American Academic Libraries Research Articles

Quantification of solo librarianship within American academic libraries between fiscal years 2016 and 2019 using IPEDS data

Insufficient reporting of the size of the solo academic librarian population exists. Utilizing Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) annual data and adhering to the 1989 Solo Librarians Caucus definition of solo librarianship, a method relying on IPEDS UnitIDs and the Human Resources (HR) survey component was designed to quantify this population working within American institutions of higher education for fiscal years 2016 through 2019. Pairing with additional IPEDS institutional data from two fiscal years provided overview insight into the institution types served by these professionals based on geographic region, enrollment full-time equivalents (FTEs), Carnegie Classifications, and annual library expenditure.

Applications of diversity language to descriptions of collection development activities at academic libraries: An exploratory analysis of strategic plans and diversity information webpages

Diversity is commonly invoked as a goal for libraries in a variety of domains, including collections. This study explores how diversity language is used to characterize collection development efforts at a sample of large North American academic libraries, through content analysis of strategic planning documents as well as library webpages providing information about diversity efforts. The topic of collection diversity was found to be not consistently addressed in these documents. While 90 % of the institutions whose strategic plans were examined mentioned diversity in some way, less than half of these did so in relation to collections; about one-third of the libraries with diversity information pages omitted reference to collections in these documents. Strategic plans and webpages that mentioned collection diversity often did so cursorily, and in vague terms that lacked specific details about the nature and purpose of diversification. This indicates that the academic libraries still have far to go in developing a shared conceptualization of what collection diversity involves. Analysis of updated documents, retrieved two years after the initial sample, suggests that there may be increasing attention to social justice concerns in these contexts, which would potentially enable greater precision in discussions of collection diversification.

Digital Initiatives in Academic Libraries: Challenges and Opportunities

Digital initiatives have become increasingly common in academic libraries, but inconsistent definitions, standards, and expectations limit and, in some cases, negatively impact the effectiveness of practitioners. This article explores the discourse surrounding professional titles and responsibilities in digital initiatives within North American academic libraries between 1990 and 2020. A review of job advertisements, position descriptions, and professional activities reveals ambiguously defined responsibilities, inadequate technical education, and limited opportunities for training. Current trends suggest digital initiatives will expand from traditional digitization and digital library projects toward more diverse and flexible digital project management. This change will require familiarity with software development, systems administration, and library practices. The implication for library science education is the need for course programming that reflects these trends.

Creating the South Caroliniana Library

Creating the South Caroliniana Library

Understanding Access in Academic Library Special Collections

American academic libraries have collected rare and unique non-circulating materials now referred to as special collections. These materials are handled differently than in other parts of academic library collections with specialized access policies, procedures, and staff. This research project looks at how ideas of access to special collections have changed during the period 1936 to 2019. Interviews were conducted with 21 special collections professionals. Using a grounded theory approach, a conceptual model of the aspects of access was developed. Ten aspects of access were mapped onto three overarching categories. An exploration of access through the lens of special collections is especially meaningful because of the tension between the principles of preservation and access within the special collections community. This project is also significant as the library profession as a whole explores how representation of diversity within collections and access to them impacts library users.

Are Virtual Reference Services Color and Gender Blind? Service Equality Revisited

ABSTRACTFollowing the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020, there has been an increased focus on racial equality in library services, including recent modifications of the ALA Code of Ethics. Online library services may eliminate race‐based service discrimination by obscuring the racial identity of the patron. However, racial assumptions based on patrons' names can lead to online discrimination. While prior research shows mixed results, we examine if there is evidence of racial bias in virtual reference in American academic libraries. Initial findings based on content analysis of 946 responses from 255 libraries suggest that Tyrone Jackson received better service than others did.

Academic Librarians Develop Their Teaching Identities Differently Depending on Their Years of Instructional Experience

A Review of: Nichols Hess, A. (2020). Instructional experience and teaching identities: How academic librarians' years of experience in instruction impact their perceptions of themselves as educators. Communications in Information Literacy, 14(2), 153–180. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2020.14.2.1 Abstract Objective – To examine how an academic librarian’s years of instructional experience impacts how they think of themselves as instructors. Design – Survey questionnaire. Setting – American academic library profession. Subjects – 353 participants selected from 501 respondents. Methods – A Qualtrics survey was sent via email to members of several American Library Association discussion lists. The author selected a subset of respondents for further analysis based on how they answered key questions on the survey. Selected participants were those who believed they had experienced perspective transformation around their teaching identities. The author used principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to identify twelve transformative constructs across three sub-themes: relational, experiential, and professional inputs. The author then labelled each construct based on its respective component parts. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests were then conducted using SPSS. Main Results – Statistically significant differences were found between experienced and inexperienced instructional librarians. Participants with more instructional experience tend to believe their teaching identities are influenced to a greater extent by these factors: Interpersonal relationships Feedback from colleagues outside of librarianship Self-directed learning opportunities Participants with less instructional experience tend to believe their teaching identities are influenced to a greater extent by these factors: Feedback from those within librarianship Library-centric inputs such as their formal library studies Conclusion – Different types of professional development opportunities will appeal to different librarians based on their level of instructional experience. Less experienced librarian instructors may find mentoring and informal collegial relationships within the library to be beneficial. More experienced librarian instructors may prefer to seek out relationships with colleagues outside the library to further develop their teaching identities.

