Recently in Library Literature Category

I have been tortured by the need to find ways radically change some of the ways librarians as researchers handle research, authorship, peer-review, and publication.  As information professional we should be innovating in these areas and yet at least tenure-track librarians are in the same or worse boat as other faculty members in the Titanic of scholarly communication.  Sure there are bright lights, but in general and in practice we aren't practicing what we preach.  So perhaps we need to pick some low hanging fruit in the library literature.

Here is my proposal just submitted for a 20 minute webcast in the spring of 2012 to the ACRL Spring Virtual Institute (with a significant finding in bold)

Traditional one shot information literacy sessions when only one class period is devoted to the library is still common.  Librarians try to fill most of this time with the dissemination of information even though some active learning techniques are incorporated, it is still the smaller portion of time used.  This presentation showcases a method of "flipping the classroom", changing a standard information literacy session into a ten minute lecture and a forty minute hands on activity.  This can be done with no additional access to students before or after the session as long as the class can be held in a hands-on computer lab.

The information literacy lab was conducted by introducing only one library information resource, the discovery search tool (Summon). to the students.  Its features were showcased and critical evaluation of information sources was also introduced as a concept.  The remainder of time is devoted to a group assignment on evaluating information sources both on the Web in comparison to the information resource.

Students worked in groups of two to complete the assignment which was handed out on paper.  The first part explained again criteria for evaluating information sources while the second part gave 4 example sources from a Wikipedia article.  Students were asked to identify the type of information source (scholarly journal, news, book, website) and the authors with their credentials.  Then the students were asked to infer the intended audience for the information source and the usefulness of the information for their coursework later in the semester.  Finally, the students were asked to located an item in the library's discovery search interface that was of high quality in the characteristics they had explored.

Student outcomes were assessed at the end of the semester following library instruction in different sections of the same class.  A survey was administered in three sections where traditional instruction was delivered, in another a more hands on approach was used, and in another the class was "flipped".  The questions assessed:
Did students use library resources in the class and which databases were used?
Were they more critical of information sources on the World Wide Web?
Did the library instruction help them with their assignments?
Were library resources easy to find and use?
Did the library help to improve their grade in the class?

Results of the survey were similar for a few questions, but there was a dramatic increase in positive student response in two area for only the class with the hands-on instruction lab.  71% of those students indicated that they were more critical of information on the web compared to only 48% in the traditional information literacy class.  Also 96% of students responded that the the library instruction helped them with their assignments compared to 70% in the traditional sessions.  This clear improvement in two areas with no loss in others is strong data to support the hands-on information literacy lab approach.

I want to keep my summary of College and Research Libraries articles going, hopefully to benefit colleagues with no time to read every bi-monthly issue, but also perhaps to express my opinion on the research therein.

How Unique Are Our Users? Comparing Responses Regarding the Information-Seeking Habits of Engineering Faculty by Sarah Robbins, Debra Engel, and Christina Kulp - Survey across 20 institutions of over 900 engineering faculty finds statistically similar attitudes and behaviors concerning libraries.  That means practitioner research librarians can publish local studies that may be generalizable to similar user groups at other institutions.

The Information-Seeking Habits of Engineering Faculty by Sarah Robbins, Debra Engel, and Christina Kulp (yes the same three, and I did reorder their names and the article order in the journal) - See my mini-rant below, but this study did find some interesting user behaviors about Engineering faculty including less than half did patent information searching (but still 47%).  I would love to see the primary data from this study put in an open access data repository.  Drool!

Information Literacy Instruction and Assessment in an Honors College Science Fundamentals Course by Corey M. Johnson, Carol M. Anelli, Betty J. Galbraith, and Kimberly A. Green - I really liked the assignment and exam approach here with very good examples.  Collaboration between librarians and teaching faculty was key and produced significant learning of science information seeking behaviors.  Still some difficulty in applying their approach at other institutions, and I think some of the questions may have used library jargon or allowed only one retrieval approach.

Academic Libraries in For-Profit Schools of Higher Education by Jinnie Y. Davis, Mignon Adams, and Larry Hardesty - Some things I didn't know but you can see a great deal of their observations by looking at a job ad for librarian positions at these institutions.  Good points about interaction with other academic and public libraries.

"Changing the Way We Talk": Developing Librarians' Competence in Emerging Technologies through a Structured Program by Mark Pegrum and Ralph Kiel - Would love to implement as librarian and staff training.  Just the scale seems a bit large to handle. Could I #makeithappen?  Also you may note the article only lists 26 numbered references, so how could it be published in C&RL.  Well, I found that most of the endnotes contained two or more references, so it meets the regular 50-100 for the journal.

Mini-rant: So in How Unique Are Our Users they admit that their data analysis shows you CAN use survey data from similar populations, but then go on to conclude "So what?" you can do "Very little." with that.  Other than sinking what I thought was a very important point for research/practitioners (me and other Penn State librarians) they also somewhat poke a hole in their other paper in this issue of C&RL.  THAT article by the way looks at the same data from the same survey in order to make a general point, which is basically that the ITHAKA study is right - academic faculty really DO want more electronic resources.  By the way the conclusion in this latter article has 19 sentences of which 7 are questions including if the findings about engineering faculty are generalizable to other engineers!

