Improving Access to Graphic Novels Through Tagging

Wendy West, “Tag, You’re It: Enhancing Access to Graphic Novels,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 13:3 (2013): 301-324.

Graphic novels are all the rage and increasingly being collected by academic libraries. Author Wendy West considers the question of access to graphic novels in this thoughtful paper. West investigates the use of subject terms, whether supplied by catalogers or users, in records for 59 popular and highly rated graphic novels in 38 Association of Research Libraries’ online catalogs or search interfaces that allow “tagging” (i.e., assigning of subject terms by a user). She found that such practices increased the circulation of graphic novels; however, “their use is limited across the study’s library population.” (p. 314) West concludes by proposing a broadening of these practices in the next generation of library catalogs, and suggests additional research on what motivates academic library users to tag.

Fostering a Culture of Assessment

Amos Lakos, Shelley E. Phipps, “Creating a Culture of Assessment: A Catalyst for Organizational Change,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4:3 (2004): 345-361.

In this thoughtful paper, authors Lakos and Phipps discuss organizational culture and the need to incorporate assessment into that culture. They define a culture of assessment as “an organizational environment in which decisions are based on facts, research, and analysis, and where services are planned and delivered in ways that maximize positive outcomes and impacts for customers and stakeholders.” (p. 352)

I am particularly interested in assessment as part of everyday work, which the authors encourage. They tell us that “A major challenge to overcome is the everyday, unexamined workflow. If left alone, it presents a daily barrier to creative experimentation and problem solving. Processes and services should be continuously evaluated for efficiency and effectiveness.” (p. 353)

Three areas that Lakos and Phipps recommend that we focus on are 1) leadership, 2) creating a systems thinking environment, and 3) encouraging openness, integrity, and trust. The systems thinking environment that they advocate is the SIPOC Model (Suppliers, Input, Processes, Output, Customers), based on research by W. Edwards Deming. “The SIPOC Model is an effective framework for understanding and analyzing how organizations work.” (p. 358)

I am interested in the practical strategies that we can take to create a culture of assessment. One way that it could start is by coming up with a list of issues, concerns, workflows, etc. that might be problematic. This is where it’s necessary to encourage openness, so that people don’t feel defensive or bad about whatever the current situation is. Even if a workflow appears to be working fine, it could still be open for review. It’s critical for the leader to be open-minded and not defensive. If the leader demonstrates that he or she is open to constructive criticism or questioning, that makes it safe for others to open themselves to review as well. 

Focus Groups as a Library Assessment Tool

Graham R. Walden “Focus Group Interviewing in the Library Literature: A Selective Annotated Bibliography, 1996-2005,” Reference Services Review 34:2 (2006): 222-241.

Focus groups have been widely used to evaluate library services to their customers. In this paper, author Graham Walden conducted a thorough literature review on the use of focus groups in libraries, and found that they have been used to evaluate services across libraries functions, including administration, cataloging, reference, information literacy, and more.

Historically, focus groups came into use in the 1920s in social science research. It gained broader use as time passed, eventually coming into application in libraries. Walden describes the four steps of the focus group process: planning, recruiting participants, conducting the discussions sessions, and analyzing and reporting the results.

In this literature review, Walden discusses one book, three book chapters, and twenty-one papers published in 15 journals. This review and the publications discussed in it will be very helpful to anyone considering or planning a focus group-based research project. Walden’s discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of each paper will guide others in planning their projects. For example, several of the papers reported that they had used in-house moderators in their focus groups. This is viewed by Walden as a weakness, as focus group members might not be completely honest in front of someone they know. Another weakness he found with several of the studies was the practice of taking notes rather than recording the sessions.

My interest in focus groups is less on their use to evaluate library services to students or faculty, and more on their use in determining service quality within the library. Might focus groups be applicable to evaluate services that technical services or library systems units might offer to the rest of the library? Ultimately, the faculty, staff, and students are all our customers, but often our immediate customers are the librarians and staff within the library; that is, our colleagues. Our organizations might be small and we might not have funds to hire an outside moderator. Is it possible to conduct focus groups within our libraries that will still provide us with useful feedback about the services we offer? Are we offering the services our customers want? How well are we meeting their needs? Are there things we should be offering that we’re not? Are there things they would like us to do that we don’t currently do? Are there things we could be doing better?

