Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Measuring (And Increasing) The Value Of Library Services, Carol Tenopir

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The value of the university library to faculty, students, and administrators has long been assumed. In an era of increasing choices (and sometimes decreasing resources), academic librarians all over the world are faced with finding the best ways to measure and demonstrate the value of the library to all stakeholders, and to gather evidence that helps libraries make the best choices about new directions for the future that will sustain and increase the value. This talk will both describe some methods for measuring value and outcomes and summarize results that measure value to users.

Science, Technology, And Library Work: Trends And Milestones, Maria Forsman

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Nowadays it is difficult to imagine, what kind of changes research libraries have gone through during the last 40 years. In the 70’s libraries were proud of large collections of printed books and journals. Library automation was mostly in infancy, but some research fields were forerunners in developing library and information services. These fields are those that are economically useful in society. The first and most qualified international databases were in sciences like chemistry and physics, medicine, education and economics. Other sciences – like humanities and most of social sciences – were followers. Databases and different e-services were developed in …

Change Management In Libraries: An Essential Competency For Leadership, Catherine B. Soehner

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

In this era of shrinking budgets and advancing technology, libraries inevitably need to change to keep up with the times. This is especially true in regards to changes in the Information Technology (IT) services provided by libraries. Some traditional services are no longer used and others must be rearranged so that the library remains a vital component of the campus. Reorganization of personnel often takes place to accommodate these changes. Organizational change may initially appear overwhelming, especially if it involves many people with strongly held opinions and beliefs about maintaining traditional library services. However, a structured process, transparency, and effective …

The Future Librarian: A Diverse And Complex Professional, Gunilla Widén, Maria Kronqvist-Berg

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The library professional is an active actor in the information society and the professional identity is affected by societal and cultural phenomena as well as technological changes. The library users’ changing information behavior, different forms of information, and information overload challenge the professional perspective; what is the core expertise of the library profession and what new skills are needed in the future? The library profession meets a growing complexity in its role and it becomes difficult to balance the generalist and expertise level of the profession (Stover 2004). Desirable future skills are related to operating and navigating on the Internet, …

Problem Lah! Learning To Tell The Story Of Continuous Assessment And Improvement, Tamera Hanken

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

To succeed organizations rely on the purposeful application of the management functions, planning, organizing, leading and controlling, i.e., assessment. Assessment involves the collection and analysis of service and performance data to inform planning, organizing and leading-- opening the door to a culture of assessment and continuous improvement. Like other organizations responding to ever challenging economies and ever changing customer expectations, libraries are examining continuous improvement methods such as Lean, or Six Sigma, to ensure operations and services are customer focused and can be continuously assessed and improved with limited resources. Librarians though, often lack a general understanding of assessment and …

Positioning Academic Libraries For The Future: A Process And Strategy For Organizational Transformation, Erin L. Ellis, Brian Rosenblum, John Stratton, Kathleen Ames-Stratton

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Seeking to more effectively respond to campus initiatives and user expectations, the University of Kansas (KU) Libraries underwent a process of significant organizational review and transformation. Guided by a purposeful, open process, a diverse and representative group was elected to serve on the Libraries Organizational Review Team (ORT) to assess the existing organizational structure, determine major functions and cross-functional areas therein, and identify new and vital activities and positions essential for achieving our strategic priorities. Recognizing, too, the trends and challenges occurring within higher education and academic libraries, ORT sought to redefine professional roles and functions to strategically position the …

Unlocking The Potential Of Library Generated Data To Assess Value, Impact, And Influence, Margie Jantti, Brian Cox

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The University of Wollongong Library (UWL) has initiated an innovative and collaborative research project to unambiguously demonstrate the value that can be provided by academic libraries. The project centres on the integration and interrogation of a series of discrete datasets, e.g. student performance, student attrition, student demographic data, and borrowing and electronic resources usage data. The project has enabled UWL to identify whether a correlation exists between usage of Library resources and academic performance (e.g. grades). Findings reveal a strong and sustained correlation; providing a new facet through which to view and understand the student academic experience.The project is different …

Organisational Changes And A New Media Policy: Meeting User Demands At The Royal Institute Of Technology, Cecilia Heyman Widmark

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

This paper discusses why there is a need for organisational changes and a new policy for acquisitions within an academic library when 96.5 % of the media budget is spent on electronic resources related to the 3.5 % spent on print. At the Library of The Royal Institute of Technology the acquisitions and handling of printed material involved more time and personnel compared to that of licensing and administering electronic resources. Given the economic relation between the two expenditures it was clear that this should be reflected in the organisation.

