The Logical Operator

A little while back, I said I might speak further about LibGuides. Now seemed like a good time; I’ve dug into it more deeply and I’ve got a better sense of what it can do.

Overall, I’m pleased. Really pleased, in fact - it’s made creating online tools for the students I teach whys and wherefores of library research dramatically easier and faster, and the fact that LibGuides handles layout and design means that I no longer have to write* CSS to make my web things pretty.

I mentioned in my last entry that the sessions I taught using LibGuides page like this one have been far more successful and engaging to students. The pattern has held - my most recent victory was for a class in research analysis and design for psychology students, and the guide is seeing a lot of hits. My Industrial Psych guide is far and away the leader, with hundreds of hits since I taught the session, and the professor there asked if he could make it a core component of the course from now until eternity (or, I suppose, until something better comes along). It’s working out nicely. Read more…

Uncategorized BI, libguides, library instruction, news

One of my responsibilities - a responsibility shared by many of my fellow librarians - is to teach library stuff to science students. Library orientation, BI, information literacy instruction, whatever you call it, it means teaching students the 5 W’s of the Library:

• Who is this guy?
• What is that squirrel doing out there? It looks merry.
• When will this end? Oh god, this is never going to end.
• Where is the coffee shop again?
• Why is he still talking?

In all seriousness, the prospect of teaching a library instruction teaching fills me with the nervousness, because although I have done it many times, I remain acutely aware of two things:

1. Sometimes, you can’t make databases interesting, and
2. I have no real training in teaching, and I have bored students nearly to death in the past.

However, I have to say that this week has proven to be an excellent week for library instruction. I’ve done two sessions, which is actually a little ahead of the pace for the sciences (I advertise every semester, and the response rate is almost always great in the Fall, and weaker in the Spring; I generally do one session per week at most), and both have gone very well.* Read more…

Uncategorized BI, engaging students, information literacy, libguides, library instruction

I’m about to set off for day 2 of the Science Online ‘09, an “unconference” on science blogging and the use of other new technologies in the teaching, learning, and conduct of science. I was supposed to live-blog the events, and I tried dutifully, but about an hour in the network at the conference site was slashdotted by the attendees (apparently, the network was overwhelmed by 200 technogeeks getting online by WiFi all at once). Coupled with the fascinating, but relentless schedule, and dinner, and accidentally falling asleep after getting back to my hotel room, and I have a lot of catching up to do on the whole “tape-delay-blogging.” Like, all of Day 1.

I plan to post a series  entries covering the sessions I attended (along with, of course, any other interesting things that popped up), and my reflections, thoughts, and mental perambulations from the point of view of a science librarian. I can’t promise that they’ll make you gasp in dawning understanding, but there’s some interesting stuff in there.

Stay tuned for more posts on Science Online ‘09!

Uncategorized scio09

The process of identifying the “right” digital repository software to implement at my university continues apace, with the most recent efforts surrounding a specs-level evaluation of six or seven systems (DSpace, Fedora, and so on) to see if we could identify showstoppers from the very start (either technical capabilities we know we want, or features “incompatible with IT,” as on might say). The evaluation was successful, in the sense that we’ve managed to narrow our pool considerably based on design, licensing, or other factors. We’re now faced with a more daunting task: we not only have to review what we can see of these systems in the wild - which amounts to little more than the front page and, if we’re fortunate, the ability to see public collections - but also dig into the systems to see how they work on the inside, and how people use them.

So, the question on my mind is: how exactly do we do that? Test installations are a must. We need to see the system in action, develop sample content to deposit therein, and see how many different ways we end up breaking the repository (or just being incredibly frustrated with it).

However, the software-technical side of the repository system is less useful for most of us than an understanding of how repositories are used, and in fact, if they are used. From the literature and from presentations, discussions, and my reading about institutional repositories, it looks like that “if” is a much larger concern than the implementation of something cool.

Of course, the larger point is that, assuming a certain level of functionality, the software really doesn’t matter (if you ask some of the experts in the field, there aren’t any good ones, anyway). We need to use something that will provide sufficient function and be acceptable to our IT services group. On the other hand, contributors to the repository may have a general interest in what it can do, but they’re only going to be interested to the extent that it does what they want it to do - as with most things, users will employ a satisficing process to evaluate this resource the same as they will any resource.

