Organization Monkey

here’s a thought for us to nibble on:

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?”

from Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Lyn Robinson, Mike McGuire, “The rhizome and the tree: changing metaphors for information organisation”, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 66 Iss: 4, pp.604 – 613

DOI: 10.1108/00220411011052975

Ollé, C., & Borrego, Á., A qualitative study of the impact of electronic journals on scholarly information behavior, Library & Information Science Research (2010), doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2010.02.002

About three quarters of the survey respondents stated that they consult more journals and read more articles than they did in the past. Since the number of journals available has increased and access is so much easier, researchers are reading more from a wider range of journals.

i wonder what effect this broader skimming is having on the quality of publications? just because they read widely does that mean that they cite more broadly as well?

my mind boggled at this statement:

Although scientists are well aware of the cost of their research, which they pay by means of grants, information is usually provided to them at no direct cost, and some of them have the impression that it is provided for free.

here’s a link to the pre-published version: http://diposit.ub.edu/dspace/bitstream/2445/12286/1/Olle_Borrego_LISR.pdf

do you ever read an article and it just resonates with you? everything the author has written sits perfectly within your world view, so that you exhale when completing it and say to yourself, “yes, this.” enter: deborah lee’s 2003 article, “marketing research: laying the marketing foundation,” library administration & management 17(4): 186-188.  it’s a brief article; it gets in and gets out and leaves you with the understanding that libraries think about marketing all wrong but also outlines the steps to correct that.

i’ve just completed a research project that analyzes the text of 24 published case studies on marketing electronic resources in libraries.  after reading the case studies it became clear that libraries generally do not do a good/consistent job with evaluating their marketing tasks.  it occurs to me now that i have read this article by lee that perhaps libraries don’t analyze their marketing well because they’re not really sure *why* they’re marketing.  lee’s article states that before you market you need to understand what your patrons want from you, and then develop a marketing plan to let them know that you can provide them with what they want.  in the case studies i read i didn’t see any of that marketing groundwork described.  it makes sense, then, that a library wouldn’t be able to successfully evaluate marketing tasks if the purpose was never defined.

also, a zinger on p. 186:

Picture this scenario: you’re a member of a committee drafted to examine the current library instruction program offered by your college library. Your library offers a number of free workshops for students, but attendance is very low. Too frequently, the discussion in such a committee will center on the question: how do we encourage students to attend the workshops and instructional sessions? According to marketing theory, as defined by Kolter and others, this is the wrong question.

made at http://www.batmancomic.info/ in response to this passage in christopher cox’s “hitting the spot,” published in the serials librarian 53(3), 2007:

The university has strict human subject rules, and each survey proposal must be reviewed by the Institutional Review Board, a process which takes about a month. Due to time constraints, the author had no choice but to employ a more haphazard approach. Surveys were gathered in three ways: a link was posted on the library Web site and an announcement put in the library’s monthly student e-newsletter. This garnered about six responses. An e-mail was next sent to all library student supervisors, asking student workers to fill out the survey. This yielded 45 more surveys. Finally, in order to gain a more representative campus sample, copies of the survey were printed and distributed to willing parties outside various academic buildings throughout campus (six in all) during the second-to-last week of classes. 94 surveys were collected using this method. This brought the total to 145 completed surveys. The majority of survey respondents (n = 135 or 94%) were students, with only 2 faculty members and 6 staff members completing the survey. Student responses were the primary target of the survey, so this result was satisfactory for us.

So, what’s the big deal, you may ask. When a researcher wants to do a study that involves humans his/her study proposal may need to go through an evaluation by a group of researchers charged with making sure that the rights and welfare of the humans used in the study is protected.  That group of researchers is called an Institutional Review Board (IRB).  The reviewers may ask the researcher to change parts of his/her study design to make sure that a participant is safe and enters into the study willingly and informed of any risks.  At the end of a review by an IRB the researcher can be certain that his/her project is ethical.  By deliberately bypassing the IRB step which the author states that his university requires, the above-quoted researcher chose an unethical path.

Libraries are viewed as trusted entities, and research like Cox’s chips away at that trust.  I am really disappointed to have read this article in an international peer-reviewed journal.  This research should have been rejected on the basis of the giant flaw in the research design of bypassing the IRB review.  The HHS Web site says it nicely, “The value of research depends upon the integrity of study results.”

this paper expands on Bates’ 1996 article about information seeking of interdisciplinary scholars, so you’re pretty much obliged to go read this thing now.

one particular interesting point for me as a librarian is taken from the result of the authors’ survey of physics and astronomy faculty on their perceptions of how interdisciplinary they thought the literature in their special areas of research was.  those that felt their area’s literature was fairly concentrated (as opposed to “scattered,” or broad) had the highest rate of e-print archive usage.  this has potential implications for the kinds of archives/back files of e-journals that a library may choose to purchase.  it would be advantageous for a library to understand the perceived interdisciplinarity of a field before the purchase; if the field considers its literature to be more concentrated than scattered, the higher the use of the back files will be.

article in press: Jamali, H. R., & Nicholas, D. Interdisciplinarity and the information-seeking behavior of scientists. Information Processing and Management (2010), doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2009.12.010