Research topics from my research methods class in spring 2014

Part of the joy of teaching the Research Methods class is reading the various interesting research topics proposed by my students. I always gather them and put them into a list. Recently I have been sharing them in this blog. Here’s the list from spring 2014:

Do extensive recruitment efforts increase cultural diversity in the workplace for archives & special collections libraries?
What anticipated changes in operational factors such as budget, staff training, required staff volume, ease of assisting patrons, patron usability, processing time for returns and new books, and space usage lead managing librarians to decide on a materials classification and stacks organization scheme?
Do parents have a positive or negative view of graphic novels as tool for literacy for their children?
What are Mexican American immigrant patrons’ use and perception of public library services?
What are the factors that impact OPACs’ perceived user-friendliness and search outcomes from undergraduate students’ perspectives?
What are the information needs and behavior of practicing veterinarians in the Los Angeles area, and are these needs currently being met by available resources?
How does self-disclosure affect reference user satisfaction?
What is the relationship between archival collections available through online digital platforms, such as websites and catalogs, and the researcher and information seekers’ conception of the extent of an archival institutions’ full collection?
What technology tools do students prefer to use within the library to aid them in collaboration with their peers?
Is it beneficial for public libraries to join library consortia in order to share e-media?
What are patrons, specifically teens, looking for in terms of space design?
What is the relative value and impact of research and publication experience as compared to other factors on a selection committee’s decision to hire an entry-level candidate?
What are the definable goals for academic and research institutions like libraries and archives with regard to collecting and exhibiting art objects?
How are students, patrons, faculty and staff using the Online Archive of California and what is their success of using this resource?
Do public library users perceive a significant difference between the usefulness of information they receive from a professional librarian and information they retrieve themselves through common internet tools?
What are the qualities of a research room in a cultural institution desired by users, and how does the presence of a research room affect users’ perception of the cultural institution?
What approaches do libraries and archives use to improve user access to and awareness of audio resources within their collections?
Does open access to digital resources for objects in museum collections lessen the esteem that they receive from the general public?
Do programs implemented in the school library have a positive effect on students’ motivation?
Does library reference promotion and marketing encourage library users to utilize library reference services over quick online search engines such as Google or Yahoo?
How do various age groups respond to web tutorial information delivery methods in terms of perceived helpfulness and information retainment?

One of my students was interested in the qualities of a research room in a cultural institution desired by users, and I thought of her topic when I visited the Museum of Modern Arts in Istanbul. There is a research room/library inside of the museum and it’s interestingly designed. As you can see from the pictures, there were books hanging from the ceiling by a string piercing through the middle of each book. I wonder what this means. Well, this is modern art so it’s open to all kinds of interpretation. I have my own, but it’s too cynical so I’ll just keep it to myself.

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.

Doing an Ignite presentation

I will be going to IFLA in August and attending the summit organized by the Section on Education and Training (SET). The theme of the summit is “Library and information education and training: Confluence of past and present toward a strong future”, and at the summit a series of Ignite presentations will be given. I’m one of the presenters, and my Ignite presentation will focus on my vision of LIS education in 2015, which I talked about in one previous post.

Using the Ignite talk format, speakers present a topic using 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds. According to Wikipedia, “Ignite is the name for a particular type of event that is held throughout the world—organized by volunteers—at which participants speak about their ideas and personal or professional passions according to a specific format. The event holds the motto, “Enlighten us, but make it quick!” Anyone can throw an Ignite event. The presentations are meant to “ignite” the audience on a subject, whereby awareness, thought, and action are generated on the subjects presented.” As I was preparing for my presentation, I found this Ignite talk about successfully giving an Ignite talk, which really helped an Ignite newbie like me better understand the process.

One of the things that make me feel a bit nervous about the Ignite format is the fact that the slides are auto-advanced. This means presenters will have to time the presentation really well in order not to go off the slide. This is different from all the other presentations I have done before, for which I have full control of the advancement of slides. Looks like for the Ignite presentation, I will need to create a script and practice it several times to create a seamless match between my talk and the slides.

