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Research Forum: The Tufts/EDUCOM data-sharing project for library statistics

Pour une action des bibliothecaires en faveur du respect des regles concernant l'ecriture des citations

In March 2020, academic libraries across the United States closed and sent everyone home, some destined to not reopen for months. University offices closed. Classes were moved online. Suddenly, librarians and staff pivoted to working from home and to all remote services, without time for planning logistics or training. To study the impact of this extraordinary and sweeping transition on virtual reference services (VRS), we conducted a major study of academic library responses to the pandemic that focused on librarian perceptions of how services and relationships with users morphed during this COVID-19 year.Academic librarians rallied to our call, and we collected a total of 300 responses to two longitudinal surveys launched at key points during the pandemic. Data collection focused on two phases in 2020: 1) shutdown and immediate aftermath (mid-March to July), and 2) fall ramp up and into the semester (August to December). Via Zoom, we also interviewed 28 academic librarian leaders (e.g., heads of reference and/or VRS, associate directors for User Services) from September to November. Surveys and interviews centered on adaptations and innovations to reference services, especially VRS and perceptions of changes in user interactions.

In 2019, the University of Connecticut (UConn) Library began systematically collecting faculty-authored books (FABs). We envisioned the collection as a service—a program to capture and celebrate faculty work and ensure that their intellectual contributions were represented in the library’s collections. Under the leadership of our new dean, we crafted and communicated jargon-free program parameters, collaborated with liaison librarians and book vendors to purchase more than 220 FABs, and collaborated with communications staff to pursue events and marketing to publicize this new collecting area. UConn is a large public research university with more than 30,000 students and 1,500 full-time faculty who publish scores of books yearly, so this FAB service resonated with faculty and senior administrators alike. Though we are adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact, FABs have become a signature initiative for UConn Library.

Embedded librarianship has been around for a long time. It was considered a buzz word and began appearing in journals and conferences early in the 21st century, according to Kathy Drewes and Nadine Hoffman. Embedded librarianship became a way for librarians to provide research help and assistance to distance education students, as more library resources came online. Embedded librarianship has been an important service no more so than now in the new reality of the pandemic world.

As a new academic librarian trying to establish myself and build relationships, I’ve been forced to give a fair amount of thought to what kind of librarian I want, and need, to be. Like many academic librarians, I have been trying to find the balance between being available for our faculty—supporting their (and their students’) instruction needs and facilitating their research—and being a professional in my own right, advocating for myself and my expertise.Many articles about the faculty-librarian relationship focus on faculty perceptions of librarians (or vice versa) and on the need for collaborative relationships. These are important aspects of academic librarianship to address, but they don’t really speak to a significant contributing factor—librarians’ perceptions of themselves and their role.

The University of Wyoming (UW) Libraries received two grants to provide African American poetry programming in the spring and summer of 2020, one from the Library of America’s Lift Every Voice project and one from the Wyoming Humanities Council Spark Grant. As part of the grants, the library partnered with Albany County Public Library and the Laramie High School to create a slate of programs celebrating African American poetry and music that would appeal to all generations. The initial programming was intended to be a series of month-long face-to-face events with a balance of programming types: lectures, poetry readings, poetry slams, children’s programming, and panel discussions. The fact that multiple people worked together to plan the programming enriched the series and was extremely helpful when we realized that we would have to pivot to a virtual program series because of the coronavirus pandemic. This article will discuss how we turned a face-to-face program series into remote programming in a very short timeframe.

On March 10, 2020, UCLA announced a transition to remote teaching through the end of winter quarter. Remote teaching has been extended through all subsequent teaching periods through summer 2021. Similarly, remote work has remained a predominant work situation for the majority of UCLA Library staff, although some staff have returned to in-person work to support services that required on-site activity. A wider return to work will begin in July 2021. After this year and a half of remote teaching, UCLA is planning to return to primarily in-person instruction starting in fall 2021 in line with changes to Los Angeles County public health guidelines.

In December 2019, two student assistants in the Special Collections Research Center at Appalachian State University curated an in-person pop-up exhibit of rare and manuscript materials as part of the University Libraries’ “Library Cares” week-long exam study break program. The pop-up, entitled “Winter in Appalachia,” took place from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. in a high-traffic area on Belk Library and Information Commons’ first floor. The student curators were undergraduates who worked part-time at the reference desk in Special Collections and were supervised by the reference archivist, who served as their exhibit facilitator. This article is an interview with the student curators about their experience planning, preparing, and staffing the exhibit, and their evaluation of the event. We hope to be able to return to such events post-pandemic, but we have started to think about ways to incorporate student curation in a virtual world.

