Yesterday I received the applicants for the De Montfort Frontrunner placement who’s coming to help me gather data on use of DMU learning spaces on campus, starting next academic year. We’re going to shortlist for the post on Monday, but having had a brief flick through the applications I’m pretty happy with the state of the field so far. I was super excited when the applications landed in my inbox, much to the amusement of my team!

I’m also making some headway with organising a second focus group for our investigation into communication with PhD students. As we want to reach out to students from faculties that our first focus group didn’t cover, it’s allowing us to be a bit more targeted in recruitment, so hopefully that will pay off in the response rates and we’ll get a nice solid number.

Things should move pretty quickly on both projects from here. I’ll post back with updates as more happens.

We have some great data to look at, including the pictured PhD timeline, which was jointly created by the participants in the group.

Although it was clear from the feedback from a single group that the PhD experience diverged quite significantly according to factors such as discipline and supervisor, we’re keen to run  a second group. This would allow us to establish to what extent our local processes give students a particular character of experience, and hopefully extend our participant pool to all four of the facilities.

We’re also planning to include those who were unable to make face to face groups (including distance and international students) with a questionnaire based on the outcomes from the groups.

The approaching Easter holidays mark a good point to start analysis and plan next stages, so I’ll report further then.

The first big thing is that I’ve put together a proposal for a student Frontrunner to gather data on use of learning spaces around our campus. Frontrunners is a DMU employability initiative which recruits students to work on projects around the university (see the Frontrunners site). Fingers crossed that I’ll get the role approved: feedback on the application has been good so far. Either way, putting together the proposal has given me a much better overview of how the project will work, and putting together the role description and outline of skills which the student would learn was an interesting exercise, digging up some of my recruitment and selection skills from my old Occupational Psychology degree.

Our Library and Learning Services project on communication with PhD students is also moving along nicely: the focus groups are due to run over the next two weeks. I’m going to act as the notetaker for the first group, so I’ll get to see a colleague in the facilitator role. I’ve only ever acted as the facilitator before, so will be interesting to have a more detached perspective on the group. I’m sure I’ll be scribbling lots of notes! Next month we’re planning to go on some visits to other universities and see what we can learn from colleagues in the sector too.

This term has definitely seen me flip round from focusing on teaching, delivering a lot of sessions for the first time, to focusing on project work. However, the teaching hasn’t reduced much – I’ve just got a better portfolio of knowledge and resources to draw upon, and I’m delivering more familiar materials. It’s good to feel that everything’s starting to get a little bit easier, though!

The literature indicates that communication between librarians and researchers isn’t seen as perfect by either side (Brown and Swan, 2007), and there is some evidence (and some speculation) that face-to-face contact is the most effective method of communication and promotion the Library has (Sadler and Given, 2007; Carter and Seaman, 2011). The most common methods used for communication between liaison librarians and researchers are email, face-to-face, telephone, and web-based subject guides (Arendt and Lotts, 2012; Henry, 2012).

Although web 2.0 is seen as a huge international trend in library communications (Tripathi and Kumar, 2010), most library uses of web 2.0 technologies for communication seem to lack the two-way interaction that defines web 2.0 (Adams, 2011; Aharony, 2012; Gerolimos, 2011). However, using web 2.0 technologies could nonetheless reinforce a library’s innovative brand (Brewerton and Tuersley, 2010) and offer a convenient format for sharing advice and news (Adams, 2011).

If I was to pick one article to read on this topic, I’d strongly recommend Sadler and Given’s (2007) article (although I don’t quite agree with their definition of ‘affordance’). This highlights some of the discrepancies between librarians’ preferred communication channels and the channels to which postgraduate research students pay attention. They found that the library website and teaching sessions were used heavily by librarians to communicate, but the students had ‘tunnel vision’ when it came to reading the library website, and didn’t see library teaching as important or relevant.