Though a bit nervous, I do look forward to it. I think this could be an interesting format our PhD students may use to share their research with us during the residencies. If one can “ignite” the audience on the topic of his/her thesis research in a five-min talk, he/she is either a grand master of public speaking, or is truly onto something groundbreaking.

Predatory Reference – Librarians “Slam the Boards”

A few days ago, the Special Libraries Association (SLA) held a webinar where Elisabeth Leonard, Market Research Analyst at SAGE, presented findings from a survey of libraries about the current state of reference. This specific presentation focused on reference budgets and perceptions of reference services by various user groups – most of the library budgets for reference are shrinking and patrons have low level of awareness of library reference resources and services. This made me think about a group of librarians I studied last year – they are involved in a grassroots activity called “Slam the Boards”, and they visit social Q&A sites on the 10th of each month and answer as many questions as possible. Social Q&A sites, also called “question-answer sites” and “answer boards”, are becoming increasingly popular as an online source for people’s information needs. Users of these sites post questions that are then typically answered by fellow users. Examples of social Q&A sites include Yahoo! Answers, Quaro, Answerbag and WikiAnswers. The word “Boards” in “Slam the Boards” refer to answer boards, which is another name of Social Q&A sites. According to the founder of “Slam the Boards”, Bill Pardue, a public librarian in Illinois, the name originated from a sports term for going after a rebound in basketball or the puck in hockey, suggesting rushing into an environment and do something en masse. Through this activity, librarians hope to represent librarianship at a new venue, encounter users beyond the library, provide well-sourced, dependable answers to people’s questions, and make people aware that librarians and libraries can be valuable source not just for books, videos and other materials, but also for mediated answers to questions and referral to appropriate sources and organizations.

Last year, I conducted in-depth interviews with librarians from “Slam the Boards”, and learned that their participation in this activity was motivated by one major reason – they believe in the importance of marketing and promoting libraries, particularly in the age of shrinking budgets, and consider “Slam the Boards” an innovative outreach opportunity. I also inquired about their time commitment, choices of social Q&A sites and questions, perceived difference between social Q&A sites and library reference service, and benefits of the experience. Findings of my study were quite insightful, and I’ve been invited to publish the study in Internet Reference Services Quarterly.

At this day and age, as libraries are facing wide-spread budget cuts and doubtful voices of the long-term future of libraries, it becomes ever more important to engage in innovation and create positive and effective connections with the user community. I think, this “predatory” and “invasive” way of library outreach and advocacy via “Slam the Boards”, represents a concept of making librarians visible in places where they are not expected. Social Q&A sites happen to be the most obvious examples. There are a lot of other places where people ask for help in their information seeking process, such as Twitter/Facebook, or specialized online communities. Librarians’ presence in such places will make it clear that librarians stand to help people fulfill their information needs in any way they can. Hopefully we will see more and more of such innovative ideas and practices from our reference librarians.

A peek into the future of LIS education

Reference and Information Services is one of the courses I teach regularly. At the end of the course, we always have a discussion about the future of reference. Although most of my students are pretty optimistic about it – they think reference service will be transforming itself to meet the evolving needs of library users and will continue be a core component of library public service, there’s always one or two that would rather bet on the demise of reference. I love having this discussion with my students and nudge them to do some futuristic thinking so they can be more prepared for this increasingly dynamic profession.

I recently stumbled upon a blog authored by a senior librarian at National University of Singapore (Musings about Librarianship), and in one of his posts, he gathered eight articles about the future of libraries and shared his reflections on them. As an educator, this blog post made me think a lot about library and information science (LIS) education in the future. In order to figure that out, we first need to understand what future information professionals will be like. A couple of years ago, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill organized a summit titled “Information Professions 2050”, and a wide array of interesting ideas was discussed. To me, “fluidity” will be a keyword in information professions in 2050. Information processing/organization/management/presentation will be an integral component of business operations. While there may be well defined roles, we will see more and more information-related positions created based on the specific needs of a business. Therefore, my idea for LIS education in 2050 is the capability to personalize and customize one’s education. In his book “Life in 2050”, Ulrich Eberl envisions that people will live in “smart apartments” that can recognize weather and even a person’s face. Given the wide spread of highly intelligent technologies then, apartment is merely one of the many aspects of our life that’s “smart”. Higher education will be “smart” too, highlighted by students’ capability to design their own learning experience and career choices. I think personalization and customization will be two leading forces of LIS education forty years later.

