October 2009 Archives

I am working on two projects right now---a book chapter on the importance of environmental scanning in public services librarianship and a research study on student digital literacy acquisition.

ECAR just released the 2009 Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, and there are many aspects of the report that relate to both of my current projects.  Information literacy, use of technology in the classroom, and student adoption of mobile technologies (and higher ed's responsiveness to this trend) are just some of the area covered in the report.  I'll start with what this report shares relevant to environmental scanning, future trends, and libraries.

Environmental scanning is a powerful tool for gathering critical and strategic information relevant to an organization's current initiatives and future direction.  This information can be taken from a variety of sources, including current literature reviews, recent research, interviews and focus groups.  The data is synthesized to create a portrait of the current issues and future trends that must be addressed to be certain that the organization retains effectiveness and relevance.

All that said, documents like the ECAR report are an excellent contributory resource for an environmental scan.  This report focuses on freshman and senior samples at a variety of colleges and  universities.  If I were working on an environmental scan for use in an academic library,  one of the major aspects of this report to use deals with student adoption of mobile devices.

From the report:

Good news for the library web site:  94.6% of student respondents use the library web site on average of once a week.

73% said they were actively using the library web site for their coursework at the time of the survey.  That's more often that course management systems (73%), presentation software (73.5%) or spreadsheets (53.2%). I have not seen robust, reported use like this, well, ever.  Color me surprised.

IM use is on the decline among students (74% report using IM with a median of several times per week) as opposed to 90.3% for social network use and texting (median daily use.)

And a student quote from the report:  "After describing the institution's library
system as "amazing," the student wrote, "I love it how I can send a text message on my
phone to locate the book." (p. 62) 

There's much more to read in the report on the current state of student mobile adoption and use, but I would (from an environmental scanning standpoint, of course) take this as a warning bell for several initiatives:

1)  Design a mobile interface for the library's web site as soon as possible.  (We are currently working on this within the context of the overall redesign of the Penn State Libraries web site.)
The report shows that mobile use is rapidly growing, and will soon be the primary way that many users visit web sites.

2)  Design a mobile app that integrates the library with other university-specific resources just as quickly.  (There was a quote somewhere in the report about the proliferation of commercial apps, and how higher ed. has so far failed to maximize this opportunity to connect with students.)  I know quite a few universities have done this, and we are in the process of it at Penn State.

3)  Start thinking about eventually scaling back on IM-based reference services.  Text messaging is the way for the near future.  It is so interesting to see IM usage receding so quickly.

I'm going to try to post about the IL-related findings as well in a separate post.  If you have any thoughts on the report's findings, environmental scanning, or other things I should do while in Canada, let me know!

Pew released a new report on Twitter users today.  It has some interesting data on who updates their status frequently (or infrequently) and where the user traffic resides for this online activity.

Here are a few points I noted:

Connectedness is a slippery slope: the more devices (laptop, Kindle, iPod, mobile phone) a user owns, the more likely they are to use Twitter or another similar service to update their status. 

Twitter has a long tail: the top 10% of all Twitter users accounted for over 90% of all tweets.

Adoption increases the likelihood of more adoption: Internet users who already use sites like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn are more likely to also use Twitter: (35% of Internet users).  Users who do not use any other social networking sites are much less likely to use Twitter (6% of Internet users).

I am coming back from beyond (i.e., sabbatical in Canada) to share a report that Lorcan Dempsey discussed on his blog this week.

The Discoverability: Phase One Final Report was produced by the University of Minnesota Libraries (and specifically by a sub-group of Libraries' staff serving on the Libraries' Discoverability Team, which reports to their Web Services Steering Committee.)

This report outlines analysis of current modes of access and discoverability trends for library resources and services, also sharing recommendations to maximize greater user discovery in the future.  Our Web Steering Committee has produced a Tactical Plan, and many of the recommendations in this report back up one of our identified tactics:   "Increase the discoverability and transparency of Libraries resources and services."

Below are the five major trends shared (taken verbatim from the report):

Trend 1:  Users are discovering relevant resources outside traditional library systems.
Google was not driving users to their e-resources (journal articles, etc....)  Instead, users going to e-resources were referred from the A-Z list of journals, PubMed, the catalog, Google Scholar, and citation linker.  Web page referrals most frequently came from Google.  Use of Google Scholar is increasing.

Trend 2:  Users expect discovery and delivery to coincide.
While circulation of library materials has decreased in general at UMN, the number of recalls has exploded (undergraduate requests have increased 296% over stats from five years ago).

Trend 3:  Increasing usage of portable Internet-capable devices.
UMN does not currently track the usage of their site by devices running mobile operating systems.  1.6% of the site's traffic was from unknown operating systems, a portion of which could have been from mobile devices.  The authors state, "There is little reason to expect much traffic from mobile devices when the design of our web pages is not optimized and mobile usability is so poor."  Nicely said.  As a mobile user, I am beginning to wonder about the utility of mobile sites in general, and if an app (such as iStanford) has more utility for your core group of users.

Trend 4:  Discovery increasingly happens through recommending.
This section of the report highlights the importance of exposing collections (both print and digital) through sources like Wikipedia (14.6% of users coming from another site were referred from Wikipedia).  Also mentioned is the importance of affinity strings in building a system that automatically recommends relevant resources to the user, according to their profile.

Trend 5:  Our users increasingly rely on emerging nontraditional information objects.
Blogs, images, video, and data were mentioned in this section (the use of ArtSTOR has greatly increased over the last year at UMN).   The importance of exposing non-print, digital collections is highlighted.  (This is something I'm exploring as part of my sabbatical as well.)

The entire report is truly worth a read, including Appendix B, which lists similar discoverability initiatives and imperatives occurring at peer institutions.