Or, if you’re a librarian looking for a good excuse for a knees-up, then Strittmatter’s (2008) article on the use of cocktail parties as liaison tools might be more tempting…

References

• ADAMS, R. (2011) Building a User Blog with Evidence: The Health Information Skills Academic Library Blog. Evidence Based Library & Information Practice, 6 (3), 84-89.
• AHARONY, N. (2012) Facebook use in libraries: an exploratory analysis. Aslib Proceedings, 64 (4), 358-372.
• ARENDT, J. and LOTTS, M. (2012) What Liaisons Say about Themselves and What Faculty Say about Their Liaisons, a U.S. Survey. Portal: Libraries & the Academy, 12 (2), 155-177.
• BREWERTON, A. and TUERSLEY, S. (2010) More than just a logo – branding at Warwick. Library & Information Update, 9 (9), 46-48.
• BROWN, S. and SWAN, (2007) Researchers’ use of academic libraries and their services: a report commissioned by the Research Information Network and the Consortium of Research Libraries [WWW]. Available from: http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/researchers [Accessed 18 January 2013].
• CARTER, T.M. and SEAMAN, P. (2011) The Management and Support of Outreach in Academic Libraries. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 51 (2), 163-171.
• GEROLIMOS, M. (2011) Academic Libraries on Facebook: An Analysis of Users’ Comments. D-Lib Magazine, 17 (11), 4.
• HENRY, J. (2012) Academic library liaison programs: four case studies. Library Review, 61 (7), 485-496.
• SADLER, E. and GIVEN, L.M. (2007) Affordance theory: A framework for graduate students’ information behavior. Journal of Documentation, 63 (1), 115-141.
• STRITTMATTER, C. (ed.) (2008) If You Pour It, They Will Come: Hosting a Cocktail Reception to Promote Services to Faculty. Public Services Quarterly, 4 (3), 269-276.
• TRIPATHI, M. and KUMAR, S. (2010) Use of Web 2.0 tools in academic libraries: a reconnaissance of the international landscape. The International Information & Library Review, 42 (3), 195-207.

Stacks at the University of Nottingham

I’ve undertaken annual reviews of departmental journal subscriptions in both my most recent jobs, and although they tick over, they always seem to leave me feeling unfulfilled. Regularly reviewing departmental journal subscriptions (outside ‘big deal’ packages) is critical: as departments change, so does their needs for certain titles. Nonetheless, I always seem to feel like we’re making these decisions on half the information we need.

The minimal format for a review usually involves sending out a list of currently subscribed journals to the department for comment. However, the response rate is usually pretty low, and I’m also not sure it elicits the right kind of feedback.

When studying Psychology I learnt that collecting information about people’s actual behaviour is much more useful in predicting their behaviour than collecting information about their attitudes. Instead of asking ‘do you think this is a good journal?’ we should probably be asking whether academics publish in the journal, put it on their reading lists, purchase a personal subscription or sit on the journal’s editorial board. All this, and whether students and staff are actually accessing it, as well.

This fascinating article on journal subscriptions, by Jane Harvell at the University of Sussex, suggests an entirely data-based model of journal evaluation and subscription. However, it’s a step too far for me to go completely data-driven. Although not every academic is in a position to fully contribute to the review process, they like to be involved in the decision-making; the only negative feedback I’ve ever had from these reviews is from academics nervous that the library might make a decision without their input, and I agree that this would be a risky process.

Therefore, the Library needs to do what is does best: manipulate information. We somehow need to provide an easily-digestible breakdown of current journal subscriptions and potential journal subscriptions, and map these against usage data (or turnaways), publication outputs, reading list appearances, impact factors, and anything else we can get our hands on. And we need to condense it down into 2 sides of A4, or a 5 minute Powerpoint presentation.

Oh dear. About an hour I was feeling pretty proud of myself for preparing for the journal review early. Now I’m starting to think some of this might need to wait until 2014. Baby steps…

2012 was a bit of a whopper for me! I finally reached my goal of finding a permanent full-time professional post in February, and have spent the months since settling into my new role. Maybe ‘settling’ isn’t quite the word, mind. Quite a few changes in staffing across the year meant I took on additional subject support and activities I wasn’t expecting, and I’ve been kept quite thoroughly on my toes.

