Keynote: User Studies: What are We Learning, and What Does it Mean for the Future of Research Libraries?
Crit Stuart, Director, Research Teaching and Learning Programs, ARL
• Said that in “It’s all about U,” the “U” is for “user.”
• When working in a university, we are surrounded by our users all the time, and should make use of this to get to know them and their needs better.
• ARL landscape: what’s happening in teaching, information literacy, virtual space, etc.
• ARL did a survey on innovative work in libraries, probably to be published in October.
• Information Literacy & Instruction:
- campus collaborations: info lit, writing centers, first year experience, growing area of special collections and instruction, emerging trend of IL training over four years built around deliverables produced each year
- enabling technologies: podcasts, camtasia, videos, wikis & blogs, Second Life, FaceBook, quick bites, commercial resources that can be tailored, a fair amount of sharing virtual objects between libraries
- new competencies training: research methodologies, new undergraduate experience, oral presentations, writing proficiency, new forms of scholarship, multimedia, ethics/personal accountability; as teaching moves to being more problem based and group oriented, we are changing our instruction to be in this realm, too.
- Staffing experiments: new pedagogies (less lecture, peer tutoring, team teaching with academic faculty); ambitious learning outcomes (critical thinking, research methodologies, fluencies, knowledge creation); more pedagogical skills and technology training needed for instruction librarians
- Trend: videos and podcasts used to assist in teaching (often around catalog and database searching), short duration, point of need, familiar media, addresses varying levels of skill Sound familiar?;
- Trend: Camtasia used in embedded guides and instruction, not much assessment done at this point in time;
- Trend: Personal librarians that are assigned to a particular class or to parents of students, taking on a subset of the population and pushes out information that is timely;
- Trend: Popularizing Special Collections is a growing trend, digitization, critical thinking using primary materials, creates new knowledge, grads paired with undergrads for research;
- Trend: Academic Integrity around copyright, plagiarism, open access. mashups, university policies around ethical behavior;
- Trend: Wikis are where, perhaps, some of the best work is happening, students more connected with learning;
- Trend: Image collections are an area of growing interest, tend to be underutilized if not digitized, some libraries offering grants for faculty to use and/or to store on ARTstor;
- Trend: Multimedia training for students and faculty, if faculty aren’t familiar they resist using it, and use only papers in their class, by bringing up comfort level and critical evaluation expertise of faculty, bring them up to speed;
- Trend: Information instruction built around problem
- Trend: Librarian working with on-campus writing; liaison to editors and writers, helps choose scholarly resources and write with appropriate style
- Trend: Faculty and teaching assistant support in content management systems, enrich CMS, help with pedagogy, information literacy, librarians as educational technologists
- Trend: Graduate Student Competencies through seminars, research methodologies, print & digital resources, exposure to data mining tools, help with dissertation writing; some studies show research faculty might have a hard time teaching research because it’s so integral to who they are, librarians are poised to do this.
- Trend: Celebrating creativity through prizes for research papers, digital information literacy contest, students compete with faculty on research, displaying student and faculty works (“intellectual museum”), monthly lectures from outstanding faculty
- Trend: Virtual spaces: facebook, secondlife, going where students congregate
• Physical Spaces & Programming
- Targeting undergraduates, graduates, faculty: there’s lots to do for these last two groups
- Collaborators: host of options from alumni to tutoring to student government…
- Enabling Tech: individual and group computers, multimedia capacities, touch screens, large display capacities, team software, devices to loan, scaled printing, sandboxing to test new tools and software
- Ambiance: food and drink, ability to meet and greet/see and be seen, light, view, furnishing, multi-purpose
- Community: creating the perfect convening ground for studying, letting students influence what happens/alter in the space,
- Changes to library organization: concern with user success and learning outcomes, consolidation of service points, emergence of new positions (particularly blended ones), rise of assessment/metrics/on-going analysis, collaboration outside the library, formalized connections with clients and partners, sandboxing/experimentation/flux, reconsideration of primary vs. secondary real estate.
- Ideals: mix of tech and services, 24 hour mixing ground, gradually informed by ongoing assessment (difficult to assess learning outcomes)
- Faculty/grad commons: massive data sets, new forms of scholarship, sandboxes, training in multimedia, make leap from what they say they want to what they would do, kitchens for catering and special functions, training in CMS, pedagogy, info lit constructs tied to course learning outcomes; described a specific space designed based on faculty input, but very much underutilized, that’s okay, but you have to work on it over time to build it up for faculty
- Highlighted Columbia’s Baker Library Digital Humanities Center, identification of and access of resources in humanities, assistance with and training in extraction of data, creating new digital content, editing and mark-up, mining, incorporating digital objects into writing and other scholarship, assist with new forms of scholarship
- U Penn Weigle Information Commons run by a technologist, collaboration of library, school of arts and sciences, with support form Communications, writing, CETL, focus on group learning, emphasize multimedia, training tracks for faculty and students, sport for research, project management, writing, presentation, “entire creative process”, faculty training in new pedagogies and fluencies
- University of Minnesota’s SMART Learning Commons, peer assistance in gateway courses, quick response for emerging, high-impact courses
- Cornell Mann Library using movable and adaptable furniture and tech, designed some their own
- Prototyping spaces in virtual environments (I wonder how this could work with focus groups)
• Assessment has played an uneven role, tied to legacy and tradition, more using other’s ideas rather than discovery, there is an increasing interest in assessment: Innovative libraries take assessment & customer engagement seriously.
• Keep focus on user centered goals. Need more planning processes for bringing projects online. Need to do the right type of assessment.
• The new conversation: structured conversations, informal conversations, myriad of casual contacts and immersions into our clients’ world, seeing and hearing in fresh ways, creating excitement around what we learn, and applying the knowledge to programming
This was a very good session and as an Instructional Designer, I found the whole conversation on instruction to be really interesting and useful. Fantastic stuff!
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