Gathering the Librarian Perspective on Research Support
By Colin Nickels and Hilary Davis
At the NCSU Libraries one of our core services is research support. We often hear from our campus community that they weren’t aware of what we have to offer or didn’t know where to go to get help. In order to reach more people and build awareness of our services, we have embarked on a research project to learn what researchers value from libraries, which library services they overlook, and to uncover their emerging needs. Our study involves two rounds of semi-structured interviews to gather deep qualitative data about our researchers in order to improve outreach to our research community. In this article, we’ll take a look at our first round and its outcomes.
In the first round of interviews,we convened 26 small groups of stakeholders for half hour interviews. The goal was to capture both a snapshot of research support from the libraries’ perspective and to solicit questions and names of researchers for the second round of interviews that will be conducted with researchers. Our interview guide for librarians and library staff is broken down into a few themes: perceptions of research support, outreach, and researcher requests.
We asked five questions that centered on librarians’ perceptions of research support.. We started off broadly with, “What are the primary services that the library offers researchers?” and then narrowed it down by asking what kind of help the participants offer to researchers. Not surprisingly, responses focused on access to collections, help via consultations, and support around scholarly communication (e.g., identifying which journals to publish in, research data management support), and support with developing search strategies. Some responses we didn’t anticipate centered on supporting researchers’ use of altmetrics, obtaining DOIs, training researchers to use data visualization tools, learning to program, and enabling access to modeling kits, prototyping tools, and digital media equipment (e.g., from graphing calculators to VR headsets). Librarians commented that the technology lending collection can be a great resource to researchers both in collecting data, and also in creating outputs like video abstracts or podcasts. We then asked questions that surfaced requests from researchers that we haven’t been able to support for various reasons: “Are there any services that researchers ask for that we don’t currently provide?” We followed-up by asking if there are any services we don’t currently offer that we should consider. This question is posed with the assumption that we have infinite resources to support these potential new services.
To get a sense of the outreach modes that librarians and library staff use, we asked: “What are all the outreach modes you’ve tried and what has been the most effective?” This question is meant to solicit a list of successful outreach methods. Librarians responded with a large range of outreach methods. Email was both the most useful and least useful method: it reaches a lot of inboxes, but it doesn’t necessarily get read and internalized.
To surface potential questions that we could use in our interviews with researchers, we asked the participants if they have any questions for researchers, and for the names of any researchers they think we should contact. One of the goals of this project is to test librarians’ assumptions about researchers and to gain practical insights about how researchers work. We’ve found that assumptions are often exposed in the questions we want to ask researchers. We asked librarians and library staff, “What one question are you dying to ask researchers? What don’t you understand about how researchers work or what researchers need?” both to collect a question bank for our second round of interviews, and to examine any hidden assumptions we make about researchers. One response to these questions was a request to ask researchers, “How do you find out about library collections, services, expertise, tech, spaces?” The crux of this question is discovery: how do researchers discover our resources. The hidden assumption here is that researchers use our resources and succeed in discovering them. Other questions that librarians wanted to ask researchers ranged from “Have you attended a library event?” to “How can the library help with the promotion and tenure process?”
As part of sharing about progress on this project with local stakeholders, we conducted two activities to encourage librarians to think critically about what kinds of insights they would like to learn from researchers: one activity at the annual Cooperating Raleigh Colleges Librarian Workshop (July 2018), and another at an internal Share With a Peer (SWAP) seminar (April 2018). We collected a large number of questions and feedback at both events. You can read more about our survey/questionnaire for researchers as well as the activities we conducted at the CRC workshop and our SWAP events.
If you’ve skipped ahead and glanced through our interview guide, then you’ll see that I’ve left one question out: “How do you think the outcomes of the initiative would help you in your work?” This question has turned out to be difficult to ask and to answer. I think its difficulty is connected to its nature. It’s a reflective question: It requires a step back from the rest of the interview. It also asks the participant to understand the goals and potential outcomes of the research and then to apply those to their department or role in the library.
We completed this round of interviews in spring 2018. Since then we have coded and analyzed our notes in a set of early findings. You can find a copy of our early findings presentation here. Do you have any thoughts, comments, or questions? Want to engage with us further? Leave a comment below or reach us via email at crnickel@ncsu.edu or hmdavis4@ncsu.edu.