I am currently working on a research article on the Fields medal and Abel prize in mathematics.  What is interesting is the large clusters of winners around certain factors such as nationality, alma mater, affiliation, and focus of study in mathematics.  So I am putting my projections based on that for the four winners of the fields medal.  Please feel free to combine these features (one from each line) to determine if you could be a potential winner!

Nationality: France, Russia, UK, US
Alma Mater: Ecole Normale Superieure, Moscow State University, Princeton, University of Cambridge
Working at: Institute for Advanced Study, Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, Princeton
Publishing in: Algebraic Geometry, Functional Analysis, Manifolds and Cell Complexes

Oh and you should probably be 35 years old... so good luck Kai-Wen Lan at Princeton (one example).

I wanted to tweet about this but it started to get over 140 characters.  Plus Twitter is about to get hammered by #LDSC09 soon.

I have found 3 citations of the paper I wrote with Tom Conkling over a year ago in the Journal of Academic Librarian.  The first to show up was in JAL and an alert came from Web of Science by Thompson Reuters, and the same citation showed up a few weeks later in Scopus by Elsevier.  If use Google Scholar, however, you can find two other citations: one in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship and the other at an IEEE conference, both significant and scholarly.

It points back to the central problem as often asked of me as a librarian, "Is there one way to track citations for a paper or a person?"  And my answer is "No, not yet."

Every Library’s Nightmare? Digital Rights Management, Use Restrictions, and Licensed Scholarly Digital Resources Kristin R. Eschenfelder - Eh.  An intriguing examination of "soft" DRM, such as warnings or limitations on use that have workaround or obfuscated solutions.  The paper does categorize these "soft" restrictions for later researchers.  Engineering was one of the subjects studies, but only a few specific instances were noted (one old) and no quantitative list was presented.

Status of Approval Plans in College Libraries Beth E. Jacoby - This would have been useful required reading before the PSU Libraries Collection Development retreat where we looked at coordinating our approval plan among one main campus and 23 college campuses (one university, geographically distributed), but I got behind in my C&RL reading.  I found out Penn State used to have a "Ogontz" campus, name changes keep my mind boggled.

What’s in a Name? Using Card Sorting to Evaluate Branding in an Academic Library’s Web Site Peter Hepburn and Krystal M. Lewis - Shocking reality check about library branded services.  A must read for any library web committee (at least the Findings and Table 1 sections for the time challenged)

Adjusting to the Workplace: Transitions Faced by New Academic Librarians Joanne Oud - Best Article (for me and Russ anyway)  Though it is about University Librarians in Canada, this will be a landmark study in my research agenda.  Great survey of new academic librarians that impacts mentoring, job training, hiring, collection development, and instruction (Russ!).  The questions were well contructed and the results are sometimes surprising and always quantitative.  I would love to duplicate this survey in the U.S. or at Penn State.

Transition to Electronic Resources in Undergraduate Social Science Research: A Study of Honors Theses Bibliographies, 1999–2005 Leslie Kriebel and Leslie Lapham - co-writing my own article about electronic resources in a subject area has taught me not to skip an article if it doesn't directly address your subject area.  This is a good study of undergraduate theses that reinforces our expectation that Websites are increasing in student citations, E-journals are trumping print, yet perhaps surprisingly e-Books are a flop (only 1% of citations where almost 9% of the citations were available as e-Books).  This reminds me to look at habits of grad students and not just faculty in my own citation studies.

Better than Brief Tests: Coverage Power Tests of Collection Strength by Howard D. White was the last article in the March 2008 C&RL issue that I didn't get to in my last review of the journal.  This was a pretty long article on a topic that I am recently interested in exploring: assessing collection development.  It does open with the disclaimer "When this article was first submitted, WorldCat users could easily perform coverage power tests as described below.  They cannot now...", which leaves me wondering if I can try to repeat the Methodology at all.  I hope so, this is a very good article on what comparing holding lists with OCLC really can mean, when the quantitative data is most meaningful, and the author is an experienced expert on the process.  A good background read, but perhaps less a less practical example.

Research Productivity Among Librarians: Factors Leading to Publications at Penn State by Joseph Fennewald paints an encouraging environment for professional publication that does indeed exist here at Penn State. I also like the fact that the most productive type of faculty librarian (in journals and books) is MLS plus a second Masters (like me).

A Mixed-Methods Investigation of the Relationship between Critical Thinking and Library Anxiety among Undergraduate Students in their Information Search Process by Nahyun Kwon reinforces an earlier study on correlation between anxiety and success for library users. A good map (textual and visual) for library service desk interaction and advice for general interaction of library staff with users.

Measuring Students’ Information Literacy Skills through Abstracting: Case Study from a Library & Information Science Perspective by Maria Pinto, Andrés Fernández-Ramos, and Anne-Vinciane Doucet is a very long article with lots of figures and tables on abstracting, which I found out from a colleague is a totally separate "profession" in some ways to librarianship. I certainly didn't study it in library school (should I have gone to Spain?)

Better than Brief Tests: Coverage Power Tests of Collection Strength by Howard D. White

My first peer reviewed (co-authored) article appeared in May and my first solo article in a major journal appears in June, here are the citations.

Meier, J.J. & Conkling, T.W. "Google Scholar's Coverage of the Engineering Literature: An Empirical Study," Journal of Academic Librarianship, May 2008

Meier, J.J. "Chat widgets on the library website: Help at the point of need," Computers in Libraries, June 2008