A new media plan was developed to form a foundation …

Coming Out: Making The Virtual Library Visible In Today's World, Grace Saw, Janine Schmidt

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

This is the age of the virtual customer. A silent virtual revolution has led to tumultuous and disruptive changes in environmental, financial, educational, and information environments. As the Library becomes increasingly virtual, it is becoming virtually invisible – as are library customers. Libraries are redefining their roles, managing their migration from the print past to an online future in a time of spiralling costs and declining incomes, redefining their products and services and refocusing on their customers, many of whom they rarely if ever see. How do we position the Library in the marketplace? What is the message to be …

How Does The Information Team Today Become The Information Team Of Tomorrow, Carlo Iacono

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

As the delivery of universities’ information services becomes increasingly virtual and time-honoured library practices are deemed to add less value, literature abounds with discussions about the future of the profession. Academic librarians are generally finding technical and technological expertise is a must and that they need to be aware of emerging learning and research practises to ensure their place and value remains. These new demands create new opportunities and require new skills to be acquired.

In this complex and rapidly changing environment, managers need to remain on top of the requirement for new skill sets. The starting point is understanding …

Measuring The World With Scientometrics Challenges And Limitations, Rafael Ball

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The quantification of the world is in full swing. With Big Data everyone will be convinced that in the future the truth will be based on correlations, not causality. This, however, will succeed only with a new understanding of data, its quality and precision. Will bibliometrics be able to comply?

Author Impact Factor: Tracking The Dynamics Of Individual Scientific Impact, Santo Fortunato

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The impact factor (IF) of scientific journals has acquired a major role in the evaluations of the output of scholars, departments and whole institutions. Typically papers appearing in journals with large values of the IF receive a high weight in such evaluations. However, at the end of the day one is interested in assessing the impact of individuals, rather than papers. Here we introduce Author Impact Factor (AIF), which is the extension of the IF to authors. The AIF of an author A in year {\it t} is the average number of citations given by papers published in year {\it …

Long Term Evaluation Of Information Literacy Programme, Tina Hohmann

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The Technische Universität München library was the first university library in Germany to be certified by TÜV with respect to its ISO 9001:2001 quality management. One of the main objectives of our quality management policy is to measure customer satisfaction not only in the short-term, but also over longer periods of time, in order to constantly develop and improve our services.

To this end, TUM library management have decided to conduct a long term evaluation of its information literacy (IL) programme. We regularly ask course participants for feedback immediately after the events and evaluate these yearly. Additionally, we have started …

Does Il Education Have An Impact On Undergraduate Engineering Students' Research Skills, Marja Talikka, Harri Eskelinen, Hanna Varri

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

This paper presents the first results of testing a model of studying the change in undergraduate students’ research skills after receiving information literacy (IL) instruction. The model is tested with a group of Master’s level engineering students attending a construction materials’ seminar. The IL instruction consists of presenting the basics of information searching in general, the basics of bibliometrics, and searching guidelines of the most important databases in the field of mechanical engineering and material science. After the lecture, the students attend an instructed hands-on information retrieval training session. In order to enable information retrieval from the most important …

Great Expectations: Results From A Faculty Survey Of Students' Information Literacy Proficiency, Brian Jackson, Margy Macmillan, Michelle Sinotte

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

In the fall of 2012, our library surveyed teaching faculty to gauge their expectations around students’ use of information. We asked instructors what they thought was important for students to know in each year of study, how proficient they felt students were in performing tasks associated with research, how they expected students to acquire that proficiency, and how they assessed students’ skills. The survey also polled faculty on the types of resources they felt were important for each year of study. The results of the study are informing the development of the library’s strategic plan and the inclusion of information …

Qualitative Scientometrics, Gustaf Nelhans

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

When scientometricians are asked about the relationship between citations and quality, they often argue along the lines that citations could be seen as indicators of use and that that this implies usefulness and impact on other research, which in turn is an argument for using them as indicators of quality. This paper questions the implicit linearity of such a ‘one-dimensional model’ of representing quality by quantity from a number of standpoints. First, the use of citations as well as any indicator that is used is performative in the sense that those getting measured by them, i.e. researchers or university administrators, …

Determining Return On Investment: The Importance And Development Of Statistics Collection For Information Literacy Training At Cput Libraries, Janine Lockhart, Deborah Becker

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Academic libraries are increasingly required to prove their value as university management is demanding evidence of return on investment. The Information Literacy (IL) programme at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) Libraries has undergone a process of development over many years from the initial random training sessions to the development and approval of a certified short course.

