Library 2.012 Virtual Conference - FREE!

Given all the cuts to libraries and particularly to librarian professional development (including travel), I actively seek and would like to promote those opportunities that are cost-effective.  And how much more cost-effective can you get with something that is free?  (OK, your time is money, but eliminating conference fees and travel expenses boosts the cost-effective equation tremendously.)

The Library 2.012 Virtual Conference is next week and there are 148 presentations (and counting) scheduled over 2 days.  They cover six different "strands":

• STRAND 1: Libraries – Physical and Virtual Learning Spaces

• STRAND 2: Librarians & Information Professionals – Evolving Professional Roles in Today’s World

• STRAND 3: Content & Creation – Organizing and Creating Information

• STRAND 4: Changing Delivery Methods

• STRAND 5: User Centered Access

• STRAND 6: Mobile and Geo-Social Information Environments

Here is a sampling of the presentations:

• ALA Presents Ebook Business Models for Public Libraries
• Cultivating Culture: Promising Virtual Practices for Indigenous Communities
• Toward a Sustainable Embedded Librarian Program
• DDA@UNT: How's that workin' for ya'?
• DDA in the Real World: How does our DDA compare with our other book collections?

OK, I confess...the list is a bit biased...the last two are mine.  I hope these will be a stimulating look at what our patrons have selected and how they compare with our print and EBSCO eBooks collection.  This will be my first presentations using WeCollaborate, which provides a slightly more interactive environment than simple webcasting. 

But even if my topic of demand-driven acquisitions is not on your radar, consider taking a moment to look at the options available and take advantage of this opportunity to see what others have done.

Library 2.012: Worldwide Virtual Conference

The Library 2.012 Worldwide Virtual Conference will take place October 3-5, 2012.  This is a free Web-based conference that will include presentations essentially around the clock (since it’s around the world).  The topics will cover these areas:

STRAND 1: Libraries – Physical and Virtual Learning Spaces


STRAND 2: Librarians & Information Professionals – Evolving Professional Roles in Today’s World


STRAND 3: Content & Creation – Organizing and Creating Information


STRAND 4: Changing Delivery Methods


STRAND 5: User Centered Access


STRAND 6: Mobile and Geo-Social Information Environments

You can review the accepted presentations list to decide which ones to attend. 

Disclaimer: I will be making two presentations about our Demand-Driven Acquisitions program:

10/3, 2-3pm: DDA at UNT: How's that workin' for ya'?

10/4, 11am: DDA In the Real World: How does our DDA compare with our other book collections?

Library included in Princeton Review survey

Library Journal posted a piece about the 2013 Princeton Review college rankings, which now includes an item about the library.  This is a survey of about 122,000 students asking their opinions of various aspects of the colleges they are attending.  The particular question was,  “How do you rate your school’s library facilities?” and the responses are on 5-point Likert scale ranging from "Excellent" to "Awful".  The Princeton Review then ranks the institutions by each item and provides two lists: "Best College Library" and "This is a Library?".  Like other surveys of students, these kinds of reports provide only limited information from a very limited viewpoint.  Students are not asked to make comparisons and no other information is taken into account for the two lists.

Taking all this into consideration, it is interesting to see how some libraries fared.  Of the 20 in the "Best College Library" list, 6 were Public and 14 were Private (30%).  Of the 20 in the "This is a Library?", only 3 (9%) were Public.  For comparison, only 5% of the "Students Study the Most" were Public, but 85% of the "Students Study the Least" were Public (hmmm...).   Interestingly, 20% of the "This is a Library?" group were also in the "This is a Dorm?" group, while 15% of the "Best College Library" had the Best College Dorms".  Ok, so there isn't that much overlap there...

What about happy students?  Are the schools with the happiest students similar to the schools with the best libraries (survey says....)?  Well, not really...only 10% overlap.  However, 20% of the "This is a Library?" group were also in the "Least Happy Students" group -- the same group in the "This is a Dorm?" group.  OK, so there seems to be a set of schools with very dissatisfied students.

Finally, what about financial aid and administration.  Well, 20% of the "Best College Library" group were in the "Best Run Colleges" group, while 25% of the "This is a Library?" group were in the "Administrators get low Marks" group...again, all but one of the same schools that overlapped in other categories.  Finally, 35% of the "Best College Library" group were also in the "Best Financial Aid" group (all private schools, of course) [NOTE: one of the Best College Library group was the US Military Academy - no financial aid required].  Conversely, only 10% of those in the "This is a Library?" group were in the "Financial Aid Not So Great" group.

