Top trends of 2012 - a la ACRL

I had missed this when it had come out and had it not been for the posting in iLibrarian, I might not have seen it until, oh, 2013.  The ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee released its annual Top Ten Trends in Academic Libraries in the June, 2012 issue of College & Research Libraries.  I like these kinds of things because, when taken altogether, the most important issues tend to become more noticeable from the "noise" of the chaos of the information revolution.  I especially look for what I may have been missing.  So, here is their list and how I am involved, as Collection Assessment Librarian at the University of North Texas Libraries:

• Communicating Value: "Academic libraries must prove the value they provide to the academic enterprise."
• It is not terribly surprising that this issue is the first one listed.  It references the group's own Value of Academic Libraries report and the Lib-Value project.  While I'm not currently involved in value-related research, I know that it is being pursued by the administration and I hope to assess collection use with grades.
• Data Curation: 
• Data curation challenges are increasing as standards for all types of data continue to evolve; more repositories, many of them cloud-based, will emerge; librarians and other information workers will collaborate with their research communities to facilitate this process.
• Our own Spenser Karelis and Shannon Stark have been pursuing this problem through action-oriented research.  I hope to eventually look into associations of data curation and availability with citation rates and grant funding.
•  Digital Preservation:
• As digital collections mature, concerns grow about the general lack of long-term planning for their preservation. No strategic leadership for establishing architecture, policy, or standards for creating, accessing, and preserving digital content is likely to emerge in the near term.
• I recently read an article that reported on research on the impact of digital collections in history literature (Sinn, Donghee. 2012. Impact of digital archival collections on historical research. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63 (8): 1521-37).  I would very much like to repeat this method evaluating the impact of our own digital collections on social sciences literature.
• Higher Education
• Higher education institutions are entering a period of flux, and potentially even turmoil. Trends to watch for are the rise of online instruction and degree programs, globalization, and an increased skepticism of the “return on investment” in a college degree.
  
  Shifts in the higher education surround will have an impact on libraries in terms of expectations for development of collections, delivery of collections and services for both old and new audiences, and in terms of how libraries continue to demonstrate value to parent institutions.
• With the increasing pressure for libraries, particularly at publicly-funding institutions, to prove their value, collection development activities will likely include a wider array of assessment measures beyond simple usage.  I would like to develop a method to compare current and near-future curriculum and course planning with our collections in order to ensure that resources will meet the expected demand.  I would also like to compare highly-used resources against little-used resources to determine what could "predict" usage in the future.  
• Information Technology
• Technology continues to drive much of the futuristic thinking within academic libraries. 
• This list emphasizes the issues and recommendations in the 2012 Horizon Report put out by The New Media Consortium.  These include social media/networks, collaborative learning, online/hybrid learning, and challenge-based and active learning.  While I wouldn't say that our library is at the bleeding edge of technological developments, I would say we have been early adopters of most technological trends.  I would, however, like to lead an assessment of how certain features and functions could be developed or modified to improve the findability, accessibility and usage of our collections.  For instance, I would like us to implement faceted searching in our catalog like we have in our digital collections (see this example).  In addition, I would like us to better integrate our ILLiad service with our online resources to make it easier to request physical items, especially as we have had to cut so many of our resources.
• Mobile Environments
• Mobile devices are changing the way information is delivered and accessed.
• The UNT Libraries will be experimenting with loaning and access to resources for mobile devices. Like the item above, I hope to be involved in making collection decisions based, at least in part, on the accessibility of the content on mobile devices.  There is little point in paying for resources that have such poor usability that they are simply not used.
• Patron-Driven E-Book Acquisitions
• Patron-Driven Acquisition (PDA) of e-books is poised to become the norm. For this to occur, licensing options and models for library lending of e-books must become more sustainable.
• This is something in which I am currently heavily involved.  Our own foray into PDA or Demand-Driven Acquisitions has been considered successful, with nearly 75% of ebooks purchased by our clients being used at least one time after purchase in the first 6 months of the project.  This far surpasses multiple usage of other ebook providers.  While I have analyzed the content of the collections fairly extensively, comparing subject distribution with our print and other ebook providers, I would next like to examine differences in usage based on more narrow subject categories, publishers, content-level, and publication year.  I would also like to learn how our patrons select and use these ebook resources, again, in an effort to be able to predict such usage.
• Scholarly Communication
• New scholarly communication and publishing models are developing at an ever-faster pace, requiring libraries to be actively involved or be left behind. 
• The University of North Texas has been taking further strides in the paradigm shift of scholarly communication.  The university has recently required faculty to submit their scholarly outputs to its institutional repository (IR) (UNT Scholarly Works), and although there are certain allowable exceptions, it is significant step forward.  The Library has also stepped up efforts in this area by creating a position devoted to scholarly communication.  In addition, we have been making more concerted efforts towards supporting Open Access publications, by adding OA titles to our collection and providing OA publication fees for our faculty.  I would like to establish the regular review of the impact of our efforts, including OA articles, items in the IR and grant proposals.  I am also interested in the recent efforts to change the landscape of textbooks, particularly regarding OA and institutional licensing of texts for introductory texts.  
• Staffing
• Academic libraries must develop the staff needed to meet new challenges through creative approaches to hiring new personnel and deploying/retraining existing staff.
• This is an issue that is of much concern at most libraries.  A balance of stability and flexibility is needed to ensure that our human resources are being used most effectively.  Simply moving people into new areas without appropriate training, consultation, or consideration of the human element will often result in failure.  Conversely, perpetual planning with little action will result in declining services and impact of the library.  I hope to be involved in the assessment of staff changes that could be used to make modifications and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of workflows.
• User behaviors and expectations
• Convenience affects all aspects of information seeking—the selection, accessibility, and use of sources.
• The impact of the collection depends at least in part on the findability and usability of the resources.  I would like to learn how our patrons make decisions on which items to use for different purposes and to use this information to improve selection and findability.  