Each third of the academic library year has its own character: consolidation, development, and, finally, chaos. In February arrived to a flurry of meetings and orientation activities, and zoomed through what remained of the third that runs from January to April, pretty much skipping consolidation. Then I was up and running for development in the summer third, when academic libraries attempt a vast array of ambitious projects. To pick some significant examples, this year I developed eight subject resource portals from scratch, and helped overhaul the library induction trail, while learning about practice, pedagogy and publishing in umpteen new subject areas, and reworking my teaching approach to fit the new disciplines and systems of a new institution.

However, the first two thirds were (are always!) just an elaborate form of preparation for the autumn term, when chaos rules. This was a flurry of induction, teaching, meetings and, most critically, constant fire-fighting. I defy any subject librarian in a new post to remember this term as anything other than a blur, but overall I’m pretty proud of my work over the last few months, and feel like I’ve laid a good foundation for the academic year ahead. Writing this is the first time I’ve realised this, so yay!

Now here I am in 2013, back in the consolidation third, with an opportunity to actually do some consolidation this time round! There’s plenty more teaching and resource-wrangling to do this term, but I’m starting with greater knowledge of the university and its systems (and a bunch of familiar teaching materials to fall back on when needed).

There’s still a lot to do, however. I’ve got projects which need some attention: some research on learning spaces with an external partner, an internally funded project on our communication with PhD students alongside several colleagues, and my contribution to the development of our online postgraduate research training materials. My main aim for 2013 is to make sure I make the time for these developmental and evidence-based activities, now that I’m acting slightly less like a headless chicken.

I promise to write again, dear readers, when I’ve made good on at least part of that aim.

Edinburgh's Royal Mile

This was the final LIS DREaM (Developing Research Methods and Excellence) workshop, back at Craighouse Campus in Edinburgh. I’ve been using these blog posts as an opportunity to point towards resources on the talks from this event, and also reflect on how I can use these methods within my own work, and this post will do more of the same. Materials from this workshop are available online.

Horizon Scanning – Dr Harry Woodroof
Horizon scanning is the process of trying to spot incoming threats and opportunities for the future. Harry pointed us towards a couple robust techniques which he recommends for this. The first was DSTL‘s approach: scanning scientific websites and journals to identify future technology trends and using sentiment analysis to pick out innovations which experts had spoken about in glowing terms. The second was the Horizon Scanning Centre‘s approach: conducting a ‘scan of scans’, using the Sigma Scan database to identify existing horizon scans and provide a meta-review of their contents.

I think all of us could benefit from a little horizon scanning, and the resources and techniques Harry recommended could be applied on a smaller scale (e.g. using the Sigma Scan database to identify a few of the most relevant scans for a particular question and looking for common themes). As I’ve just become a subject librarian for Politics and Public Policy I’m also interested in tracking down the book he mentioned on experts and the limitations of their predictions in horizon scanning (set in the political sphere).

Repertory Grids – Dr Phil Turner
Phil introduced us to repertory grids as a way of recording personal understandings of a particular domain, and then talked us through the practicalities and some applied examples. The technique works by asking your interviewee to identify some examples of a particular category, asking them to comment on how two of these examples are similar to each other, but different from a third, and then seeing how all the examples score on these ‘constructs’. This gives a idea of core concepts associated with the category, and how the examples cluster together or are different from each others according to these constructs.

Phil’s example looked across several interviews to identify shared constructs, and then tested how further examples (in his case, treasured objects) were rated on these dimensions. I could see myself applying this approach in the work with learning spaces I’ve been discussing (across De Montfort and Northampton Universities) where we’re particularly keen to look at the meaning of spaces for students. One I’ll mull over and discuss with the rest of the research team…

Data Mining – Kevin Swingler
The final research method discussed was data mining. This term covers a whole stable of different methods used to create models from data, which can make predictions or be used to classify further data. Kevin talked us through the careful checks that need to be applied to data to ensure it is appropriate for the creation of such models, and potential pitfalls and ways of avoiding them.