OK, that's all well and good, but it is just a survey of students' opinions...which makes me wonder if there is some correlation with LibQual+.  Unfortunately, my university is not represented in the list of schools...is that purposeful?  Did our administration opt-out?  Oh well, the Princeton Review survey does not provide near the detail or information that LibQual does - we have no idea why Drexel was in the "This is a Library?" group when it has a prestigious School of Information (or did I just answer my own question?).

Daydreamin'

When I start a new project, the first step is usually a literature review.  I want to find out what others have learned about the problem or issue I am hoping to resolve with my project.  Given that I am starting three new projects, I have been doing a lot of reading lately, and this, of course, leads me on other tangents of ideas.  To provide some context, the three projects are:

• Evaluating the impact of the libraries' resources on the success of grant applications.
• Developing and implementing a Collection Assessment Plan.
• Investigate the feasibility of essentially "classifying" the courses offered in order to more effectively assess the coverage of our collections.

So my literature reviews have covered citation analysis & bibliometrics, assessment of research and grants, collection development and assessment, and classification.  The tangents that I have wandered down include:

• Development of a Research Impact Measurement Service (RIMS), as provided by the University of New South Wales, Australia.
• Provide citation analysis and bibliometric analysis of publications for individual faculty, as well as departments and administrative units.  
• See this presentation and this article for details.
• Assessing the impact of the library on the local community by measuring links to the university on the Web sites of local organizations and public services.
• My MLS professional paper (well, really, it was a thesis) was analyzing the distribution of links on academic medical library Web sites.  This paper from JASIST evaluates the use of different methods to count links, which is what sparked this idea.
• Assessing the impact of the libraries' digital collections on the research and education community by citation analysis and Web link analysis.  
• This paper, also from JASIST, lit that spark in me.  It is too easy to stay focused on books, journals and databases when assessing the collections.  While our team regularly evaluates the usability and the content of our digital collections, there hasn't been as much research into their true impact in the communities they serve.

Of course, the common theme is assessment of our collections, but the directions are from there are different, from extending into the local community to developing a new service for our faculty and administration.  This can be a very interesting job.

Measures of reach

On the ACRL Value of Academic Libraries blog, Joseph Matthews discusses measures of reach and impact that were recommended waaaaay back in the mid- 1990's (about the time I started my professional training).  Now, nearly 20 years later, we still haven't made much progress.  Part of that is will (only recently have we had the need to do this), and part of it is technical...it's just not that easy to get these measures.  Here are some examples, with my comments about the technical feasibility of obtaining these values:

• The percent of courses with materials in the reserve reading room.
• Possible, but difficult. This would require access to the courses database and manually matching up courses with data from the ILS.  
• The percent of students enrolled in these courses who actually checked out/downloaded reserve materials.
• Not terribly difficult, but not very accurate. A gross value of this could be generated simply by using the total number of enrolled students divided by the total number of users with status of "student" with a circulation greater than 1.  But this is not really accurate - individuals in the numerator may or may not actually be counted in the denominator.  
• The percent of courses requiring term papers based on materials in the library’s collections.
• Ugh - how would we do this?  I can't imagine the work involved in a census of all courses, but surveying a random sample of courses would provide fairly reliable estimates.
• The percent of courses requiring students to use the library for research projects
• See above...Possible to get estimates, but not easily.
• The number of students who checked out library materials.
• The number of undergraduate (and graduate) students who borrowed materials from the library.
• These two are similar to #2 above - fairly easy to get rough estimates.  
• The number of library computer searches initiated by undergraduates.
• This is virtually impossible to measure here.  Our users are not required to log into the databases unless they are off-campus.  While users of in-library computers must log in, there are far more users who use their laptops and own PCs.
• Percent of library study spaces occupied by students.
• We are finally starting to put card-swipes on some of our classrooms.  Eventually, we hope to put them on all study rooms.  But there are still many open areas that would be impossible to measure usage.  
• Number of pages photocopied by students.
• Easy to get...practically useless now.  However, we can get usage of ebooks, including page and chapter downloads.  Unfortunately, we can not yet distinguish user types because they usually do not need to log in.
• Percent of freshmen students not checking out a library book.
• Good idea - need to get a handle on non-usage.  This is the antithesis of items discussed above.
• The percent of faculty who checked out library materials.
• Fairly easy to get and fairly valid.  The Faculty population is more stable than the students, so a ratio of gross measures would likely be more valid.
• The number of articles and books published by faculty members.
• The number of references cited in faculty publications that may be found in the library’s collections.
• Difficult but highly useful.  I'm working towards a systematic way of collecting this information.

In general, the recommendation was to provide:

• The percent (undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and researchers) who borrowed materials
• Easy to get rough estimates
• The percent who downloaded online materials
• The percent who used the physical and virtual collections.
• Virtually impossible in our environment.  

So, you can see, it takes more than simple recommendations.  The technical environment would need to be changed to support this.