As you can see, most of my comments begin with "I would like to..." or "I expect to...".  These are aspirational in nature and reveal my ideas.  I just need to ensure that I follow through on these and not get sucked into routine or tangent efforts that distract me from what is more important.

"Library Cube"...on my wish list

In the article, Discovering the Impact of Library Use and Student Performance in EDUCAUSE Review Online, the Library Cube put together by the University of Wollongong Library in Australia is highlighted.  This data warehousing solution pulls together data about students (anonymized), schools (called, "faculties"), and library resource usage.  The library administrators and librarians who manage programs and collections can not only demonstrate that those who use the libraries resources score higher grades, but also can identify groups that do not use the resources as much as others.  This could be used to investigate reasons and develop methods and programs to address this disparity.

As Collection Assessment Librarian, here is what I could do with this data:

• Associate resource usage (print and online) with grades, degree completion, schools, years in the program, on- versus off-campus, student backgrounds (like locations of high schools or community colleges, family income, work loads, ages)...
• Associate collection coverage with courses much more easily than the manual or semi-manual process we do now.
• Demonstrate to faculty any disparities of usage of resources assigned (this refers to the copyright case in Georgia where it was found that they were not in violation of copyright for many of the items posted online because they were simply not used!)
• Determine how different or how similar different student groups are in terms of library usage.
• Identify the groups of students or faculty who never use the library in order to conduct additional research to find out what they do use and how we could reach them better.

This kind of connection of student and school measures with resource usage measures is becoming more prominent in other countries, but less so here in the United States.  

This line from the video, "At the heart of Library Cube is the Student Number," points out the key reason, I believe.  Concerns about privacy have led to policies that unnecessarily restrict the sharing of key data.  There are ways to make the data effectively anonymous, but there is still great reluctance.  Technology is another obstacle, but one that should not be hard to overcome.  Our library is veering ever so slightly in this direction, starting with our face-to-face instruction sessions and some courses that are taught largely through Blackboard.  I hope that the results will convince the decision-makers that this method can and should be used to help make informed decisions while not infringing on students' rights and not imposing unnecessary work on the data gatherers.

Textbook affordability & libraries

With the economic crisis droning on ad infinitum, I've decided that I really missed out not taking an economics course.  When planning my liberal studies program, I had avoided anything that was even close to business courses.  Having lived an additional 20 years, though, I have realized that economics is as important a subject in the social sciences as anthropology and history.  So, I've picked up a few books at my library here (I love being at a general university!) and have started learning a few things.  For instance, did you know that as resources become limited, the cheaper goods become more in demand?  OK, I had learned that one on my own (why else would I shop at Walmart?), but having these basics now at the front of my mind increases my awareness of the economics of everyday life.

Thus it is with textbooks.  As funding for education gets tighter (for students and for institutions), we start looking around for cheaper alternatives.  Textbooks are third in the list of educational expenses - behind tuition and room & board.  My concerns about textbooks has grown since I returned to the field of librarianship and sold many of my old public health books.  Three years before, I had gotten rid of my old LIS books (many of which dated to the 1980s & early 1990's).  What was the point?  I kept these books because they were expensive and because I thought I would need to refer to them regularly in my professional life.  This was not the case.  Except for my biostats book (Rosner, 6th edition - great book), I've rarely re-opened any of my texts.

