The Mixed-Method Library: Qualitative Research and the Future of Assessment in Higher Education

This presentation was offered as part of the CUNY Library Assessment Conference, Reinventing Libraries: Reinventing Assessment, held at the City University of New York in June 2014

Visitors and Residents mapping workshop

A detailed guide to running a Visitors and Residents mapping workshop. The workshop is designed to make visible individuals' online practice and approaches. It uses a mapping process which acts as the basis for discussion

Sociomaterial texts, spaces, and devices

Work on students' study practices posits the digital and material as separate domains, with the ‘digital’ assumed to be disembodied, decontextualised and free-floating, and spaces in the material campus positioned as prototypically ‘traditional’ and analogue. Libraries in particular are often characterised as symbolic of predigital literacy practices and forms of meaning making. This binary oversimplifies student engagement, particularly in relation to their creation of and interactions with texts. Two studies illustrate this: an investigation of student and staff textual practices that explored the complex and emergent networks they created, adapted and maintained; and one that explored perceptions and use of library spaces (digital and physical). A sociomaterial analysis shows the ongoing importance of institutional, personal and public spaces. This demonstrates that in order to enhance the student experience, a more nuanced understanding of the complex, emergent relationships between digital and print, device and user, and author and text is required

Mapping Student Days: Collaborative Ethnography and the Student Experience

Research on students’ educational experiences demonstrates the importance of a holistic understanding of the complexity of students’ lives in developing library programs, services, and resources that effectively address undergraduate needs. The “A Day in the Life” (ADITL) Project investigated a typical day for over 200 students at eight diverse higher education institutions in the US. Examining the local and individual expressions of student taskscapes – the ensemble of interrelated social activities across time and space – placed each student’s relationship to their library in a larger description of their academic and personal lives. By exploring the whole student experience, this multi-site ethnographic study mapped out a more complete, complex, and diverse cartography of college students’ lives and the library’s place in it

Mapping Student Days: Collaborative Ethnography and the Student Experience

Research on students’ educational experiences demonstrates the importance of a holistic understanding of the complexity of students’ lives to developing library programs, services, and resources that effectively address undergraduate needs. The “A Day in the Life” (ADITL) project investigated a typical day for over 200 students at eight diverse institutions in the US. Examining the local and individual expressions of student taskscapes – the ensemble of interrelated social activities across time and space – placed each student’s relationship to their library in a larger description of their academic and personal lives. By exploring the whole student experience, this multi-site ethnographic study mapped out a more complete, complex, and diverse cartography of college students’ lives and the library’s place in it

Mindfulness and Mapping of Digital Practice: The Visitors and Residents Workshop

Visitors & Residents – the concept Visitors and Residents is a way of describing the range of ways we engage with the Web. In particular, V+R encourages us to think about the social traces (rather than data traces) that we leave online. In Visitor mode, you might access an online resource in a purely instrumental way, i.e. simply to get some information. In Resident mode, you view the web as a series of spaces or places; you engage with people – not just with information. As a Resident you typically have a profile, and at the extreme end of residency you are visible to others on the open web, i.e. you will show up in search results (e.g. your Twitter profile, your blog, etc.). We are never wholly Visitors or Residents, however. Our behaviour depends on our choices and our context, i.e. what we are doing and with whom. V+R is a continuum. Somewhere in the middle of these two poles, Visitor and Resident, is where a lot of online activity happens – behavior which is “resident in character but within bounded communities”, i.e. resident behaviour which is not visible on the open web. This would include interactions within Facebook groups, within members-only wikis or discussion forums, or in module discussion boards within VLEs, for example. V+R mapping Visitors & Residents mapping is a useful exercise for “making the virtual visible”, and thus for reflection. The metaphor helps us to talk about the digital as a space or a place: “the web is a place where we do stuff… mapping helps make it more visible.” In this workshop we will map our practices to spark discussion around the implications of the digital, not just as a set of tools, but a series of spaces in which teaching, learning, and other social interactions can and do take place. Outcomes: Participants see their peers’ online engagement and reflect on their practice. Starting point for thinking about future activities around engaging students/staff online, open practice, digital capability, credibility of online sources etc. Participants leave with a clear idea of the areas of their own online practice they intend to develop further, and why. The workshop can be used as a starting point to explore areas such as Digital Literacy and Digital Leadership at an institutional level, going on to inform policy/strategy. Links from Pre-conference: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/evaluating-digital-serviceshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Visitor_and_Resident http://daveowhite.com/vandr/ http://www.donnalanclos.com/ http://www.oclc.org/research/themes/user-studies/vandr.htm

Ethnographic approaches to the practices of scholarly communication: tackling the mess of academia

In my anthropological research in academic libraries, and in higher education generally, I have encountered a contrast between the ways that institutions approach the information systems they build and buy, and how people use those systems. Confronting the ‘mess’ of people’s everyday practice is a necessary first step towards more effectively connecting people to the resources they want and need. Here I discuss some of the ways to visualize and embrace the actual practices of people, in physical and digital contexts. 'Based on a breakout session presented at the 39th UKSG Annual Conference, Bournemouth, April 2016 

The Resident Web and its Impact on the Academy

Article about the impact of the 'social' or 'resident' Web on Higher Education and the role of academics

Keynote Address

Donna is an anthropologist working with ethnographic methods and analysis to inform and change policy in higher education, in particular in and around libraries, learning spaces, and teaching and learning practices. She is Associate Professor for Anthropological Research at the J. Murrey Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte. Donna has conducted anthropological research in libraries at University College London as well as at UNC Charlotte, and regularly presents workshops and talks in the US and the UK. She has worked with various institutions, including Carnegie Mellon, Parsons the New School, the Wellcome Trust, Imperial College (London), Kingston University (London), and the University of South Carolina (Upstate), on issues of digital practices and institutional change. She blogs about these and other projects at www.donnalanclos.com, and you can also find her on Twitter @DonnaLanclos