Academic Libraries and Outreach to the Sciences: Taking a Closer Look at Research Groups

MacKenzie, Emily

doi:10.1080/0194262x.2014.914011

Cited by 14 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…We believe these stages are useful as they provide organisation to the needs of this demographic, that can then be more easily act as a frame of reference for information professionals. Mackenzie (2014) and Gabridge (2009) both concluded that academic librarians are not being capitalised upon in a meaningful way by doctoral students, and while we do not attempt to provide specific advice for instruction and outreach practices, we suggest a consideration of these three stages may be useful for academic librarians to consider in planning their programmes.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Where outreach does exist, it is typically limited to engaging students at all levels and stages and is catered to their specific processes (Reed, 2015). For example, in the medical and scientific disciplines it is common practice to construct research groups that carry out research creation and output as a team (Mackenzie, 2014). There is no such bespoke research strategy for the social science student, which appears to be isolated to undergraduate and graduate students, with no mention of PhD students.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Further, an emphasis on ‘data management’ may be misguided, when doctoral students need assistance managing all their personal information – PIM may be a better term to use when marketing services. Mackenzie (2014: 168) states: ‘Libraries (and their librarians) are rarely identified by the research community as an important source for assistance with information’. In her survey of academic staff, Gabridge (2009: 15) found that ‘faculty do not often see librarians as being equipped to help them solve their data problems’: instead they seek the IT department for solutions to storage and access of research.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘We have to make an effort with it’

Cushing

Dumbleton

2017

IFLA Journal

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Fifteen doctoral students enrolled in a variety of humanities and social science programmes from a single metropolitan university in Ireland discussed their practices and habits associated with personal information management via three focus groups, in order to explore personal information management skills at different stages of the doctoral programme. Findings suggest that personal information management needs of doctoral students managing dissertation/thesis information can be categorised as three distinct stages: beginning, middle and end of the doctoral programme. In developing services to meet the needs of this population, information professionals may find it useful to classify such services via these three stages.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘We have to make an effort with it’

Cushing

Dumbleton

2017

IFLA Journal

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“…Embedded librarianship is an approach that focusses on "the needs of one or more groups, building relationships within these groups, developing a deep understanding of their work, and providing information services that are highly customized and targeted to their greatest needs" (Shumaker and Talley, 2010). This approach has been leveraged in academic settings, for example, to integrated libraries into research teams (Carlson and Kneale, 2011;MacKenzie, 2014;Corrall, 2014a). Medical librarians have embraced the informationist model of integration into the clinical enterprise (Cooper, 2011;Rankin et al, 2008;Grefsheim et al, 2010).…”

Section: Background and Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social networks and relational capital in library service assessment

Bracke

2016

Performance Measurement and Metrics

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Purpose – Researchers and administrators have struggled to fully understand the value of library human resources for decades. There are many approaches to counting the activities of library staffs, but less is understood about the value of developing and maintaining relationships. Given the growing importance of engagement-focussed, expertise-based service models in research libraries, the failure of library assessment models to account for the relational value of librarian activities is problematic in justifying and incentivizing new strategic activities and understanding the importance of libraries’ relationships with users and other stakeholders. The social network perspectives now commonplace in organizational studies to provide relational and contextual understandings of organizational behavior could be applied to library performance measurement and evaluation, providing a fuller picture of library impact. The purpose of this paper is to address this conceptual gap in the evaluation of library services. Design/methodology/approach – The first part of the paper will present a content analysis of recent literature on emerging service models in academic libraries to identify relational aspects of the models. The relational elements will then be mapped to major concepts and methods from the social network analysis literature. This will include, as appropriate, basic network properties such as transactional content (e.g. exchange of power, services, etc.) of the relationship, nature (e.g. intensity, reciprocity, embeddedness) of the relationship, and structural characteristics of library networks. It will also identify more advanced areas of analysis such as the development of social capital, diffusion of innovations and contagion, and the role of networks in providing access to organizational resources. After mapping relational elements of emerging library service models to social network theory, a research agenda for better understanding library social networks and their value will be proposed. Findings – Social network theory offers a rich conceptual and methodological framework for understanding the relational value of library services, particularly in emerging engagement-centered views of librarianship. Although activity- and outcome-based models of assessment are still important in the assessment of library activities, a social network view of library relationships is an essential complement in providing a more complete view of library value and will complement other work in this area such as human capital valuation and the relational capital components of the values scorecard. Originality/value – This paper presents a unique theoretical and methodological viewpoint on the assessment of library services. This will contribute to the understanding of a vexing problem in library assessment, the value of library human resources, by providing a framework for the measurement and evaluation of relational aspects of librarianship that are often viewed as intangible and unmeasurable.

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“…Rather, the librarian becomes a functional member of the team, and provides information at the time of need rather than waiting for information requests to be presented at a later time. [45][46][47] Engaging with researchers through outreach initiatives to research groups 48 and targeted information literacy instruction to students working in research groups [49][50] are ideas that have received some sparse attention within the literature. However, these previous iterations of outreach to research groups seem not to have considered adopting the longitudinal, team-based approaches utilized by informationists in clinical settings and implementing them within non-clinical research settings.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%