Technological scenarios for the new normality in Latin American academic libraries

The technological scenarios that have arisen in Latin American universities have been substantially changing in recent months as a result of the international health emergency caused by COVID-19. The lockdown policy revealed the need to develop digital and informational skills to adapt to the environment and the demands of distance learning required for integral online education. In order to observe and systematize the transformation of the technological environment in academic libraries during these months, the recent situation was identified based on data analysis obtained from a questionnaire applied in Latin American countries. The results reported significant changes in the use of digital applications, services, user assistance and librarian training during the pandemic, as well as the libraries’ mid-term commitments.

Open Access in Estonia

ABSTRACT In the North American academic library and information studies literature, not much has been written about open access (OA) in Estonia. The present article addresses that lacunae by focusing on the country’s open access landscape, spotlighting essential OA resources in the Humanities and Social Sciences. UNESCO’s Global Open Access portal provides cursory information on Estonian OA and notes, “No national OA policy; no financial support for OA publishing; lack of awareness on OA/digital preservation among researchers and academics.” 1 This article examines the current state of open access in Estonia and argues that, despite the perceived lack of national OA policy in Estonia, OA remains a robust complementary alternative to proprietary databases. Estonian institutions have shown a keen initiative and interest in the development of the OA sources.

Book Review: The Globalized Library: American Academic Libraries and International Students, Collections, and Practices

Andrew A. Wakelee reviews The Globalized Library: American Academic Libraries and International Students, Collections, and Practices edited by Yelena Luckert with Lindsay Inge Carpenter.

CADRE: A Collaborative, Cloud-Based Solution for Big Bibliographic Data Research in Academic Libraries.

Big bibliographic datasets hold promise for revolutionizing the scientific enterprise when combined with state-of-the-science computational capabilities. Yet, hosting proprietary and open big bibliographic datasets poses significant difficulties for libraries, both large and small. Libraries face significant barriers to hosting such assets, including cost and expertise, which has limited their ability to provide stewardship for big datasets, and thus has hampered researchers' access to them. What is needed is a solution to address the libraries' and researchers’ joint needs. This article outlines the theoretical framework that underpins the Collaborative Archive and Data Research Environment project. We recommend a shared cloud-based infrastructure to address this need built on five pillars: 1) Community–a community of libraries and industry partners who support and maintain the platform and a community of researchers who use it; 2) Access–the sharing platform should be accessible and affordable to both proprietary data customers and the general public; 3) Data-Centric–the platform is optimized for efficient and high-quality bibliographic data services, satisfying diverse data needs; 4) Reproducibility–the platform should be designed to foster and encourage reproducible research; 5) Empowerment—the platform should empower researchers to perform big data analytics on the hosted datasets. In this article, we describe the many facets of the problem faced by American academic libraries and researchers wanting to work with big datasets. We propose a practical solution based on the five pillars: The Collaborative Archive and Data Research Environment. Finally, we address potential barriers to implementing this solution and strategies for overcoming them.

Leadership, Development, and Expertise: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Scholarly Communication Librarian Position Announcements

INTRODUCTION In 2012, the Association of Research Libraries reported that 95% of libraries identified their libraries as leaders of scholarly communication efforts on campus. While academic librarians have long been responsible for SC issues, institutions have explicitly tasked positions with these responsibilities increasingly over time. This qualitative analysis of position announcements focuses on the ways libraries expect these librarians to engage with SC issues and responsibilities, rather than describing the prevalence of SC-related functions. Specifically, this study asks the following questions: (1) How do administrators communicate leadership expectations of SC librarian roles through job advertisements? (2) In what ways could these leadership expectations be challenging or problematic for SC librarians in non-administrator positions? METHODS This study is a qualitative content analysis of scholarly communication librarian position announcements posted to ALA JobList between January 1, 2016, and July 31, 2019. The advertisements are predominantly from North American academic libraries. Qualitative content analysis is systematic but allows for flexibility of interpretation in describing themes and categories. The coding scheme developed over multiple readings of the data and the author identified categories through the process of subsumption. RESULTS & DISCUSSION Prevalent themes in position announcements include leadership, expertise, and development. Leadership responsibilities appear as management duties or, often in non-administrator positions, as an expectation to take initiative or be an exemplar. SC librarians are expected to be experts, often as the library’s campus liaison or as educators in a variety of SC issues. They may also be tasked with developing institutional repositories or SC programs, though it is not always clear in the advertisement what support is available. These themes are discussed in terms of the SC librarian as a boundary spanning role. Boundary spanners are positions within an organization that communicate with the outside environment. They may also serve as filters for information coming into the organization or facilitate communication between departments or units in an organization. CONCLUSION In SC librarian job advertisements, positional authority is often absent from positions that have a responsibility to lead or develop SC efforts, programs, or initiatives. Non-experts may bestow some level of authority to experts. However, leadership and development tasks may prove difficult for a SC librarian who lacks the ability to make decisions or organizational changes. Suggestions for institutions and potential further research are discussed. External Data or Supplements:Hackstadt, A. (2020). Data from: Leadership, Development, and Expertise: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Scholarly Communication Librarian Position Announcements. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YIXNPG, Harvard Dataverse.