With these developments came the need for more relevant and detailed statistics. In a parallel process, the recording of the statistics for IL and other training done by library staff have therefore also evolved over the past few years.

This paper outlines the …

Role Of Libraries In Promoting The Use Of Open Education Resources (Oer) In India: A Study Of Nptel Resources And Major Technology Libraries, Tukaram S. Kumbar, Amruth Sherikar

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The number of higher educational Institutions in India is growing steadily. Institutions imparting higher education in science and technology, particularly the ones setup up by Government of India as Institutes of national importance has almost doubled during last one decade. This development is a part of the national strategy to increase the capacity building in the S & T area. In order to support this major initiative, the eight major Institutes of national importance viz Indian Institute of Technology located in different parts of country and the Indian Institute of Science with support from Ministry of Human Resources and Development, …

Beyond Inspec - Building A Semantic Enrichment Service To Explore How The Iet Can Better Support Academic And Commercial Researchers, Allison Haggar, Richard Hollis

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

As the amount of content in the engineering space is constantly growing it is becoming more and more difficult to retrieve relevant information. In this context the IET has commissioned a project to evaluate the feasibility of providing a semantic enrichment service based on the terms contained in the Inspec Thesaurus. The possibility of automated tagging of a variety of content types including traditional academic publishing data (e.g. journal abstracts), commercial product information (e.g. product catalogues) and social media (e.g. twitter feeds) has been explored as well as the auto generation of new terms for the Inspec thesaurus. We have …

'Access As A Service' - Reframing The Service Catalogue And Measures Of Success For Information Resources, Maureen Kattau

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

As collection development and the management of information resources have shifted from ownership to access or to ownership as access (in perpetual access models) the traditional distinction between collections and services - as the basis for thinking about service delivery - is no longer a tenable model. This turn towards "access as a service" has also meant that information resources have come more to resemble 'soft services' in their attendant issues of measurement and value demonstration.

Previous input, or infrastructure, measures (volume counts, usage, etc), if not unproblematic in terms of demonstrating their contribution to University outcomes, were at least …

Co-Creating A Research Landscaping And Visualization Service For Aalto University Library, Johanna Bragge, Heli Yamaguchi, Anne Sunikka

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The explosion of research available in digital journal databases poses increasing challenges but also opportunities to scholars. For a scholar to stay competitive, new information discovery tools such as text-mining and visualization software are needed to handle the data flood. A contemporary science library is in a key position in mediating the best practices via its services to scholars. This research depicts how Aalto University Library innovated such a service together with relevant stakeholders and customers. The dual goal of the research is 1) to ensure that the new service best fulfills the needs of scholars, and 2) to increase …

Implementing A Next Generation Library System, Peter Green

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Only a few years ago most library management systems were considered stable and mature and the focus of effort by library vendors and academic libraries was on developing and implementing client facing, web scale, discovery layers. These are now ubiquitous. However the rise and rise of electronic content and the growing complexity of managing that electronic content with systems developed last century has led to the current focus on developing and implementing next generation library management systems. These new library systems are being built from the ground up, encompassing all forms of content and subsuming more recently developed products, such …

The Difficulty Of Indicating Transformation: The Challenge For Library Statistics And Surveys, Heli Kautonen, Markku Laitinen, Anna Niemelä

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Academic libraries have long refined the tools and skills in order to show their positive impact to research, to science and to the overall society. The aim is to provide essential information for library managers and decision makers. However, the qualitative and quantitative analyses showing libraries’ impact should also provide indications about change, i.e. the transformation of such social practices that challenge the essence of libraries.

