Text Analysis of Communication Faculty Publications to Identify Research Trends and Interest

Text analysis has been widely used to identify research trends in many disciplines. However, little has been written about using this method to discover a department’s research trends and faculty research interests in the library setting. This study examined 107 faculty publications from the School of Communication at the University of Houston. It analyzed word and phrase frequencies from titles and abstracts using Voyant tools. The analysis was performed on both the department level and the individual faculty level. This article demonstrates a new way for librarians to understand faculty research. The method can be replicated by subject librarians to analyze their own departments.     

A Music Researcher's View

A researcher with wide interests in the field of music and the music librarian at the same institution describe their separate views of collection development for university and college music libraries. Typically, articles on collection development are written from the perspective of the librarian/subject speclalist. This piece incorporates the viewpoints of two persons with differing academic functions and differing approaches to academic music libraries. One is an eclectic faculty member with a broad spectrum of research interest. The other is an experienced music librarian who manages the music library at the faculty member's institution. Two separate essays briefly outlining the views of the faculty member/consumer and the music librarian/supplier are given below. The essays were independently conceived, and were not coordinated or cross-checked prior to their joining here.     

Beginning the Conversation: Discussing Scholarly Communication

Since the earliest scholarly journals began, journal literature answered a need to communicate scholarly and scientific findings and preserve a validated scholarly record of accomplishments and areas for further research. Scholars are profoundly interested in the transformation of scholarship and the implications for their disciplines. Librarian expertise within the digital serials realm and partnering with faculty to prioritize learning in the library will imaginatively create opportunities for learning with library resources. Discussing scholarly communication changes and traditions provides excellent common ground for serials librarians to begin conversations with disciplinary faculty.     

A Faculty–Librarian Partnership: A Unique Opportunity for Course Integration

ABSTRACT

Librarians at the University of California, Berkeley have created a partnership with faculty in the teaching of a special course, “Introduction to Environmental Studies.” This class is interdisciplinary in nature, covering science and the humanities, and has offered a unique opportunity for library staff to develop a special program incorporating the teaching of analytical skills along with research skills for specific subject areas. The continuous collaboration with faculty and the challenges of working with students with very varied backgrounds and interests are the main points of discussion in this article.     

Participation of Teaching Faculty in Library Book Selection

Teaching faculty members have expertise in their specialized areas, and their participation in library book selection is very important for academic librarians in their collection building. Yet, while some members of the faculty participate actively in library book selection, many others select only a few books or make no selection at all. This study at a Midwestern university shows that years of teaching, age, number of graduate courses taught, publication activities, and professional contacts of the teaching faculty are significantly correlated to the degree of their native participation in library book selection.     

A Multicultural Studies Collection Enhancement Group:

Librarians in small academic libraries rarely have the time or personnel to develop their collections adequately. All too frequently their holdings lag behind the research needs of faculty and students. To offset this tendency Dickinson College funded a faculty summer study group with the specific charge of enhancing the library's holdings in the area of Black of African American Studies. The results were impressive. For once faculty were forced to consider research materials when they created new courses or embellished old ones, while the library received the extra plus of high profile purchasing with a strong likelihood of use. This article suggests that such preemptive collection development-the focused purchasing in specific areas prior to their introduction to the curriculum-could serve as a useful model in other cross-disciplinary endeavors.     

Focused Library Instruction for Occupational Therapy,Physical Therapy,and Respiratory Care Students and Faculty: Library Instruction in Allied Health

The integration of librarians into allied health programs presents many exciting opportunities for collaboration. This column will describe how a library instruction program is integrated into the occupational therapy, respiratory care, and physical therapy curricula at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. The allied health faculty have welcomed and recognized the librarians’ expertise in teaching evidence-based practice and library research skills.     

