My new book – “Enhancing Library and Information Research Skills: A Guide for Academic Librarians”

My two wonderful colleagues, Kris
Brancolini and Marie Kennedy, and I wrote a book together based on our
experience with the Institute for Research
Design in Librarianship (IRDL), an IMLS-funded program that provides
professional development opportunities for academic librarians to improve their
research skills. The book is titled “Enhancing Library and Information Research
Skills: A Guide for Academic Librarians”, in which we covered the whole
spectrum of being a practitioner-researcher in the academic library setting.

It was a great experience working with
Kris and Marie on this book. They both are strong advocates for academic
librarians’ engagement in research and use of research evidence to inform
decision making. We truly hope that this book will help academic librarians
around the nation to become more aware of the value of research to academic
librarianship, develop a solid understanding of the research process, and ultimately
improve their confidence and competency in conducting and applying research in
their professional practice.

A recent international research collaboration

International collaboration is always a refreshing and even
enlightening experience to me. I have worked with two librarians from Tsinghua
University Library in China on a couple of projects and absolutely enjoyed it. I
have known them for more than 10 years so we have a very efficient and pleasant
relationship. Last year when I was at IFLA,
I met a librarian from Ghana and we had good conversations about library
research. This spring we worked on a project together to evaluate the reference
services at University of Education, Winneba (UEW) in Ghana. We decided to
approach the evaluation from the user perspective, and identified the Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs) based on the RUSA Guidelines
for Behavioral Performance. A user survey was conducted to measure the KPIs
and to examine how users use and perceive library reference services. The
findings were illuminating. For example, regarding how the reference service
should be improved, some users recommended that librarians be better trained.
It’s interesting that these users realized that the service inadequacies were a
result of insufficient personnel training. It is also interesting to note that
personal interests is the second most popular motivation for users to use the
reference service, which is auspicious and shows that students and faculty
trust reference librarians with their personal information needs. And yet, some
of the things we take for granted such as electricity and computers/copiers,
were still a concern for some library users at UEW in Ghana – they felt there
weren’t enough of them to meet their needs.

Overall the study was a great learning experience for me. I’m
glad that our findings will help UEW library determine the service areas where
improvements are most needed and develop necessary training programs to address
them. On a personal note, the study opened my eyes to how reference services
work at an academic library in Ghana, and how library users are experiencing the
services. It will be published in Library Review soon, so keep an eye on it if
you are interested.

QQML 2014

I just got back from the 6^th QQML conference in Istanbul. As always, it’s a fruitful trip. What I particularly liked this year was Cornell University Librarian Anne Kenney’s keynote talk “Defining 21^st Century Research Libraries to Implementing 21^st Century Research Universities”, where she talked about the paradigm shift among academic libraries that are focusing less on measuring what libraries are doing and more on developing metrics that measure how well they are enabling research universities to thrive in the 21^st century. Her talk gave me a lot to think about, particularly for the research methods course I intend to develop that focuses on academic librarianship.

I also enjoyed the LibQUAL-related presentations at the conference, which not only included presentations sharing results of LibQUAL surveys in libraries in different countries, but also one interesting presentation that described translating LibQUAL in other languages ( the historical context, the functionality of the current web interface in handling different languages and a reliability and validity analysis for selected language versions). LibQUAL is a great example of conducting survey research in LIS, and in the fall I will be teaching a course about survey research. So these presentations were timely and beneficial.

During the conference I spent quite a bit of time talking to a group of scholars from Taiwan. Two of them got their master’s in LIS and PhD in education. Their students are school teachers, and they are developing information literacy standards and instruction strategies at K-12 level. In Taiwan, teachers are responsible for information literacy instruction in addition to subject teaching, and now the increasing workload has made it necessary to have special teacher positions that exclusively focus on information literacy. This is quite different from the US, there the trend is reversed and school librarian positions are getting cut everywhere because of budget problems. Another Taiwanese Professor comes from National Chengchi University and they have the only online LIS master’s program in Taiwan. We talked a lot about online education and I invited her to share the experience of their online program at the Library 2.014 conference. It’s always nice to learn about online education from the international perspective.

Finally, another highlight of this conference was seeing my old friends Songphan and Cristina. I saw them last year in Rome but didn’t get to talk much because of our different schedules. It’s just wonderful to see them again and catch up with them.

Enhancing academic librarian’s research knowledge and skills – A lesson from South Africa

I’m currently working on a project to conduct content analysis of research articles published in the last decade in three popular journals among academic librarians, and the goal of the project is to understand the topics, trends, methods, strengths, and weaknesses of practitioner research (see previous post for more information about this project). Although it’s a lot of work, reading all these articles has been quite rewarding, particularly for my teaching – e.g. I have identified some really good candidates to use as readings for my courses.