A focus group that consists of co-workers who know each other, and moderated by someone they know, and which is not recorded or transcribed, may not be scientifically valid in the same way as a focus group that meets those standards, but could it still be useful from a managerial perspective?

 

 

Library Assessment with a Suggestion Box

Cecile M. Farnum, Catherine Baird, Kathryn Ball, “Can I Make a Suggestion? Your Library’s Suggestion Box as an Assessment and Marketing Tool,” Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research 6:1 (2011): 1-21.

An assessment tool that many libraries make use of is the suggestion box. In this paper, the authors describe their study of how suggestion boxes were used in academic libraries, how they’re managed, and whether the feedback they get from those suggestion boxes were used in planning or decision making.

They conducted a survey of Canadian academic libraries and found that libraries use both online and physical suggestion boxes. Of the twenty-five responding libraries, 96 percent of them use a suggestion box in some form. Most of the libraries respond to at least some of the suggestions that were made, however, most could not say whether the suggestions were used for decision-making in any way. They found that libraries were more likely to do so if the suggestion box was on their homepage or if they posted responses to suggestions publicly.

Suggestions boxes are often used to submit complaints. The authors encourage readers to think of complaints in a more positive way; they can be used to help the organization improve its services. They suggest a number of ways to improve the suggestions received: information should be gathered regarding the category of complaint, demographic data, library information, and ranking information about the importance or level of annoyance of the complaint.

The authors also suggest that libraries assess how they deal with complaints and encouraged them to increase their response rate, take action to resolve issues, and tailor their responses to be “warm.” By this they mean, for example, not simply citing a policy in response to a complaint, but recognizing that something might be bothersome or inconvenient, and promising to review the policy.

This article provides readers with an understanding of how suggestion boxes are used at academic libraries as well as a lot of good ideas for how the use of a suggestion box could be improved and used as a public relations or marketing tool.

I’ve been thinking about how a suggestion box could be used to improve the work of technical services and library systems. Our customers are not only the faculty, staff, and students of our university, but also the librarians and other staff that work in other parts of the library. Is there a way for them to provide anonymous suggestions to us, to improve the services that we offer? Or would it be better to use another approach to gather their information, like a customer service survey or focus groups?

Literature Review on Library Assessment

Jon R. Hufford, “A Review of the Literature on Assessment in Academic and Research Libraries, 2005 to August 2011,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 13:1 (2013): 5-35.

One of my favorite topics is library assessment, so I was pleased to see this article in a recent portal issue. While the article is very thorough and interesting, I’ll say right off the bat that I was disappointed that the author excluded the assessment of acquisitions and technical services from his review.

This is, however, a prodigious review of the literature of assessment as it relates to libraries. Hufford reviews both monographic and journal literature, including some important works published before 2005. He describes the greater emphasis placed on assessment of higher education in recent years, much of it generated by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education’s 2006 report A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of United States Higher Education. There have been many efforts by a number of organizations, such as the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and others to develop and encourage ways in which libraries could conduct assessment of their activities, services, and physical spaces.

I would like to have seen technical services activities represented in this literature review, but that may have made the project too big or the resulting paper too long. Because assessment is such a hot topic in the area of technical services, it would make a great project for someone!

Trends in Library Publishing

S. Craig Finlay, Chaoqun Ni, Andrew Tsou, and Cassidy R. Sugimoto, “Publish or Practice? An Examination of Librarians’ Contributions to Research,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 13:4 (2013): 403-321.

In recent years I’ve become very interested in library science research and publication, so this article in the current portal: Libraries and the Academy caught my attention. The authors analyzed over 4,000 articles in 20 top library and information science journals between 1956 and 2011. They looked at authorship; specifically whether the authors were practitioners, non-practitioners (in other words, teaching faculty), or a combination. They also looked at the topics of the papers published and their correlation with their status as practitioners or not.

They identified some trends in authorship, most notably that authorship by practitioners has declined somewhat since 2002. This is after a long period of steady increases in practitioner authorship, so the authors speculate that this may be an anomaly.