This paper presents two sources of information for analysing libraries’ impact on the national level. The first is the Finnish Research Library Statistics Database and the second is the National Library End-User Survey of …

Integrated Decision Support System – Idss For Library Holistic Evaluation, Lorena Siguenza-Guzman, Victor Saquicela, Dirk Cattrysse

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The decision-making process in academic libraries is paramount; however highly complicated due to the large number of data sources, processes and high volumes of data to be analyzed. Academic libraries are accustomed to producing and gathering a vast amount of statistics about their collection and services. Typical data sources include integrated library systems, library portals and online catalogues, systems of consortiums, quality surveys and university management. Unfortunately, these heterogeneous data sources are only partially used for decision-making processes due to the wide variety of formats, standards and technologies, as well as the lack of efficient methods of integration. This article …

What Would Be The Future Of The Integrated Library Systems?, Xiaohua (Cindy) Li

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Since the advent of Integrated Library Systems (ILSs) in 1970s, they have gone from being innovative to stagnant. In recent years, the rapid advancement of web technologies and the exponential growth of electronic resources and digital contents have increasingly exposed the weakness of traditional ILSs. The lack of flexibility, interoperability, and efficiency makes the ILSs hardly meet the needs of both internal and external library users. Meanwhile Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Drupal and open source ILSs have gotten much attention due to their technological and economic advantages, and cloud computing has allowed libraries to focus on bigger pictures. …

Bibliometric Services In Research Evaluation: A New Task Area Strengthening The Jurisdiction Of Academic Librarians, Sabrina Petersohn

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Science policy framed by audit culture relies heavily on performance measurement. This changing research environment affects higher education institutions and their scientific libraries. As service providers for research and teaching libraries need to demonstrate their added-value in front of various stakeholders. Some Library and Information Science (LIS) scholars and practitioners thus promote evaluative bibliometric services as a new service area. The question rises whether this trend to engage in evaluative bibliometrics will consolidate into a recognized professional task area in academic librarianship. Using Abbott’s theoretical framework the paper asks whether academic librarians claim a professional jurisdiction on bibliometric expertise in …

Examining Library’S Information Literacy Instruction In Support Of Student Research Skills Competencies, Mirela Djokic

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The presentation focuses on liaison model approach to integrating information literacy (research skills sessions) into curriculum, primarily focusing on first-year courses. It examines effectiveness of a variety of instruction modes and delivery, ranging from one-shot to sequenced sessions.

The Library offers comprehensive research skills sessions for courses at all levels based on the standards, performance indicators, and outcomes published in the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education actively supported by the Library. Over the past few years, the Library adopted the Liaison model, where librarians collaborate with Instructors in their respective subject …

Redefining The Nexus: The Convergence Of Information Literacy, Scholarly Communication And Data Literacy, David Scherer, Lisa Zilinski

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

The March 2013, ARCL Committee on Research and the Scholarly Environment White Paper, “Intersections of Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy”, discussed the intersection of two initiatives and the evolving environment in academic libraries, as well as explored the “economics of the distribution of scholarship, digital literacies, and our changing roles.” However, in technical libraries, scholarly communication and information literacy initiatives are converging with data literacy initiatives. Until recently, as highlighted in Common Ground at the Nexus of Information Literacy & Scholarly Communication, the conversations surrounding scholarly communication, information literacy, and data literacy have taken place in disparate and siloed environments …

Training And Development Of Library Employees In Research Data Management, Catherine Soehner

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

Providing services to faculty and researchers throughout the data life cycle has become an important aspect for many libraries worldwide. Considering the complexity of data management, providing these services can appear daunting. Data services worldwide have matured steadily over the past five years and the United States is only catching up. Learning about the information and services available through other institutions allows libraries to develop referral services that make effective use of current personnel. A model for training and development of library employees was created at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah that prepared librarians to …

Comparison Of Engineers Australia Online Library Offerings With Services Of Equivalent International Engineering Organisations, Elena Vvedenskaia

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

For the last 94 years, Engineers Australia has provided a forum for all members of the engineering workforce with the appropriate qualifications and experience, those prepared to indorse a common code of ethics.

Almost uniquely positioned in the world from this perspective, Engineers Australia been able to draw upon an extensive network of technical and professional expertise accumulated across 50 Colleges, Technical Societies and Special Interest Groups covering every field of engineering.

This body of knowledge has been systematically collected, preserved and made available to members by Engineers Australia Library since the formation of the Institution in 1919.

This presentation …