One of the articles, “Darch, C. and De Jager, K. 2012. Making a difference in the Research Community: South Africa’s Library Academy Experience and the Researcher-Librarian relationship. Journal of Academic Librarianship. 38(3): 145-152. ”, talked about the organization, implementation and evaluation of a series of ‘Library Academy’ events within a Carnegie Corporation-funded project to improve library service to researchers in six South African universities. To some extent, the “Library Academy” series was similar to the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (see previous post for my involvement in this project), which seeks to assist librarians to develop the skills necessary to complete a research project of their design, and to construct a personal network of possible collaborators for future research projects.

The Library Academy aimed at “exposing participants to research content and methodologies in a wide range of non-LIS subject domains, and in requiring the production by each individual of an original and publishable research paper”, hoping to improve academic librarians’ research knowledge and enable them to provide better services to researchers, and thus ultimately enhance the researcher–librarian relationship.

Comprehensive assessment measures were used to understand the impact of The Library Academy. I particularly liked one of the self-assessment approaches – a process of real-time feedback was developed, using Post-It notes on a wall during or at the end of sessions, and the notes were then collected and transcribed. Maybe we can borrow this idea in the sessions of the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship, so we can make real-time adjustment to our teaching.

At any rate, this article about The Library Academy series for academic librarians in South Africa was quite informative, and definitely worth reading, especially for those of us who are involved in developing the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship.

QQML 2013

Last week I was in Rome attending the 2013 International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries (QQML), where 288 papers from all over the world were presented, covering a wide variety of topics in LIS. I had a great time talking to librarians, educators and researchers from different countries and learning about their research. Two of my old friends from Chapel Hill were also there – it’s been six years since I last saw them, and it was just wonderful to see them again.

The papers that interested me most were the ones about library assessment and valuation. Recently I have been thinking about developing a course entirely on library assessment. This topic has been a component in many courses in our program, but I think it is important enough to spend a full course on it. More and more libraries, especially academic libraries are facing increasing pressures to establish their relevance and value, and assessment is critical in this process.

Here are a few papers about library assessment that I enjoyed:

A survey study to examine students’ use of an academic library, its resources and spaces, and their engagement and persistence at UT Austin (by Meredith Taylor).
A project using the Understanding Library Impacts (ULI) protocol to assess library contributions to undergraduate student learning at Barnard College (by Derek Rodriguez and Lisa Norberg).
A study using the MISO survey to assess the quality and effectiveness of library services (by David Consiglio, Katherine Furlong and Gentry Holbert).
The single or joint use of qualitative and quantitative metrics to support library accreditation efforts, funding requests and assess user needs and expectations ( by Michael Maciel).
The best practices of data visualization and examples of how some of them have been applied in libraries (by Rachel Besara).

There are also a couple of papers about health information access that caught my attention. This is an area that I wish to further explore. I just learned this morning, my first paper in this area, “Preparing Public Librarians for Consumer Health Information Service: A Nationwide Study”, co-authored with Dr. Van Ta Park, has been accepted to publish in Library and Information Science Research. Van and I will also discuss ideas of developing grant proposals together to fund our collaborative research pursuit down the path of health information.

Overall, I had a great time at QQML 2013. Now with all the ideas and inspirations grained from the conference, I’m going to have a very busy summer.

Back to the Future – results from a strategic planning exercise

One of the complaints many librarians have is that they don’t have time to do research or read research articles. This is certainly understandable given their busy work schedule. I once joked with them that we need a robot that could automatically scan the published research and identify the articles relevant and useful to us. Now I think maybe in a small way I can function like such a robot. As an educator and researcher, I read journal articles on a regular basis – why don’t I pick out the interesting ones and share them on this blog?

In Journal of Academic Librarianship (Volume 38, Issue 1), I read an article titled “Futuring, Strategic Planning and Shared Awareness: An Ohio University Libraries’ Case Study”, which sought to create a shared awareness of possible library futures and guide Ohio University’s strategic thinking. Librarians and staff at Ohio University Library were presented with a series of future scenarios, and for each scenario, they were asked two questions: first, to objectively rank the probability of the scenario occurring from “unlikely” to “very likely”; and second, to rank the impact that the scenario will have on the library from “no impact” to “high impact.”

As a result, two possible, interrelated, futures that were ranked “high-impact” and “highly likely” by the librarians and staff. First was the “Increasing Threat of Cyberwar, Cybercrime and Cyberterrorism”, and the second was “Out-of-Business”. It’s interesting to see that cyber security has become a top concern for librarians. A new faculty member in the area of cyber security will be joining us at SLIS SJSU, and I will be sure to talk to her about this article and hear her ideas about data security in libraries.

As for the “out-of-business” scenario, I can’t say I was surprised. A couple of weeks ago, when I had lunch with my librarian friends from King Library, we talked about the transformative nature of the LIS field and how librarians will be impacted. The increasing awareness of this issue sends a signal to us educators that we need to prepare future LIS professionals with the skill sets to function well in the evolving information environment, particularly the non-traditional settings.

These two scenarios, taken together, represent a rather bleak view of the future. It surely gives us a lot to think about. I don’t think anyone will have any solutions soon, but it is important to be proactive, and recognize and understand the threats in the future. If more libraries could engage in such a discussion of the future, we would be one step closer to finding out how to respond when future becomes present.