Recently at Joyner Library, the main library for West Campus at East Carolina University (ECU), three heads of service completed a project to revise the library’s liaison competencies. The head of collection development, the head of research and instructional services, and the scholarly communication librarian took the competencies from a task-oriented document and turned them into one that allows liaisons to choose what and how they want to learn. The new document is built around learning statements, is goal-oriented, and serves liaison librarians much better than the previous document. This article will cover the creation and use of the new liaison competencies document.

Librarians at Western Carolina University have performed scholarship-focused summer outreach to the teaching faculty for many years, primarily via in-person workshops. Since faculty often focus on scholarship rather than instruction during summers, our emphasis on research and publication was timely and appropriate. However, the in-person research workshops were poorly attended, as faculty who do not teach summer courses often do not come to campus.

At the ACRL/SPARC Forum at the 2020 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, three panelists discussed efforts to negotiate with vendors regarding “Big Deal” journal packages, including strategies and information that make such negotiations more effective for libraries. The three panelists provide their remarks below. Gale Etschmaier recounts negotiations between the Florida State University Libraries and Elsevier that led to the successful cancellation of their Elsevier “Big Deal.” Robin Sinn summarizes open access efforts at the Johns Hopkins University Libraries. And, finally, Jason Priem discusses his company’s product Unsub, a “data dashboard that helps libraries forecast, explore, and optimize their alternatives to the Big Deal, so they can unsubscribe with confidence.”

Campus and community outreach activities often play an essential role in fulfilling the mission of academic libraries at public institutions. At the University of Florida (UF), library employees are partnering with local schools to support student learning and development through the exploration of new technologies and historical resources. In past years, the UF Libraries have collaborated with local teachers to host academic library tours, collection exploration, and research workshops. The UF-Marston Science Library has also hosted Girls Tech Camp, a one-week summer camp to encourage middle school girls to pursue STEM education and careers. Building on these past activities, the UF Libraries conducted a pilot project in summer 2019 to support the diversity initiative of the local school district.

Military-affiliated students are a diverse campus constituency and may encounter a number of obstacles to their academic success. At the University of Memphis (UM), the Veteran and Military Student Services (VMSS) center provides a wide-ranging suite of services to engage and support military-affiliated students. This article describes how two UM departments, the University Libraries and VMSS, collaborated to facilitate the discovery and circulation of an existing collection of textbooks for military-affiliated students.

The University of California-Los Angeles campus is home to an iSchool and a robust library system, consisting of nine physical locations and even more affiliated library units. It would seem natural that the iSchool would partner with the library to provide library and Information Studies students with opportunities to learn practical skills to enhance their resumes.

ACRL is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2020 awards. Made possible by generous corporate support, the annual presentation of awards and grants enables ACRL to honor the very best in academic and research librarianship.

The student sitting next to me in the University of Winnipeg’s Aboriginal Student Services Centre listens respectfully as I demonstrate the library catalog and databases, then turns to me. “It’s interesting,” he says. “The way the university teaches us, by explaining. It’s not like when me and my father would go into the bush.”

Curriculum mapping for the purposes of an academic library is the process of reviewing a degree-granting department’s curriculum side-by-side with library learning objectives to situate information literacy instruction within the sequence of courses that a student will take.In 2014, I undertook a curriculum mapping pilot for our library using a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis methodology as part of a leadership institute. My project looked at three degree programs at our university and suggested changes for further engagement with the departments. At the same time, three other librarians that I met at the leadership institute took part in curriculum mapping projects at their institutions using different methodologies. Together, we published our results in the New Review of Academic Librarianship.

In late spring 2019, eight staff members from the Colorado School of Mines (Mines) Arthur Lakes Library, in Golden, Colorado, visited the China University of Mining and Technology (CUMT) in Xuzhou, China. The trip was intended to develop a relationship between the two libraries and foster future partnerships. The visit, which centered around the Symposium on Mines-CUMT Library Collaboration, included presentations by Mines and CUMT staff, museum visits, cultural activities, and a full-day workshop for early career researchers.

The departmental seminar has long held a prominent place in the culture of academic science. In chemistry, one of the most tradition-bound STEM disciplines, faculty of all ranks go on the road with prepared talks about their latest research, visiting host departments to share and network. While this mode of communication is time-intensive and not inexpensive, it offers many benefits to all concerned.