The techniques covered weren’t a million miles away from the statistical methods I’ve used in Psychology (my original academic discipline) but slightly more focused on use of the model, rather than modelling the underlying processes. The talk inspired some spirited discussion of how much data we have sitting around in libraries that we never try and do anything with (for example, predicting demand based on existing usage figures). Maybe it’s something that could be explored more fully across multiple library services, using a similar approach to the Library Impact Data project.

Impact of Research on Practice – Professor Hazel Hall
Our last session of the day was facilitated by Hazel, and was designed to get us thinking about the links between research and practice in a more active way. We were split into 6 groups, 3 of researchers and 3 of practitioners (broadly specified). Each group focused on an aspect of the link between research and practice and what could be done to improve it. Then the groups were paired up (one researcher group with each practitioner group) and asked to come up with 3 ways of improving application of research to practice based on our shared discussions.

We had quite similar ideas across the groups, implying that we were all reasonably aware of and agreed upon the issues, and even potential solutions. Therefore, for me, the most interesting part of the discussion was about incentives: how do we ensure that researchers are incentivised to fully include practitioners in their research and dissemination strategies, and how do we incentivise practitioners to draw upon research in their practice? I think a big factor is the infrastructure in which both groups work, and it’s made me think about impact (particularly in professionally-focused research) from a whole new angle!

The next and last event in the DREaM series will be a conference. Unfortunately I’m not able to attend in person, but I’m looking forward to participating remotely: having seen the quality of information sharing at the previous DREaM events, I’m quite looking forward to that. It’s certainly been a fascinating set of events to participate in, although, as I said on the feedback forms, one where I think that appraising its true impact is going to require a long-term perspective.

]]> http://www.chuukaku.com/blog/2012/04/dream-3.html/feed 0 http://www.chuukaku.com/blog/2012/02/libday-3101201.html http://www.chuukaku.com/blog/2012/02/libday-3101201.html#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:33:09 +0000 Katie http://www.chuukaku.com/blog/?p=239 Only at my normal part-time job for Tuesday and Wednesday this week, where I’ve been a science subject librarian for 2 years. On Thursday I start a new job, supporting social science at a different university, part-time while I work out my notice and then full-time towards the end of the month. It’s a week of big changes for me!

My pigeon hole on Tuesday morning: just a few Chemistry books to check

As part of preparing to leave, I’ve been updating the books in some of the subjects I support, and the new copies have just started arriving. Although I select and order a lot of the books, I rarely see them when they arrive, with one exception: when new editions of textbooks turn up, and I need to decide how many copies of the old editions to keep on the shelves. A constant stream of arriving Chemistry textbooks made editions checking a bit of a theme for these two days.

Tuesday had a couple of packed meetings. First up was a meeting between myself, my line manger, and the other Science and Engineering librarian. Lots to catch up on: notes from the College Academic committee meeting, handover documents for my post, online resources for a new course and potential licence issues, and book provision for the University’s only problem-based learning course. The second meeting was with staff from that problem-based learning course, really thrashing out the issues, and planning a pilot of a new book provision plan for the rest of this academic year.

End of Tuesday was spent finishing my preparations for a teaching session which took up Wednesday morning. This was my annual session with second year Geology students, giving them guidance in searching for literature to support their report on a type of ore (which they study at first hand) and the mine it came from. It’s a nice size of group to run a hands-on PC session with, and there’s lots of specific tricks they can use in the search, so it was quite a fun session to teach.

I finished early, as using up a part-day of annual leave, so just had time to catch up with email queries, chase a few ongoing issues, and meet and greet a new member of academic staff before I left. There’s a lot still to do before I go, and the clock’s ticking!

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My portable device workstation set up on the train to London

Today I was down at the British Library in London for the second Library and Information Science Developing Research Excellence and Methods workshop (see http://lisresearch.org/dream-project/). The workshops are funded by the UK;s Arts and Humanities Research Council and aim to create a network of researchers (in both academia and practice) to spread knowledge of research methods throughout the library and information community.

