"Five Years of Empirical Research in the Area of Technical Services," by Natalia Gelber

Natalia Gelber. "Five Years of Empirical Research in the Area of Technical Services: An Examination of Selected Peer-Reviewed Journals, 2007-2011." Technical Services Quarterly 30:2 (2013): 166-186.

Author Gelber analyzed 256 articles from 21 peer reviewed journals to determine the type of empirical research conducted, the subjects of the research, and whether the topic influenced the type of research methods used. The top four journals represented in the study were Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Library Resources & Technical Services, Technical Services Quarterly, Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, Serials Librarian, Library Collections Acquisitions and Technical Services, and Serials Review, ranging from 17 to 65 articles. The remainder of the 21 journals had fewer than 10 articles each.

Findings revealed that 53.5 percent of articles were sole-authored, 28.5 percent had two authors, 11.7 percent had three authors, and 4.3 percent had four authors. Only a tiny portion had more than four authors. The great majority of the authors were practitioners (94.5 percent); only 3.1 percent were academics. U.S. authors predominated, representing over 85.5 percent of the total, and 70.7 percent of the research settings were in academic libraries. Only 3.1 percent of the research incorporated end-users into the research.

The most commonly used type of research was the case study, with 61.7 percent of the total. Another 21.9 percent of the research consisted of surveys. Qualitative data analysis was more common that quantitative (54.7 percent vs. 27.3 percent), and only 18 percent was mixed qualitative and quantitative. The top topics were electronic resources management, discovery of materials in the online catalog, cataloging policies and practices, and acquisitions. (Collection development as a topic was eliminated from this study.) The third research question was not able to be answered because there weren't enough examples of all of the research methods to make it statistically significant.

I find it interesting but not surprising that the two most common types of research are the case study and the survey. (Literature reviews and historical reviews were eliminated from this study.) As the researchers are most likely to be practitioners, it seems to me that the most meaningful research they conduct and share with others is 1) how we did something and what we learned from it, and 2) how is everyone else doing this and what can I learn from their experiences? In fact, whenever I'm faced with a new challenge at work and I want to read up on the issue, I do a literature review to see what others have done and how it worked for them.

I found Ms. Gelber's research very interesting. I was surprised at some of the journal titles that ended up on her list (see the article, p. 173, for the full list). I had to look up one of the research methods that she listed: the Delphi Method, which consists of two or more rounds of experts responding to questionnaires. After each round the summaries of the questionnaires are shared with them to see if their own responses change; after several rounds, the conclusions are expected to be more reliable. It's used more in business forecasting, although I can see that it would be interesting to apply to technical services or more general library futures forecasting.