More and more data on libraries

I finally had time to carefully examine the results from the Library Impact Data Project (sponsored by JISC). Just a reminder, this is a study that attempts to find the level, if any, of correlation between usage of library resources (as measured by visits, PC logins, logins to resources, etc.) and educational outcomes (as measured by grades, graduation level, and completion).  This is exactly what those who are associated with the ACRL Value of Academic Libraries project have been advocating.

Ellen Collins, the primary statistician for the study, posted the most statistically significant results to their blog (see Final Blog).  Unlike many statisticians, she has done an excellent job in presentation.  I was pleased that she posted effect sizes rather than raw values.  This is important because effect sizes are so much more informative than the values, even when the latter is presented with statistical significance.  Significance by itself only tells you that the differences between the groups you're comparing are not likely due to chance alone.  Sometimes this is because the differences are quite large - sometimes, particularly with very large sample sizes, the differences may be rather small.  By reporting the differences as "effect sizes", which takes into consideration variation within the groups, we, the readers, get a better understanding of how big that difference actually is.

It was also quite nice that she used colors to highlight the size and direction of the effect sizes.  This makes the charts so much quicker to read and easier to understand.  Here is one example:



Without this use of colors, she would have had to add more text to indicate the direction (the sign is irrelevant to direction) and it would have taken the reader more time to make sense of the values.  Finally, she does not include data for relationships that showed no statistically significant correlation.  This saves space and the time of the reader to skim through.  For a peer-reviewed journal article, though, she would likely need to show these values so that the reader would be able to verify this information.

Now to the results - Like all good statisticians, she starts with the basics - associations of demographics with the library usage. In her discussions, she is careful to detail some limitations to the results and analysis.  One of these is that some groupings were too small to analyze because they couldn't protect student identities and such analyses wouldn't produce valid conclusions.  Another is that the effect sizes of the associations of demographic variables with library usage, while statistically significant, were not very large (she thoughtfully included descriptions of ranges of effect sizes).  It's important to look at demographics first because these are factors that are beyond the control of the library, and if the effects were large, they could confound the relationship of associations between usage and outcomes.  I would have liked to have seen, however, similar analyses of demographics with educational outcomes.

After determining that demographics have very little effect on library usage, she then looked at disciplines in both broad and more narrow groupings (see Findings Post 2).  This has the most substantive, although admittedly less surprising, results.  Comparing all the other broad "subject groups" to social sciences (the "majority" set of users), those in the Arts, as well as Computer Science & Engineering fields used the library significantly less in nearly all measures of usage.  Interestingly, those in the Arts showed stronger effects of lower usage in the electronic resources measures.  Now, the Arts includes video and music, and there are a growing number of streaming services that would support these fields.  I glanced at the Huddersfield Library's resources for music and noticed only a few of these streaming services.  These results could provide the support needed for additional funding.  While it is not surprising that CS&E students did not borrow as many books from the library as those in the social sciences, our data of ebook usage shows that books these fields had greater usage than all the other STEM titles.  While we cannot determine who used these books, many of the titles are pretty specialized.

I'll have more about these results in another post...

This editorial provides some good advice for writing and submitting articles for publication in a peer-reviewed journal like CR&L. Key notes include:

• Give the literature review section some meaning. Don't just list the studies that have been done before - provide "insights that highlight patterns, conflicts, or voids in the scholarship."
• Have, and state clearly, a research question. The literature in library science is chock-full of "studies" that are merely descriptions of programs and outcomes. The authors equate having a methodology with having a research question - you can't have one without the other.
• I'm surprised (and pleased) that the authors mentioned analysis & logic. I think this is a "lost art" that is no longer formally taught in graduate schools, let alone undergraduate, except in schools of philosophy.
• Interesting comment about tone: "some writing is too informal and personal for presentation in a scholarly publication."
• You'd think we librarians (many of whom are graduates of humanities education) would write with impecable grammar...apparently not.
• Finally, a note about relevancy: "Some articles are
  well written and interesting but really have nothing new to contribute to the field."

However, this last issue can also serve as an obstacle to those wanting (or needing) to write and publish. I often hear of those who think that the ideas they have are not important to others - "Who would care?" This is where getting feedback from a trusted colleague or mentor is priceless.

In this editorial, the authors are actually referring to simple descriptions of personal experiences (single projects at their institution) that do not contribute to the growing body of knowledge.  Here are some tips that I believe would make our projects relevant:

• Do a proper literature review (see comment above about giving the review meaning)
• Have a formal research question
• Develop a sound methodology to answer this question
• Conduct the research in a responsible way
• Discuss the results (even if the results are not "good" or supportive of your ideas) in a logical manner and within the context of previous knowledge.
• Share your results in the most appropriate contexts.