It makes quite a nice activity to record for Library Day in the Life: it’s quite different from what people seem to think I do, but using evidence to develop practice and developing services is pretty everyday in my role. However, elements were also quite different to what I normally do: the workshop crosses different library sectors (public, academic, health libraries etc.) and there’s some blue skies thinking that’s beyond my usual ‘how can we do this better?’ remit.

However, the question I get asked most by non-librarians is how (and even if!) library services are responding to changes in society and technology, and this workshop a good way to illustrate that development is something that gets a lot of attention.

You can find out more about the LIS DREaM Workshop contents on my dedicated post at http://www.chuukaku.com/blog/2012/01/dream-2.html.

]]> http://www.chuukaku.com/blog/2012/01/libday-300112.html/feed 0 http://www.chuukaku.com/blog/2012/01/dream-2.html http://www.chuukaku.com/blog/2012/01/dream-2.html#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:58:30 +0000 Katie http://www.chuukaku.com/blog/?p=235

LIS DREaM pack

This was the second of the LIS DREaM (Developing Research Methods and Excellence) workshops, this time held at the British Library in London.  As with the previous workshop, I’ll be focusing on my thoughts on applying the methods, as the workshops are so well documented. For those wanting to read more slides these (where available) are already up on the Workshop 2 webpage on via the individual talks linked below. Videos of the talks will be available in about a week.

User involvement in research – Professor Peter Beresford
Peter discussed the implications of doing user involvement in research (from commissioning it, all the way to designing studies). He didn’t strictly present this as a method, more focusing upon the ethical, methodological and pragmatic challenges of the approach, no matter what method it was used alongside.

In academic libraries I’ve found that involvement of users in research is increasingly popular: for example, with user involvement in design research in library design literature. However, Peter’s discussion of the origin of service user involvement in research among marginalised communities made me question how this research is targeted. Very often the users libraries involve in research are habitual library users: could encouraging less frequent users to conduct their own research into the library’s potential expand our user base and relevance?

Techniques from History – Dr Thomas Haigh
I appreciated that Tom split up historical research into several approaches which might be relevant to LIS research: intellectual history, social history, cultural history, institutional history & history of practice / labour. Although I’ve never been a real history fan, I’ve often found accounts of the intellectual history of a concept fascinating. A recent example was reading about the history of bibliometrics, which I found really illuminating with respect to where practice is today.

I’ll admit I was surprised how much of a social scientist I felt when listening to Tom’s talk! My research needs focus on developing services and making recommendations, and I think this is usually best served by talking to current service users, so I’m keeping this approach on the back burner for the time being. Still, it was good to learn about a method that’s entirely new to me.

Introduction to Webometrics – Professor Mike Thelwall
Mike talked about webometrics: specifically examples of using analysis of web links, the sentiment of comments on Twitter, and patterns of interaction on YouTube, and what could be learnt from gathering data on these ongoing interactions. This was the talk where I could most easily see the applications possible to my own work.

It would be interesting to look at patterns of linking to library sites and resources an academic library within its own institution using web links. However, you’d need to go beyond the public web data Mike studies: for example, looking within the virtual learning environment. Perhaps appropriately anonymised data could be negotiated to get access? Twitter commentary seemed potentially promising, but would allow limited conclusions regarding a single institution (too few comments to get much data). I wonder if you could get illuminating data by narrowing down to academic libraries via Twitter users posting @ university library accounts?

Making the bullets for others to fire (research and policy) - Professor Nick Moore
Lastly, Nick spoke about doing research which informs policy. While government policy on education and information affect academic libraries, the kind of research that I want to do is more aimed at institutional and sectoral policies. However, many of his suggestions about conducting research seemed relevant regardless, and his advice to be passionate, ahead of the curve (but not too far ahead!) and to build networks & relationships were universally applicable.

The techniques covered in this workshop were a little further out of my comfort zone than the first, so expanded my research understanding further, but left me struggling a little more to think of applications! As I’m moving jobs this week, I’m going to think quite carefully about how the methods from both workshops could be used in my new workplace. You never know how a new environment might provoke new questions!

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