Librarian, Faculty, and Student Perceptions of Academic Librarians: Study Introduction and Literature Review

Abstract

A survey concerning perceptions of academic librarians was conducted at a large, 4-year university with three populations: librarians, faculty, and undergraduate students. The high response rate and the use of an instrument based on previous studies offers the possibility of longitudinal comparison and the identification of relationships between groups within one environment. Results will be presented in a series of articles, beginning with this paper's study introduction and literature review of librarian, faculty, and student perceptions of librarians. Subsequent papers will present results from the three surveys and offer analysis across the three groups. The literature review focused on research studies of U.S. and Canadian academic libraries since 2000 with relevance to these major research questions: perceptions about what librarians know (expertise and skills), what librarians do (role and duties), and what librarians are like (motivations and affective behaviours). Librarians' perceptions of themselves as critically important yet underappreciated seem to have persisted, perhaps because they are the only group to see the university-wide scope of their jobs, whereas, non-librarian faculty and students have a more limited views of the profession. In contrast to previous studies, recent literature suggests that course-integrated information literacy (IL) instruction has increased the visibility of librarians as educators to both faculty and students. The influence of popular media on students' perceptions seems less powerful, opening the door wider for library marketing and branding programs.

Academic Librarian Perceptions of Academic Librarians: Building a Foundation of Shared Understanding

“…(Q4) seemed to align with the services and roles identified in the literature. For example, teaching was rated the most frequently performed duty on this survey, reflecting the strong association with teaching found in the literature (Fagan et al, 2020). JMU organizational priorities also seem to be reflected in the responses.…”

“…What librarians know: Librarian expertise and skills/value for librarians' skills Our literature review (Fagan et al, 2020) found copious information about "what librarians know" in research studies of job advertisements. Mentions of technology skills increased over time.…”

“…Our literature review (Fagan et al, 2020) found several approaches by academic librarians describing the primary roles of their profession (Arendt & Lotts, 2012;Cox & Corrall, 2013;Library Journal & Gale Cengage, 2015;Vassilakaki & Moniarou-Papaconstantinou, 2015). Despite this study's focus on the spectrum of duties students might perceive librarians to do, responses to the question "How often do you think academic librarians perform the following duties?"…”

“…For this question and a few others, we analyzed liaison versus nonliaison responses for the sample since so much literature focused on liaison librarians (Fagan et al, 2020). Again, these differences should not be inferred to exist in the population of JMU librarians.…”

“…This article is the second in a series about the perceptions of academic librarians held by librarians, nonlibrarian faculty (hereafter "faculty"), and students. The first article presented a comprehensive literature review (Fagan, Ostermiller, Price, & Sapp, 2020), and this article and the next two will present survey results and analysis. For the purposes of this paper, "librarians" will be used to mean "academic librarians" since they were the subject of this survey.…”