Some of the best classes I took did not even include a textbook - the readings were hand-selected by the professor and the discussions drawn from them were stimulating and enlightening.  This has led me to conclude that textbooks are a shortcut for faculty whose time is limited for teaching.  This is effectively pushing the cost of developing a curriculum from the institution (who should have paid for the time of the faculty to create the curriculum) to the student and/or the financial aid providers.

So it is with interest that I've been reading about alternatives to textbooks (necessity is the mother of invention, eh?).  Here's a posting on the ACRL Value of Academic Libraries blog about the Alternative Textbooks project. It's exciting to see libraries involved in getting faculty to use its resources (what a thought!) and helping student-retention.  The University of Southern Florida's T.A.P. site serves as a good hub of information about this paradigm shift in curriculum planning. The biggest initiatives towards making textbooks more affordable include Open Access textbooks and class licensing of e-textbooks (McGraw-Hill), which may be a compromise with publishers.

The programs mentioned in the ACRL Value posting are more intriguing because of their involvement with the libraries.  California State University system advocates for faculty to work with their library to identify local resources to support the curriculum.  The key to these programs is providing small amounts of money to pay the faculty to develop their own "texts" using OA and library resources (emphasis added):

At Temple University Libraries we are now in the second year of our local Alternate Textbook Project. In each round ten faculty receive a $1,000 grant to develop an alternate textbook. Although boosting student retention is not explicitly stated, the Project has multiple outcomes: (1) save students money to improve college affordability; (2) encourage faculty to make more use of library and open educational resources; (3) improve student learning.

I'm very interested to see how these projects pan-out and how they could enable libraries to directly impact student retention and add value to students' and universities' outcomes.

Evaluating collections...

I've kept this posting from Stephen's Lighthouse "alive" in my Google Reader, even though I have read it several times. I've been intrigued mostly by the "honeycomb" of criteria that he actually discovered from a posting about User Experience Design:

Of course, the User Experience is the newest model to hit library assessment, so it was logical that Stephen then applied these criteria to evaluating online courses, asking questions pertinent to this library service.


I'm intrigued because I've been trying to develop my own model of evaluating collections that I could use on a regular basis.  I've been fixated on a "tripod" model, with 3 sets of 3 criteria - Usage, Scope and Depth - but I haven't made much progress down this path.  That is why this diagram caught my attention.  While  ascribed to online courses in this posting, these are the same kinds of criteria that have applied to collections of one kind or another.  

• Useful: Stephen asks, 

"What do your students do with the activities, materials, links and other content you include in your course? Does each of these itesm add to the understanding of a complex concept in some way? Or perhaps they directly support hte achievement of an established learning objective in the course?"

•  We could also ask, "What do your students (and faculty) do with the books, journals, databases, tutorials, and other content you offer in your library?"  
• Usable: Stephen focuses basic Web site usability issues, such as working links and applications.  And while we could also examine the usability of our Web interfaces to our collection (e.g. catalog, article databases, etc.), we could also evaluate the usability of our content (print books, ebooks, scores, etc.).
• Findable: While Stephen mentions "navigation and layout", findability of our resources is a very important aspect of collection assessment.  Are the items cataloged accurately and to the appropriate level? Are journal article findable using multiple access points (ejournals list, article databases, catalog, etc.)? What about the special collections?
• Credible: Stephen writes, "...it's important for the students to know the content is credible in terms of its source, purpose, currency and relevance" (original emphasis).  These are among the most established criteria of collection assessment.  The problem is how to measure them with some semblance of objectivity.  
• Desirable: "How well does your course capture the interest of your students?" Stephen asks.  Similarly, we could ask, "How well does our collection capture the interest of our students?"  While some of our faculty may snort at such a concern, if our students are not interested in the works, even for required projects and courses, they will eschew them or use them ineffectively.  
• Accessible: While Stephen's accessibility issues are focused on Web sites, we do need to consider other aspects, including physical accessibility.  Are book stacks wheelchair accessible? Even for those without overt physical limitations - are the book shelves too high? too low? Are the books packed in too tightly?  Do the special collections require too many people to "go through" to access?  While remote shelving is becoming more common, is the delivery too cumbersome to use?
• Valuable: Stephen asks, "Does your content support your students in their pursuit of course learning objectives?"  He quotes the author of the original article, "'the user experience must advance the mission'".  So, do our collections advance the mission of the library?

This may prove to be good model on which to base our regular collection assessment; or it may be simply the re-working of old ideas.  I need to ponder this more....