It’s fun to do some futuristic thinking, and we will see whether my crystal ball is precise if I’m still alive by then.

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.

A course on library assessment/valuation

The spring semester is just getting started, and yet I’m already thinking about my plans for the summer. I’m not teaching any summer courses, and instead, I plan to use the time to develop a couple of new courses. After getting tenure, I feel like I can finally take my foot off the gas pedal of research for a little bit and contribute more to curricular development. As mentioned in a previous post, one of the courses I’m developing is a methods course on survey research. The other course I have in mind is about library assessment.

Assessment is key to understanding the value of libraries. Professional organizations are already actively engaged in exploring ways to build effective, sustainable, practical assessment. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has been organizing the biennial Library Assessment Conference since 2006, and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has created a national portal containing a wide range of resources and discussions about assessing the value of libraries. Personally, I have learned from many librarians that assessment has become one of the top priorities in their organizations. Thus, given the importance of library assessment in library practice, it is important for our students to have a well-rounded mastery of this topic.

Right now I’m looking for a textbook for this potential course on library assessment, and I have my eyes on a former colleague’s work “Library Assessment in Higher Education by Joe Matthews”. I’m also thinking about drawing ideas from librarians on how to best approach such a course – if you are a practitioner who happen to be reading this post and would like to share some of your thoughts/experience on library assessment, please don’t hesitate to drop me a note!

A challenge of interdisciplinary research

Last year I presented a paper at the IFLA satellite meeting “Global Collaboration among Information Professionals”. My paper was about iSchool faculty’s interdisciplinary engagement in teaching and research. You can read more about my IFLA trip here. In this paper, I did two-stage study to examine iSchool’s interdisciplinary approach in education and research via the lens of iSchool faculty members’ background and experiences. At the first stage, a content analysis of faculty online profiles was conducted to examine faculty members’ rank, PhD field, teaching and research descriptions. At the second stage, a survey study was conducted to investigate faculty’s interdisciplinary experiences in teaching and research.

After I came back from the trip, the editor of LIBRES invited me to publish my paper in his journal. In the process of preparing the manuscript for publication, I read many articles about interdisciplinarity that were written by researchers and educators in other fields. They all seemed to share one of the findings in my own study – it is difficult to publish interdisciplinary research, and it’s challenging to identify the appropriate publishing venues. Now, it’s not just something I found in my study – it has become a reality for me.

Last year, my colleague Van from the Department of Health Science and worked on an interdisciplinary study that elicits input from health care professionals regarding how librarians can better help the public with their health information needs. In the summer, we finished the study and completed the manuscript. Then, we started the long journey to get it published. So far, we got rejected by every health science journal/conference we submitted it to because they didn’t think it fit their scope/focus. We have exhausted all the possible publishing venues in health sciences and failed, and now we will turn to journals in library and information science and see if we will have better luck.

Apparently, as interdisciplinary research becomes more and more popular, this is something that needs to be addressed. In the upcoming iConference in Berlin, there’s going to be a workshop on interdisciplinarity in information science. Hopefully they will cover this topic about publishing interdisciplinary research.

Student research ideas from fall 2013 Research Methods class

I have finally finished all my grading. It’s been a joy reading all the research proposals my students developed in the Research Methods class. Here are their research questions:

What are the evidence gathering activities and types of research used in special libraries for decision-making?
What is the need among librarians, and library workers for assessment tools to identify the underlying values of technology tools and cost of digital participation for patrons?
Is user satisfaction effected by the accuracy of the content provided by the Digital Humanities Project?
Are the Chinese senior patrons who were foreign born and immigrated to the U.S. as an adult or senior, satisfied with the Chinatown branch’s bilingual information services and Chinese seniors’ lifelong learning programs?
Is social media an effective marketing tool for small branch libraries?
What is the impact of makerspaces in libraries on library traffic and the circulation of materials?
How do project resources and participant community affect citizen science activity?
How does the inclusion of tablets in storytime affect children’s library usage?
How do video game programs impact teenagers’ actual use of library services in San Francisco Public Library?
How do individuals newly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis perceive the usefulness of the information resources available to them in choosing a disease-modifying medication?
Does the availability of research guides in a non-academic health science library have a positive relationship with user satisfaction with search results on the library’s website?
To what extent are the branches of the San Diego Public Library collecting racially diverse young adult novels?
What are the elements in library design and services that lead to improved use for library users and non-users?
Does the addition of comic books and graphic novels to a library’s collection lead to increased patron usage of other library materials and library services in public libraries?
What are the specific challenges archivists encounter saving digital audio materials?
How do users’ usage rates of virtual reference services compare with usage rates of traditional reference services at public libraries, and what are the reasons behind the use/non-use of such services?
Are Web 2.0 tools, used in academic libraries’ information literacy instruction, effective in aiding the students to improve their information literacy skills?
How effective and accurate are librarians using the chat reference service at the San Francisco Public Library in providing information to patrons on sexual health questions?
What is the extent of Aboriginal groups involved in digital preservation of indigenous knowledge activities in preparing, adopting, and presenting ‘protocols’, or ‘codes of ethics’?
How effective is the San Francisco Public Library main location’s Teen Center at bringing teens into the library to participate in events and use the libraries resources?
What interactive applications do users prefer in a women’s ministry website?

Quite a variety, aren’t they? I find this topic particularly interesting – “What is the need among librarians, and library workers for assessment tools to identify the underlying values of technology tools and cost of digital participation for patrons”. The student writes in her proposal:

“Emerging among the different types of literacies now vital for navigating through our information environment is a type of literacy that concerns technology and information ethics, where a user of technology, rather than just obtaining skills to use technology, can identify the underlying values that have shaped its design and determine whether becoming a participant in those values would therefore be desirable. This form of literacy assumes that technology does not represent a moral neutral and that, very often in current digital culture, using technology requires an exchange of information for a service or tool. Instead, technology reflects values, whether or not it has been intentionally designed with those values, and there are often costs that must be weighed before participating. The need to address this is growing in importance as we use an increasing amount of technology tools daily with little to no assessment. A lack of assessment leaves very important questions unasked: what values are supported in the use of a technology tool? How is a participant’s use of a technology being monitored and why? What is the participant’s information used for? Who owns this information when the participant that created it does not?”

Technology and information ethics is indeed an increasingly important topic, and I wonder what role our library and information professionals can play in enhancing people’s awareness of this issue. Looking forward to more research about it.

Books about Research Methods (5)

I have been thinking about developing a research methods course focusing on the survey method. Survey is a very old research technique. According to Earl Babbie’s “The Practice of Social Research”, the use of survey could be traced to the Old Testament – “After the plague the Lord said to Moses and to Eleazar the son of Aaron, the priest, ‘Take a census of all the congregation of the people of Israel, from twenty old and upward’” (Numbers 26: 1-2). Surveys are mainly used in studies that have individual people as the units of analysis, and to collect original data for describing a population too large to observe directly. In LIS research, survey is one of the most frequently used research methods. For example, survey research can be conducted to study user satisfaction with reference service, to assess student learning in information literacy instruction, to examine user awareness of mobile services provided by the library, etc.

To develop a course on survey research, the first thing is to find a textbook. I looked around and decided on “Internet, mail, and mixed-method surveys – the tailored design method”, by Don Dillman, Jolene Smyth and Leah Christian. It’s a comprehensive guide to designing and administering surveys. I particularly like how they talk about constructing survey questions – this is the most critical element in questionnaire design. I like their writing style too – straightforward and easy to understand. The only regret is that they did not include much discussion of analyzing survey responses. It’s understandable though – data analysis in survey research is a huge topic that warrants a book of its own. But I guess this means I will have to find other readings for this topic then. Time to dive back into the literature!