Identifying Subject-Specific Conferences as Professional Development Opportunities for the Academic Librarian

A major challenge facing academic libraries is the need for reference librarians to become knowledge experts in their assigned subject areas. The subject-specialist approach increases the effectiveness of collection development, classroom instruction, and faculty liaison interactions. Simultaneously, this approach creates the need for continuous learning opportunities. Conferences organized around academic disciplines provide a direct connection to subject-specific information as well as opportunities for meeting people who share common interests. With the increase in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to teaching and research, the authors argue that attending subject-specific conferences is the best way to keep up with information needs in various fields. This article reviews the benefits of attending academic conferences and discusses five strategies for selecting an appropriate subject conference in any discipline. First-person accounts of conference experiences illustrate these benefits.     

How Law Schools Benefit When Librarians Publish,Teach, and Hold Faculty Status

Many nondirector academic law librarians publish and teach legal research classes. Some hold faculty status as well. Law librarians have expertise in the development and delivery of legal research instruction methodologies and are developing a body of literature documenting their efforts to create and share a pedagogy of legal research instruction. Principles of shared faculty governance entitle library faculty to contribute to the development and delivery of a curriculum of legal research instruction. Encouraging law librarian participation in the shared governance of law schools should lead to increasing opportunities for the successful reform of legal education curricula with respect to legal research instruction.     

Librarians as Research Partners: Their Contribution to the Scholarly Endeavour Beyond Library and Information Science

Academic libraries are increasingly called upon to demonstrate their value to their home institutions. Research collaboration with faculty resulting in the co-authorship of scholarly output is one possible way to demonstrate the alignment of the library with the institutional mission. Involvement in research also improves librarians' skills in offering research support services. This study explores the contribution of librarians to scholarly journals in fields other than Library and Information Science (LIS) as well as their collaboration practices with researchers in those fields. Results show an increasing number of papers published by library-affiliated authors in non-LIS journals between 2006 and 2015. The papers fall broadly into four areas: articles on topics related to LIS published in non-LIS journals; higher education and information literacy; systematic reviews and meta-analysis; and research collaboration in the faculty's areas of expertise. The study is limited by the difficulty in properly retrieving the scholarly output of librarians from bibliographic databases and the difficulty in ascertaining their contributions to published articles.     

Better Together: Responsive Community Programming at the U-M Library

In the past seven years, the University of Michigan Library's programming model has evolved to be responsive and reflective of staffing areas of interest and expertise. Our team-based, iterative model enables us to develop responsive exhibits, workshops, experiences, and events in our community. This article explores our experiences in developing this model through the lens of some of our collaborations with the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL). Our approach to programming opportunities builds on learning by doing, building deeper, mutually beneficial relationships with other organizations, and continually making sure we are truly developing programming with our audience (our community) in mind. While public and academic libraries often develop distinct sets of services, collections, and expertise to serve their respective communities, successful collaborations can yield interesting opportunities for more effective engagement and programming. Our relationship with AADL has helped us to identify and better understand how we can connect our teaching and research missions with the interests and needs of the broader community in which we are situated.     

Self-Efficacy of Academic Librarians: Implications for Public Services Managers

The question of academic librarian status has resulted in academic librarians approaching relationships with faculty as one of deference, where they cede power to disciplinary faculty regardless of their own expertise. To date, no research has explored why academic librarians engage in deference behavior when working with disciplinary faculty. Self-efficacy, a person's beliefs in their ability to perform a task, may be an appropriate theoretical framework to begin exploring this behavior. This pilot study explores the perceived self-efficacy of Colorado academic librarians holding an instruction and/or liaison role (n = 68) in order to examine academic librarians' levels of perceived self-efficacy and its relationship to faculty status and years in profession. Results indicate that there is not a significant relationship between perceived self-efficacy and faculty status or years in profession but that gender is significantly associated with perceived self-efficacy. Results also indicate a change in self-efficacy as library faculty progress between faculty ranks. Avenues for future research on academic librarian self-efficacy are suggested and implications for public services managers are discussed.     

Meeting Evolving Research and Curriculum Needs: A Survey of Interlibrary Loan and OhioLINK Borrowing at an Academic Law Library

The research goal was to study the law faculty's interlibrary loan and OhioLINK borrowing activity to assess current subject gaps in the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Library's collection. The authors analyzed and collated faculty research interests. The results indicate that additional purchases are required to support international law and health law, two curriculum areas currently under development at Cleveland-Marshall.     