Friday Frags

I've been sidelined a bit this week viewing ALA's Virtual Conference, Mapping Transformation and preparing a presentation on DDA.  So this morning I've been playing catch-up with my blog reading and there are just too many interesting things to focus on one item of interest.  So here are my Friday Frags (tip o'the hat to our library's staff blog):

• Two items on Wikipedia:
• A study of how the copyright laws "impoverish" the transfer of knowledge, specifically through Wikipedia.  This is interesting because the economist uses a control group, so there is a little more validity than just descriptive stats.
• Conversely, there are much fewer contributors to Wikipedia, and more concerning is the drop of new administrators.  The article implicates the increased scrutiny that applicants are put under, with requirements of tests of copyright knowledge, essays, and reviews of past contributions and discussions regarding their input.  While this hasn't yet impacted overall stewardship, there is concern for the future of this community.  This would be a good microcosm of human behavior to study development and maturity of societies.
• The ALCTS awarded its Microgrants (sadly, I'm not a recipient), both of which were awarded different libraries of the University of Maryland.  The Health Sciences & Human Services Library will digitize early books and journals of medicine (prior to 1800), while the UM Baltimore County Library will collect, host and archive articles by faculty from open access journals that are endangered or no longer accessible.  
• The UK has been the source of several studies on the behavior of students and their interactions with libraries.  This study from JISC focused on doctoral students, most of whom could be considered within the "Generation Y".  Interesting findings include:
• Students are not participating in the scientific conversation as much as we would think.  Only 23% regularly review blogs, and only 13% actively participate, and only 9% maintain their own blogs.
• These students do not understand open access, believing that there is no positive and possibly negative value to making their own work available.
• Students predominantly rely on secondary sources, even those in the humanities.
• There is more, but it will take me a while to read through it all.
• Reports of other studies include:
• SAGE & LISU report on demonstrating library value
• Kno's report on usage patterns of e-textbooks by different student groups (lumped together by field of study).  It would be very interesting if this data could be replicated in the print world (but it would be very time-consuming and would lack the numbers for statistical analysis).
• Innovative digitization projects are cropping up, including:
• Digitizing the AIDS Quilt - not just for posterity, but also for research
• Interesting presentations & ideas related to the ALA Virtual Conference:
• Librarian by Day's post on the Needham & Williams' mantra of "Don't do more with less..." to libraries.
• Stephen Abrams' post on 3D printing - the idea of "making things" figured prominently at the Mapping Transformation conference.
• Also, Stephen Abrams' slide show: Mirages, Maps, Menus, Flowcharts & Dreams - I need to review this 'cuz I was attempting to multitask during the conference (a distinct problem of virtual conferences).

Unfortunately, that is all the time I have to write this post.  There is much more out there...

Library value & impact on learning

I've subscribed to the feeds from the Library Impact Data Project sponsored by JISC.  While I'm really interested in their results, my main interest is with their methods.  How will the researchers be able to make rational and scientific observations about library usage and academic outcomes that are valid and useful?  Well, the answer is, not easily, as this recent post explains.  The institutions in this project are all in Great Britain, which has more centralized data, such as "UCAS points" for getting into college, as well as demographic data.  In addition, the individual institutions require all students to log into the Library's resources individually, thus providing online usage for each student.  I wanted to find out what they could learn with such a relatively rich set of data.

The latest posting does suggest that even this level of data granularity is not enough.  There were problems in distinguishing "year of study" for each student (e.g. comparing usage for those in their first year versus in their second year, etc.).  This is important because usage does vary by year of study in and of itself, so it wouldn't be possible to control for this variation when examining the impact of other factors.  Their workarounds  (such as looking only at one year) effectively reduced their sample size to such an extent that statistical analysis of the results was not possible.  Finally, they had to convert one of their most key variables from a continuous (amount of time using the library) to a dichotomous variable (used/didn't use).  This, by their own admission, makes it more difficult to see the true relationship of usage to, say, completion rates.  


But given these "health warnings" of the data, they did share some intriguing results, notably that library usage is strongly and significantly associated with dropping out:

If you do not use the library, you are over seven times more likely to drop out of your degree: 7.19, to be precise. If you do not download PDFs, you are 7.89 times more likely to drop out of your degree.  Library PC usage also has a relationship with dropping out, although in this case not using the PCs makes you 2.82 times more likely to drop out of your degree.

