Boundaries and Breakthroughs: A Conversation on Maintaining Engagement and Avoiding Burnout in Reference and Instruction

This chapter puts one early- and one mid-career academic librarian together in conversation about issues and strategies related to engagement with their work and careers. The authors examine the tensions between engagement and self-care, share strategies for avoiding burnout, complicate the concept of service in reference and instruction work, and discuss the interests and types of work that keep them sustained and fulfilled

2018 Top Trends in Academic Libraries

Every other year, the ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee produces a document on top trends in higher education as they relate to academic librarianship. Topics in this edition of ACRL Top Trends will be familiar to some readers who will hopefully learn of new materials to expand their knowledge. Other readers will be made aware of trends that are outside of their experience. This is the nature of trends in our current technological and educational environments: change is continual, but it affects different libraries at different rates. The 2018 top trends share several overarching themes, including the impact of market forces, technology, and the political environment on libraries

Full-Time Faculty View Information Literacy as Important but Are Unlikely to Incorporate it Into Their Teaching. A Review of: Bury, S. (2011). Faculty attitudes, perceptions and experiences of information literacy: A study across multiple disciplines at York University, Canada. Journal of Information Literacy, 5(1). Retrieved from http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL/article/view/PRA-V5-I1-2011-1

Objective – To explore faculty attitudes towards information literacy (IL); in particular,faculty perception of student IL competencies, importance of IL skills and instruction, and ideal means of planning and delivering IL instruction.Design – Online survey questionnaire.Setting – Large public research university located in Toronto, Canada.Subjects – 221 full-time faculty.Methods – The author designed and distributed an online survey to all full-time York University faculty (n=1,451) in March 2007 using Zoomerang software. The survey consisted of between 26 and 36 questions depending on responses selected by respondents, and included both open- and closed-ended questions. The author handcoded the qualitative data and used SPSS to analyze the quantitative data. The survey had 221 usable responses giving a response rate of 15.2%.Main Results – The study revealed a high degree of concern among survey respondents regarding undergraduate students’ information literacy skills, accompanied by a perceived gradual increase in IL abilities corresponding to student year. Faculty ranked each of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education as being extremely important. No ACRL standard ranked below 6 on a scale of 1 to 7, suggesting full agreement with the value of IL proficiency. Of the faculty 78.7% felt that IL education should be a joint collaboration between faculty and librarians. A considerable majority of respondents (81.7%) answered that IL instruction should be required for all students. Far fewer faculty incorporated IL teaching in practice, with 52.9% engaging in IL instruction and 47.1% not incorporating IL instruction at all. Of the faculty who incorporated librarian-led IL sessions into their courses, 85% of faculty perceived a “substantial impact” or “some impact” on their students’ IL competencies.Conclusions – The author concludes that this study adds evidence to the claim that a disconnect exists between faculty beliefs about the importance of IL and their teaching practices. Faculty consistently express concern regarding student IL abilities and support collaborative IL instruction, yet the rate of IL integration within their classes remains low. The results corroborate that faculty perceptions and attitudes towards IL remain relatively consistent when compared with other studies. The author recommends that librarians be flexible regarding IL instruction models and encourage further investigation of faculty development models to achieve wider IL integration. A stronger advocacy role is also advised to increase instruction opportunities and the promotion of information literacy at the institutional level. The author identifies four areas for future research, including examining why faculty do not incorporate IL instruction into their classes, disciplinary differences in IL attitudes and adoption, which IL instruction models faculty view as most effective, and replication of this study to test generalizability. As of the study’s publication, the author was conducting a qualitative follow-up study in the form of semi-structured interviews with faculty

Cataloguers May Tend to Have Learning Styles Different from Other Library Job Responsibilities

Objective – To determine whether relationships exist between academic librarians’ learning styles and their professional work responsibilities. Design – Self-selecting survey. Setting – Email listservs. Subjects – 1579 academic librarians. Methods – The authors used the Index of Learning Styles questionnaire, based on the Felder-Silverman Learning Styles model consisting of eight dimensions on four scales: Active/Reflective, Sensing/Intuitive, Visual/Verbal, and Sequential/Global. The multiple choice survey was distributed online to 23 email listservs for academic librarians in 2011, and to 14 additional listservs in 2013 targeting technical services librarians. 1579 responses were received in total, which were analyzed using ANOVA with a Tukey-Kramer post-hoc mean separation, and descriptively using observed frequencies. Main Results – In examining the relationship between positions and learning styles, the study revealed there to be five statistically significant p-values when the data were analyzed. Catalogers (n=145) were found to be more reflective learners compared to Administrative (n=321) and Instruction librarians (n=228) at the p = 0.009 level. Administrative, Instruction, and “Other” librarians were found to be more intuitive learners than Catalogers, who are more likely to be sensing learners, at the p = 0.0004 level. Digital librarians (n=40) are more likely to be visual learners and Catalogers more likely to be sequential learners when compared to several other librarian categories, at the p = 0.020 and p = 0.001 levels respectively. Conclusions – The authors concluded that there were some statistically significant differences between librarians’ learning styles scores according to job responsibilities. Catalogers were found to have different learning styles than other types of librarians for three out of four scales. Based on these findings, the authors indicate that further research into how librarians’ work responsibilities impact learning styles is justified

