Search

In the summer of 2010, two researchers interviewed twenty-three library administrators of comparable academic libraries at American universities for their views of the value of research in academic libraries. The interview questions focused on the administrators’ perceived value of academic librarians’ research, incentives given to academic librarians to research, factors that influence the administrators’ thinking about academic library research, opinions about the changes in Americans libraries in the past decades, and directions that they see the academic library heading. This paper reflects the answers of these (anonymous) administrators and attempts to analyze patterns in their responses that will be of value to the academic library and its community in America.

Stoan’s distinction between library skills and research skills based on different philosophies of information seeking suggests the value of training in research methodology for the librarian. Such training could lead to more effective patron consultations, committee/administrative work, and personal research. Thus, a convenience sample of web-based syllabi for web-assisted research courses at 25/57 of the American Library Association-accredited programs were subjected to exploratory analysis, and 45 syllabi-based research topics were reviewed for usefulness to library authors’ professional work.

Although authors have done validation or comparison studies of Web-based and paper-and-pencil surveys for different samples, few have published such studies for library patrons. After publishing its previous Web-based library satisfaction survey, Western Kentucky University Libraries developed a similar survey with identical content for library Web and exit patrons to compare these groups’ responses. This article focuses on the collection of Web and exit survey responses in a two-week period, the transformation of response data for analysis, a comparison of the two samples, and discussion of the potential use of the results. Future research on the Web-based and paper-and-pencil methods themselves is indicated.