed to stand up to these difficulties and be responsible for the long-term access to its resources for the benefit of the university community? The author of this paper isn’t very hopeful and concludes:

“It remains to be seen whether librarians will develop the tools necessary to bring their practices into alignment with their ideals, or whether the goal of perpetual access will simply fall by the wayside” (p. 103).

I personally believe that libraries do have the responsibility to ensure perpetual access, though the ideal may be different from that of print materials. I look forward to further discussions on this topic throughout the library.

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.