Discovery layer decisions, configurations and strategies

The problem that patrons frequently encounter with searching via a discovery layer linked to a knowledgebase is the overwhelming number of hits. Few if any research or discussion compares how libraries resolve this difficulty. To begin a discussion, the author disseminated an open invitation for academic libraries to participate on three panels from October 2018 to June 2019 to discuss their implementation processes and decisions. Five academic libraries accepted the invitation. This paper reviews the approaches of the five American academic library systems with the intent to encourage further examination of the issues of design, implementation, and maintenance of discovery layers. The conclusions reached point to the evolving nature of discovery layer interfaces and the struggle for libraries to adapt their needs to this still changing product type. Within this group, the larger institutions with more financial and staff resources have designed a ‘’bento box’’ interface with open source software, while the other institutions with lesser means have chosen to create different instances of their subscribed proprietary discovery layers to meet their specific institutional demands and the specific needs of their patrons. A statistically relevant examination with rigorous comparison of usability testing would have to be done to see how these and other factors play out in the wider field.

Access to Legal Information for Self-Represented Litigants: The Role of the Academic Law Library

Self-represented litigants face many hurdles navigating the American legal system and effectively representing themselves in litigation. Limited access to information is a significant impediment to self-represented litigants effectively accessing justice. Rhode notes, the American adversarial legal system “presupposes opponents with roughly equal incentives, information, resources, and capabilities.” This, unfortunately, is not the reality for most litigants, especially those who cannot afford legal representation and must “go it alone.” For those litigants, access to information is essential. This paper examines the role American academic law libraries play in providing access to legal information to public patrons, specifically self-represented litigants.

Japanese manga in translation and American graphic novels: A re-examination of the collections in 36 academic libraries ten years later

Ten years ago, this journal published an article comparing the collection rates of Japanese manga in English translation and American graphic novels (“American” defined as graphic novels published in North America and originally written in English) in 44 American academic libraries in 2007 and 2008 (Masuchika & Boldt, 2010). The results showed that American graphic novels were being added to American academic libraries at a faster pace than translated Japanese manga. With the growing popularity of both manga and graphic novels, it was time to revisit this phenomenon and see if any changes had occurred in collection rates within the last ten years. This study revealed that while graphic novels were being added at a significantly faster pace, manga showed no increase in the rates they were being added ten years ago.

Building virtual collection and Spanish colonial imprints of the Philippines

PurposeThe access to the rare originals of the early Spanish colonial imprints of the Philippines remains problematic. The reference librarians often are restricted to directing the students and scholars to the secondary resources that are available both in print and as a part of the digital assets within the North American academic libraries. This paper aims to focus on the select primary source editions including select Spanish language colonial imprints that are available electronically on the Web along the Open Access. These Web-based resources serve as the reference tools for the early history of the Philippines and Southeast Asia. As many of these publications are rare and extremely expensive for most libraries, the Open Access resources serve as an aid to building a virtual collection of these items.Design/methodology/approachThe author had to create a data set of the early imprints of the Spanish Philippines using several bibliographic resources. The data set will be submitted as an Appendix for this research paper. The author did both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data set along with the voyant-based digital humanities approach for topic modeling.FindingsThe goals of this paper were to not only survey the early Spanish printing of the Philippines but also provide the reader with a somewhat complete picture of how the printing began in the Spanish Philippines, what kind of the first books were printed and how one can access them given their rarity and fragility. The collection building paradigms are undergoing significant shifts, and the focus of many academic libraries is shifting toward providing access to these items. As these items high-value low-use items continue to be part of the Special Collections, the access to these is problematic. The virtual collections thus serve as a viable alternative that enables further research and access. While the creators of these works are long gone, the legacy of the Spanish colonial domination, printing and the religious orders in the Philippines remain alive through these works.Research limitations/implicationsAs this is an introductory paper, the author focused on the critical editions rather than providing a comprehensive bibliographic landscape of the presses that produced these editions. He also did not take into consideration many pamphlets that were published in the same period. He also did not consider the Chinese language publications of the Islands. The Chinese had been block printing since medieval times (Little, 1996). In the context of the Spanish Philippines, the Chinese migration and trade have been studied in detail by Chia (2006), Bjork (1998) and Gebhardt (2017). The scope of this paper also was centered toward building a virtual collection of these rare books.Practical implicationsRare books are often expensive and out-of-reach for many libraries; the virtual collection of the same along the Open Access model represents an alternative to collect and curate these collections. The stewardship of these collections also acquires a new meaning in the digital milieu.Social implicationsThis research paper will allow scholars to see past the analog editions and help them focus on curating a virtual collection. The questions of electronic access are often ignored when it comes to visiting and using them in a controlled environment of the reading room in the Special Collections. The author argues that one way to enable access to these rare and expensive books is to provide access to their digital counterparts. These digital/virtual surrogates of the originals will facilitate further research.Originality/valueThe author could not find similar research on the publications of the early Spanish colony of the Philippines.