While there may be some concerns about the levels of granularity of the measures, their strength should be indicative that there is some sort of relationship between usage and dropping out.  This, of course, should not surprise us considerably, and the results are certainly not counter-intuitive.  Furthermore, this is solely a correlation NOT an indication of causation - but I do like what is said about these results:

What it does offer, though, is a kind of ‘early warning system’. If your students aren’t using the library, it might be worth checking in with them to make sure everything is alright. Not using the library doesn’t automatically mean you’re at risk of dropping out – in fact, the number of students who don’t use the library and don’t drop out is much, much higher than the number who do leave their course prematurely. But library usage data could be another tool within the armoury of student support services, one part of a complex picture which helps them to understand which students might be at risk of failing to complete their degree.

This posting also demonstrates to me that even when with a much richer and granular data set, there will still be problems that through a monkey wrench into the best-laid plans.

Juxtapositions for today's high-minded professionals...

I've been noticing events, postings, and articles that center around the same basic theme - the battle of higher education against the bottom-line-focused executives that either administrate or serve on the boards of our institutions. Marshall Poe discusses the importance of the university press (a service closely tied to academic libraries), with some interesting insights into the problems these services face.  Then there is the UVa debacle with the summary dismissal of the president over "philosophical differences."  These differences were the result of the business-oriented board members' frustration with the "slowness" of the president's response to their concerns.

Those who pursued an academic career (like myself) claim that they purposefully avoided for-profit employment, sacrificing higher-pay and fancy perks, in return for both greater stability and a feeling of bettering the world.  Now that the corporate mentality has taken over politics, government, and organizational governance (even in the non-profit or social services world), we feel cheated. We have the worst of both worlds - lower-than-average pay for the same kind of work, greater demands on demonstrating outcomes, and greater risk of job loss.  This growing pressure also appears to be affecting the "warm fuzzies" we counted on getting from serving the youth, the growth of knowledge, the community (local and disciplinary).

While I do believe that, as custodians and beneficiaries of funding from taxes and gifts, we librarians have an obligation to be efficient and effective in our operations, I also firmly believe that governments and non-profit organizations cannot be run like a business.  A business' primary goal is to make money.  I do not deride that objective - I believe that capitalism based on fair-play is a far better economic model than government-run economies.  But if you look at the mission statements and goals of governments, non-profits, educational and other social services, making money is not mentioned.

Interestingly, I was reading a collection of classic papers and presentations in librarianship, one of which was from Ernest Cushing Richardson.  In his opinion piece published in the ALA Bulletin in 1927, he mentioned a "trend in librarianship in the present day" to "emphasize the method of efficiency, aptitude for action, the methods of modern salesmanship...over reflection, knowledge, learning, tact, sympathy, humane developments and other factors which go to set up a connection between the knowledge which is in books and the knowledge which lives in personality"1.  Richardson goes on to advocate that libraries are, indeed, a "real business which calls for business aptitude, business experience...".  He even points out the many aspects of library operations that have been adopted by business itself, including the use of the card file, the standardization of hte index card, and the idea of standards themselves.  However, he emphasizes that "the main thing about librarianship...[is] learning or knowledge," and that "the neglect of this aspect is even more fatal than the neglect of the business side."

So, it appears that this push-and-pull between running the library (and education) like a business and very foundations of connecting individuals to knowledge is not solely a 21st century concern. How can we, as both librarians and educators, work to ensure that we neglect neither the business nor the human or knowledge side?  Richardson advocates for a "philosophy of librarianship", one that gets to the "real nature and meaning of things."  This was a real problem to librarians in this time period, one for which I believe that Ranganathan made his greatest contribution.

Interestingly, Marshall Poe presents some very intriguing ideas about the decline of university presses.  While he does mention the influence of business-oriented approach to cutting anything that doesn't generate enough revenue, he also discusses the dependency of UP's on libraries to purchase these works (and the current decline in library budgets to continue this relationship), as well as the overall decline in reading in the population, even the learned population.  Finally, he blames the UP management themselves for not "getting" the Internet and how it could be leveraged to reduce the "brick and mortar" expenses and increase exposure and readership.  This, however, requires a major shift in a fundamental aspect of UP's: making content available for free.  This shift in focus from producing a product (a book) to providing a service (editing content provided by academics seeking recognition and promotion) could enable the presses to continue to serve their original mission of disseminating knowledge.

This appears to be one example of how the high-minded professionals in education and librarianship can manage the pressures to "economize" and change our practices and operations while still dealing in our core business of knowledge.

1. Richardson, Ernest Cushing. "Book and Person Who Knows the Book."  In, American Library Philosophy: An Anthology.  McCrimmon, Barbara, ed.  Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press, 1975; ppg. 51-62.