So if we are to seek out how repositories are actually used, what do we do? To whom do we speak? We hope to speak to repository coordinators / directors at other institutions, but I’d like to get into the user’s mind too, and get beyond the “obvious” use cases.

To that end, I hope that the repository coordinators at other institutions will point me toward some frequent users, but if any of my few readers do have further suggestions along those lines, I am most interested in hearing them. I have few preconceptions about this process, so I am as a blank slate.

Uncategorized digital repositories, needs assessment, satisficing, use case, user

Note: Roger Schonfeld, one of the authors of the study, commented and corrected some msiconceptions I had about the report. I’ve responded to him in the comments section - I’ll leave the original post unaltered, so you can see the context of his comments.

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A recently released report by Ithaka - a nonprofit higher education and technology organization - discusses trends in the attitudes toward library importance, library role, resource format (electronic vs. print), and publishing method among faculty and librarians at various higher education institutions.

The report is interesting (I’m always interested in reports about how libraries are perceived), especially the section on attitudes toward library importance. The Chronicle of Higher Education, in the 8/26/08 issue, also commented on the report:

“Since 2003, faculty members across the disciplines have shown a marked decline in how devoted they are to libraries as information portals. Eighty percent of humanities scholars are still devoted to library research-although that may be not because they’re traditionalists but because they can’t yet get what they need in digital form. But only 48 percent of economists and 50 percent of scientists value libraries as gateways.

That should worry librarians whose budgets are eaten up by high-priced science journals. What if the designated users of those materials are sidestepping the library altogether?”

-Howard, Jennifer. “FYI: Scholar’s view of libraries as portals shows marked decline.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/26/2008.

The comment is more interesting than the report (which is a bit dry). So, anyway, the alarms sound because the trend shows that libraries are becoming less important in as gateways to information in the eyes of faculty: they don’t come to the library anymore to begin their research; nor do they start their research in the library’s OPAC. In turn, this threatens the viability of “librarian” as an important figure on campus.

However, I don’t actually think this report actually says quite what the quote from the Chronicle claims. First of all, the questions don’t particularly focus on “devotion” to library research - I would find an unusual devotion to library research a bit odd, actually. What’s more, the Chronicle author (and the report itself) seem to use “library research” to mean “research done while sitting in the library.” It should come as no surprise that much library research is done while not at all close to the library; this remote access has been a service goal of libraries for a long time. It’s laudable that you don’t have to actually sit in the library to conduct research using its resources.

Second, if you consider Figure 5 of the Ithaka report, it illustrates that the majority (something like 70%) of research is started using library resources in one way or another. It’s simply that it is conducted remotely (in fact, the report points out that ultimately, resource access is often via the library’s license, but the search starts somewhere else) or it may not start with a “generic library resource” approach. Breaking this down by discipline provides some no-brainer info: science faculty, for instance, rarely start in the library or the OPAC when they begin research, but rather in a specific electronic database.

This is not a surprise: science research is almost entirely journal-based, and the best way to access them is by going to the specific database in which the journal is indexed. The OPAC offers little support to science research when it starts (save for, possibly, knowing what journals the library owns), and given that the resources are electronic, and online, there’s no reason to come to the library. On the other hand, humanities scholars often have a more monograph-based research mode, and so they’ll begin in the library or with the OPAC.

In any case, while I think the library may in fact be less valued as a portal to information, this does not actually make the library less of a portal. After all, as pointed out elsewhere in the report, faculty don’t want to pay for access to the resources themselves; that’s the library’s job. However, faculty do wish to enjoy library-mediated access to those resources (and they get it, often no matter where their search actually starts). To me, this blurs the (somewhat artificial) distinction between “gateway” and “purchaser.” Without the library’s license to the materials, access would need to be mediated via some other means (which the faculty are loath to do, and rightly so, because that stuff is expensive) - ergo, the library is the gateway to the resource.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they know the library is the gateway, and that is where the report, I think, is really going. I don’t dispute the report. In fact, I thoroughly believe that the perception of value is a real problem. However, I think it’s heavily related to visibility: we’ve become so very good at providing seamless remote access to resources that nobody realizes that the library makes it possible for them to use these resources.

Uncategorized