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!
Thanks John. Another job well done.