Serving the Public: The Academic Library and Cooperative Extension

The article describes the successful design and implementation of various outreach services for Extension at the Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University. It examines the outreach challenges facing an agricultural and life sciences library in an Ivy League institution, which is also part of the land-grant colleges and as such serves an extended New York State community

A 2CUL Collaborative Ethnographic Assessment of Humanities Doctoral Students

This paper examines the processes taken to design and administer a collaborative ethnographic study of humanities doctoral students within an inter-institutional, collaborative framework. Project organization and management, including the creation of instruments and analysis of results across two local research teams and institutional cultures is discussed. Effective communications, among and between project teams, and time management were identified as critical factors for success. Benefits resulting from the project included an improved understanding of the needs of a key user group, a heightened interest in user assessment and data-driven decision making among staff within the partner organizations, and a deeper engagement with important academic administrators on both campuses

A 2CUL Collaborative Ethnographic Assessment of Humanities Doctoral Students: Design, Implementation and Analysis

This paper examines the processes taken to design and administer a collaborative ethnographic study of humanities doctoral students within an inter-institutional, collaborative framework. Project organization and management, including the creation of instruments and analysis of results across two local research teams and institutional cultures is discussed. Effective communications, among and between project teams, and time management were identified as critical factors for success. Benefits resulting from the project included an improved understanding of the needs of a key user group, a heightened interest in user assessment and data-driven decision-making among staff within the partner organizations, and a deeper engagement with academic administrators on both campuses

Supporting Humanities Doctoral Student Success: A Collaborative Project between Cornell University Library and Columbia University Libraries

In recent years there have been a number of major, large-scale studies in the United States on the high attrition rates for doctoral students in the humanities. The results of these studies reveal a significant gap between the humanities and other disciplines. None of the studies consulted has specifically considered the role of the library in supporting doctoral program completion, even though it is often characterized as the humanist‘s equivalent to the scientific laboratory. This collaborative study includes focus groups and individual interviews with doctoral students in the humanities at both Cornell and Columbia. The study investigates whether the research library might positively impact doctoral student success in the humanities and discusses specific strategies it might employ to do so

Linguistics - Cornell University

The goal of the research in this data curation profile is to learn about the linguistic aspects of the Cheyenne language with a focus on semantics, pragmatics, and syntactic issues. The data is gathered from recordings of short stories or examples given in response to specific questions. The data management issues center around the early stages of her data. The researcher described a need for a technician who could help segment and transcribe the audio files and a need to apply metadata using morphological gloss that would make it searchable. Additionally, the data would need to be available in a publicly accessible, searchable database that allows for the download of segments. The researcher also expressed a need for the data to be preserved indefinitely

Library Instruction Assessment in Academic Libraries

This version is a postprint of the formally published paper of the same title.Determining the best methods of assessment for a library instruction program in a large research university can be a challenging task. Albert R. Mann Library at Cornell University Library has pilot tested three methods of formative and summative assessment for its library instruction program— attitudinal, outcomes-based, and gap-measure—and determined not only key areas of improvement for the program, but also the benefits and drawbacks of each method of assessment. Attitudinal assessment has guided program improvement in areas of marketing and user satisfaction but does not provide the measurement of learning that outcomes-based assessment covers. The latter can be difficult to achieve in single-session, short-term instruction, while gap-measure assessment can provide a more nuanced view of both patron and instructor attitudes toward learning outcomes, if not actual data on achievement on the objectives themselves. The authors have determined that a combination of these three different types of assessment can address the shortcomings of a single method alone and provide a better measure of the program as a whole

Scholarly practice, participatory design and the extensible catalog

As part of the development of eXtensible Catalog (XC), a project sponsored by the University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries, four institutions conducted 80 interviews and numerous workshops to understand how researchers learn about, acquire, and use scholarly resources. Research findings informed the design and development of XC, a set of open-source applications that provides access to resources across a range of databases, metadata schemas, and standards. In this volume, members of the project team report on key findings of the user research that was done at Cornell University, Ohio State University, the University of Rochester, and Yale University, and discuss the value of including library users and technology specialists from many disciplines in the software design and development process