July 2010 – the Undergraduate Science Librarian

Librarians need to publish in non-library journals

Now that I’ve convinced everyone to stop going to library conferences, I’d like to make the argument that we also need to start publishing in non-library journals. Luckily, someone has already made the point for me, in a 2007 journal article that I just came across in the Journal of Academic Librarianship by Christy Stevens.

Library journals are full of articles about the importance of information literacy instruction. Blogs, library magazines and twitter posts all discuss the best ways to collaborate with faculty to teach students these skills. On rare occasions, disciplinary faculty publish articles about collaborations with librarians.

But faculty aren’t reading library journals. And they aren’t reading library blogs either. And some faculty seem unaware of the services that libraries are currently offering (the excellent ProfHacker blog often illustrates this.) And according to Stevens, librarians could do a better job of publishing in disciplinary education journals. She highlights calls from various librarian authors over the past 20 years to reach out to faculty through the disciplinary literature.

Stevens examined “discipline specific pedagogical journals” – the teaching journals for college professors to look for articles about information literacy, or even just libraries. She looked at a few of my favorites, including the Journal of Geoscience Education, the Journal of College Science Teaching, and the Journal of Chemical Education. For each of these journals, she identified articles that mention library research and articles that focused on information literacy. Some of these articles mentioned libraries in passing, some mentioned particular library-related assignments, others discuss information literacy in more detail. (Incidentally, I would love to see the list of publications she ended up with).

Overall, a relatively small number of articles were found focusing on information literacy or library-related assignments. She concludes that while there is not a lot of evidence of faculty/librarian collaboration on information literacy issues in these journals, things have improved since similar studies were done 10 or 20 years ago.

Faculty are much more likely to read pedagogical publications in their own disciplines, and librarians need to reach out to faculty in order to facilitate effective information literacy instruction.

So, instruction librarians need to stop publishing great articles about faculty-librarian collaborations in library journals and start publishing these articles in disciplinary journals.

Sounds simple, right? Let’s do it.

Stevens, C. (2007). Beyond Preaching to the Choir: Information Literacy, Faculty Outreach, and Disciplinary Journals The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 33 (2), 254-267 DOI: 10.1016/j.acalib.2006.08.009

Uncategorized

I hate footnotes

I’ll admit it. I am a librarian and I hate footnotes and endnotes.

I have often lamented the wide proliferation of citation styles. I really wish publishers could all agree on one style of citation, but that probably won’t be happening anytime soon.

This afternoon I am trying to read an article that seems very interesting, but it has endnotes, making my preferred style of reading a journal article much more difficult.

For example, normally I start to read the first few paragraphs of the introduction, then skip to the references section to see who they are citing. A nice neat alphabetical list makes this easy.

Footnotes, on the other hand, make it very difficult to scan the references cited.

Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde uses footnotes for comedic effect

Today, when I wanted to check on a particular reference, I turned to the end of the paper and found endnote #90 and read “Ibid”. I kept looking up the list to see “Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.” until eventually I found an author and article title at endnote #85. But then I have to keep going back up the list (of over 100 endnotes) until I saw a complete citation. In this case, I didn’t find it because it was buried in one of several paragraph long notes (note #76). I had to turn to the “search” feature of my PDF reader to actually find the complete citation.

This is not user friendly. I argue that a nice list of alphabetical references and author date in-text citations are the most user friendly (although my colleagues in the humanities may disagree with me vehemently).

I grant that footnotes or endnotes can occasionally be very useful for text explanations, but most of this explanation could often be done within the text. And of course, there are authors who use footnotes to humorous effect (Jasper Fforde being one of my favorites).

OK, rant over.

writing

The never ending literature search

I’ve mentioned it before: I like searching for information. I like it so much, that sometimes I just keep going beyond the point where a rational person would stop and say “I have what I need.”

There is a lot of advice about conducting a literature search. In fact, it is my job to give a lot of advice about how to conduct a literature search. Much of this advice focuses on the literature search as a cycle, where you often need to return to earlier steps, like this image from the Workshop on the Information Search Process for Research (From the University of Calgary):

But there is rarely any advice about that last step, “Search Closure.” How do I know when I’m done searching?

Perhaps many librarians have this problem, but it’s been hitting home recently as I try to manage several publication projects. I’m rarely convinced that I found everything I need.

This can manifest itself in two ways.

First, the literature on the topic can be really extensive. Have I actually found the most relevant papers? Do I have anything to add to an already large body of literature? At some point, I need to trust my own skills and say that I have found a sufficient amount of information for my needs. I need to (perhaps repeatedly) tell myself that I probably don’t need to track down every single paper on the topic.

Second, I may not find much of anything. Am I using the correct search terms? Should I try other databases/search engines? Is it really possible that I’m doing something that hasn’t been done before? This is where I start asking colleagues for advice. What keywords would you use? Have you heard of anything like this before? And at some point, I need to trust my own skills and examine the possibility that there just might not be anything published on my topic.

Of course, the never ending literature search is just one more excuse to put off the harder stuff: writing the actual paper. (Perhaps writing this blog post about the never ending literature search is another excuse to put off writing the actual paper!)

information literacy

Designing the survey seems like the easy part

Right now I am neck deep in information literacy assessment survey results.

The instruction librarians and I spent a lot of time devising our instructional goals and objectives and then developing the assessment tool (for a one-shot info. lit. session in a first-year writing course). There were a lot of meetings, and it was a lot of collaborative work.

Since the analysis of the results falls largely on me, however, right now the survey design seems like the easy part.

The assessment tool we designed has a lot of short answer questions, which require a lot of thought in order to effectively ‘grade’. We strongly feel that these questions provide a more accurate picture of student understanding, but they can be tricky to analyze.

For example, we asked the students how they can tell the difference between a scholarly and a popular source. I need to figure out how to mark this answer from one of our students:

it will say peer reviewed

Completely correct? Somewhat correct? Not correct?

So I will spend the next few days (weeks?) trying to figure out how to condense all of this information into a nice neat package.

We’ll see how it goes.