The authors analyzed the topics of published articles using a technique called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). I won’t even pretend to understand how this works, but the authors conclude from this analysis that the topics of papers differed somewhat depending on whether the author was a practitioner or not. There were three areas in which there was general overlap in topicality, and three that were different. What is notable is that articles authored by librarians focused more on library services whereas articles authored by non-practitioners focused more on use, retrieval, and informatics.

The authors conclude that if present trends continue with fewer articles published by practitioners, the observed differences in their research topics “would alter the content of the literature.” (p. 417) One issue they raise is whether librarians are sharing ideas more through the use of blogs?

It is interesting to note that of the 20 top-ranking journals in the library and information science field, there were journals with much higher percentages of librarian authors, and others with higher percentages of non-librarian authors. Those journals with the highest percentage of librarian authors included College & Research Libraries, Library Resources & Technical Services, Journal of Academic Librarianship, portal, Information Technology & Libraries, and Reference and User Services Quarterly. Those with the highest percentage of non-practitioner authors included: Information Processing & Management, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Information Science, Library & Information Science Research, and Journal of Documentation.

This research raises a number of questions for me. Are the journals attracting a particular kind of author; for example, is LRTS more attractive for practitioners, and is JASIST more attractive for non-practitioners? Or are the journals themselves causing this discrepancy because of their acceptance practices? Are there opportunities for aspiring researchers and authors to fill in some of these gaps?

Introduction

Welcome to Library Research and Reviews, a blog dedicated to the review of current library science and management literature. My goal is to post 3-4 times per week, and I will be reviewing both journal, monographic, and other resources.

My research interests include cataloging, authority control, and management, but I read widely in technical services and library systems topics, as well as collection development and electronic resources management. My background is in cataloging, but I have recently moved into a position in which I am responsible not only for cataloging, but also acquisitions, catalog management, and library systems, so my research interests have broadened accordingly. In recent years I have become increasingly interested in assessment and publishing.

I review library science books for a number of journals, including Collection Building; Library Collections, Acquisitions, and Technical Services; Library Resources & Technical Services; Journal of Academic Libraries, Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship; and Catholic Library World. Books that I’ve reviewed so far this year include:

Time and Project Management Strategies for Librarians. Edited by Carol Smallwood, Jason Kuhl, and Lisa Fraser. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013. (ISBN 9780810890527)

Academic and Professional Publishing. Edited by Robert Campbell, Ed Pentz, and Ian Borthwick.  Oxford: Chandos, 2012. (ISBN 9781843346692)

Research Methods in Information, 2nd ed. By Alison Jane Pickard. Neal-Schuman, 2013, (ISBN 978-1-55570-936-5)

Cart’s Top 200: Adult Books for Young Adults, Two Decades in Review. Michael Cart. ALA Editions, 2013 (ISBN 9780838911587)

Library 2020: Today’s Leading Visionaries Describe Tomorrow’s Library. Edited by Joseph Janes. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013. (ISBN 9780810887145)

The Future of Scholarly Communication. Ed. by Deborah Shorley and Michael Jubb. London: Facet Publishing, 2013. (ISBN 9781856048170)

The Information Society: A Study of Continuity and Change, 6^th ed. By John P. Feather.  London: Facet Publishing, 2013. (ISBN 9781856048187)

Staff Development: A Practical Guide, 4^th ed. Edited by Andrea Wigbels Stewart, Carlette Washington-Hoagland, and Carol T. Zsulya. ALA Editions, 2013. (ISBN 9780838911495)

Build a Great Team: One Year to Success. By Catherine Hakala-Ausperk. ALA Editions, 2013, (ISBN 9780838911709)

Knowledge Into Action: Research and Evaluation in Library and Information Science. By Danny P. Wallace and Connie Van Fleet. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2012. (ISBN 9781598849752)

This list will give you a sense of my reading and research interests and whether or not this blog will address the types of issues that you might be interested in. I won’t be duplicating the reviews that I’ve done for other journals here, but I will likely be reviewing similar publications, both from the journal and monographic literature. I hope you will check in now and then!