Accurate Answers to Reference Queries May Be Provided Less Frequently Than Expected. A Review of: Hernon, P., & McClure, C. (1986). Unobtrusive reference testing: The 55 percent rule. Library Journal, 111(7), 37-41.

Objective – To determine the number of government documents reference questions that are answered correctly by professional library staff.Design – The authors utilized unobtrusive reference testing: reference queries posed to library personnel who were unaware they were being evaluated. As opposed to other designs that require the researcher’s presence in the setting, unobtrusive testing utilizes proxies to administer test questions to the subjects, reducing the possibility of reporter bias.Setting – Twenty-six public and academic libraries participating in the U.S. Government Printing Office Depository Program located in the Western, Southern, and Midwestern United States. The Federal Depository Program consisted of 1400 libraries at the time of the study. One public and one academic library were chosen for each city.Subjects – Reference and government documents librarians. These two staff types were selected in order to compare the accuracy of each group’s responses to the queries.Methods – A set of 15 predetermined factual and bibliographic questions were developed by the authors and administered to library staff respondents by proxies. Government documents were selected as the foundation for the test questions. In selecting federal depository libraries for their sample the authors could ensure all queries may hypothetically be answered using U.S. Government Printing Office documents, as all of the libraries would hold the resources in question.Graduate students enrolled in the University of Arizona and University of Oklahoma library science programs were trained by the authors to serve as proxies. The proxies posed as library users and administered the set of queries at each selected library. Reference librarians and government documents librarians were tested separately, receiving seven and eight questions respectively at each library visited. Over a four-month period a total of 390 questions were posed and their answers recorded.Main Results – The respondents correctly answered 241 of 390 queries (62 percent). Government documents librarians accurately answered 65 percent of questions, while reference librarians successfully responded to 59 percent. Hernon and McClure derived the “55 percent rule” for reference accuracy from these results and previous unobtrusive studies conducted by both the authors and other researchers. This body of research estimates the rate of accurate answers of factual and bibliographic questions to be between 50 and 62 percent.Data regarding the “interview and search process” (I&S), defined as the activities between the time a query was posed and when a resolution was provided, also yielded intriguing findings. Regardless of the question asked, the average I&S duration was three to five minutes. Two-thirds of the accurate answers were supplied within three minutes, and 89 percent within five minutes of the initiation of I&S. The duration of I&S did not vary significantly by library type or librarian type.Reasons for the provision of inaccurate answers included providing the wrong data (64 percent of instances), responding with “don’t know” and ending the interaction (20 percent), or claiming the library did not own a source that would answer the query (15 percent). Other findings included the fact thatrespondents infrequently offered referrals, which took place in 17 percent of all interactions, and that the three geographic regions studied had an even distribution of correct answers.Conclusions - Based on their research results as well as those of similar unobtrusive studies, the authors propose two rules regarding reference assistance that apply to public and academic libraries. First, reference librarians correctly answer approximately 55 percent of factual and bibliographic queries received (the 55 percent reference rule). Second, librarians spend no more than five minutes on most factual and bibliographic questions (the five-minute answer rule).Ultimately, Hernon and McClure recommend reevaluating the centrality of reference services to library operations. If trained professionals are unable to answer more than 60 percent of factual questions correctly, should reference services continue to receive such considerable staffing and funding? Or, alternatively, should libraries increase efforts to improve the accuracy of answers? The authors close by challenging the profession to address the need for strategic assessment of reference effectiveness

Environmental Scan 2019

Every two years, the ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee writes an Environmental Scan, a summary of the key themes in libraries and higher education. Many topics in this arena are in a state of perpetual change. This year’s scan focuses largely on developments from the last two years (2017 and 20018) in long standing themes primarily centered in the U.S. In some cases these build on last year’s Top Trends and there are a few instances of notable events that may indicate larger changes to come. The 2019 Environmental Scan will provide an overview for all librarians working in or with an interest in higher education. Since changes can unfold over years, those deeply interested in this landscape should also consult the RPRC documents for the last four years. The footnotes provide a solid starting point for taking a deeper dive into these topics