Exploring data literacy via a librarian-faculty learning community: A case study

Faculty learning communities (FLCs) are year-long professional development opportunities available at many higher education institutions in the United States. While the literature reflects some librarian engagement with FLCs, it seems limited primarily to areas of traditional librarian expertise such as information literacy and outreach. This article describes a case study of a librarian-facilitated FLC focused on data literacy, which resulted in the development of a teaching toolkit, library-led data literacy instruction, and ongoing collaborations between librarians and faculty. The FLC structure proved to be a valuable framework that facilitated collaborative learning in topics relevant to both disciplinary faculty and librarians. In addition, the tangible work products produced by the FLC serve to advance the strategic, curricular goals of the university while giving the library an opportunity to showcase its value in the academic lifecycle.     

Expanding Librarian Roles Through a Librarian Initiated and Facilitated Faculty Learning Community

The role of libraries is changing to focus more on users rather than the collection of information. Community building and connecting people with shared interests represents a social role for libraries in the information age. Their role adds a new dimension to the traditional domains for libraries. Developing and implementing an integrated medical curriculum became the primary focus of basic sciences faculty at a new medical school. Scholarly teaching and connecting teaching with educational research presented a great challenge for the faculty. In response to the learning, teaching, and developmental needs of faculty members, a librarian established a faculty learning community as an approach to supporting faculty development and growth as teaching scholars and scholars of educational research. The article provides a case to illustrate how a librarian spanned boundaries and took up the responsibilities of establishing a faculty learning community and developing a year-long program in light of different developmental needs of faculty members at the new medical school. It also describes the process of developing the faculty learning community program, its components, and the many roles that the librarian took in implementing the program.     

The Collegial Environment and the Functional Organization

Abstract

Libraries are generally organized by function in order to carry out their mission efficiently. Academic librarians who are faculty also have a collegial organization that exists apart from any functional arrangement. Public and technical services librarians in this sort of organization are colleagues who have responsibility for the library in the way that teaching faculty are responsible for the programs in their departments. This article discusses the characteristics of the successful collegial organization and the relationship of technical and public services librarians in a collegial library.     

Where in the World Is My Librarian? Creating Cross-Campus Collaborations to Seamlessly Connect with Students When Librarians,Students, and Faculty Are in Different Locations

Research librarians often have a specialty in certain discipline, and many academic libraries thrive on this type of arrangement to support their researchers. But more often, new interdisciplinary programs are developed that require the expertise of more than one subject expert for support. In particular, students in a Master of Education in the Health Professions (MEHP) program have unique, complicated research challenges that can only be addressed with careful collaboration amongst multiple subject experts. However, this program and the library saw the need for additional expertise to support their students, and began a collaboration with the medical library, bringing a clinical informationist onto the library support team. Together, the education librarian, clinical informationist, and program faculty collaborate to provide excellent services to help students in their research throughout the program.     

Faculty citations: An approach to assessing the impact of diminishing resources on scientific research

In an effort to assess the impact of diminished library resources on scientific research, the Georgia Institute of Technology library collection was evaluated by analyzing the sources cited in the publications of faculty in the applied and physical sciences for 1989. This study indicates that even with substantial periodical cancellations, the periodical collection supports the majority of faculty needs since they rely primarily on core journals in their disciplines. Other materials cited less frequently in published faculty research — monographs, proceedings, technical reports, other serials, and government documents — are examined. The limitations of this method, its institutionally specific results, and the need to learn more about the information-seeking behaviors of research science faculty are also discussed.     

The Impact of Library Support on Education Faculty Research Productivity: An Exploratory Study

The authors surveyed college and university faculty members in the field of professional education to gauge their perceptions pertaining to the impact of library services on their research. The purpose was to illuminate faculty perceptions in a postsecondary education environment that emphasizes research productivity and requires libraries to provide ever more compelling evidence of their institutional value. Survey results showed that faculty members continue to rely on traditional discovery and collections-based library services, but that additional support for grant activity, data management, intellectual property management, and bibliometric analysis is needed. Implications for transforming library research support are discussed, and areas for further study are proposed.