The Globalized Library: American Academic Libraries and International Students, Collections, and Practices. Yelena Luckert with Lindsay Inge Carpenter, eds., for the Association of College and Research Libraries. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 2019. 448p. Paper, $90.00 (ISBN 978-0-8389-8951-7).

It is important to encourage intercultural understanding in our universities. The Globalized Library helps inform librarians about intercultural opportunities and challenges they may not be focusing on. The book provides insights into how collections can be enhanced, students can be served, and librarians can grow by approaching library work from an international perspective. The Globalized Library is a collection of chapters by a variety of authors, organized in five sections that look at information literacy for international students, international student outreach, international collections, library services abroad, and international professional development. This organization aids the reader and captures some of the most important avenues for fostering internationalization in libraries. The book is an assortment of research studies and reports of intercultural programs run by libraries. One drawback to the book is that many graphics are too small and blurry and are thus of limited value.

Effectiveness of Vernacular Library Orientation Videos in Comparison with the English Language Equivalent

Vernacular language videos with narration in non-English languages have been used in North American academic libraries to engage and empower international and non-native English-speaking students. This study investigated the effectiveness of McGill University Library’s orientation videos from the perspective of these students, using mixed methods to outline student learning, affective responses, and views on audiovisual features used in the video. Compared to the English video, vernacular language videos are equally effective in delivering content and more adept at invoking student enthusiasm about the library. These students’ perceptions on video design and audiovisual features are useful for librarians who use videos to engage a linguistically diverse campus.

Promoting the Library to Distance Education Students and Faculty Can Increase Use and Awareness, but Libraries Should Assess their Efforts

A Review of:
 Bonella, L., Pitts, J., & Coleman, J. (2017). How do we market to distance populations, and does it work?: Results from a longitudinal study and a survey of the profession. Journal of Library Administration, 57(1), 69–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2016.1202720 
 Abstract
 Objective – To determine if library promotion efforts targeted at distance education students and instructors were successful and in line with similar activities at other institutions
 Design – Mixed: longitudinal and survey questionnaire
 Setting – Large publicly-funded, doctoral-granting university in the midwestern United States
 Subjects – 494 distance education students and instructors in 2014 compared to 544 in 2011 and “more than 300” (Bonella, Pitts, & Coleman, 2017, p. 77) professionals at American academic libraries.
 Methods – In the longitudinal study, the researchers invited all distance education students and instructors who were active in the 2010-2011 academic year (n = 8,793) and the spring 2014 semester (n = 4,922) to complete an online questionnaire about their awareness and use of library’s services. Questions were formatted as multiple choice or Likert scale with optional qualitative comments. The researchers used descriptive statistics to compare the responses.
 Then, the researchers invited library professionals via relevant distance-education and academic library listservs to complete an online questionnaire about how distance education is supported, promoted, and assessed. Free text questions comprised the majority of the questionnaire. The researchers categorized these and summarized them textually. The researchers used descriptive statistics to collate the responses to the multiple-choice questions.
 Main results – The researchers observed an increase in awareness of all the library services about which they asked undergraduates. Off campus access to databases (92%, n = 55), an online course in the learning management system (78%, n = 47), and online help pages (71%, n = 43) had the highest awareness in 2014 as compared to 2011 when off campus access to databases (73%, n = 74), research guides (43%, n = 44), and online help pages (42%, n = 43) were the top three most visible items. Fewer undergraduates said they do not use the library at all between 2011 (54%, n = 56) and 2014 (30%, n = 18).
 More graduate students reported that they were very satisfied with the library in 2014 (45%, n = 12) than in 2011 (27%, n = 10).
 Faculty members were more aware of library services, especially research guides, which had 79% awareness in 2014 (n = 56) up from 60% (n = 55) in 2011. Almost half (46%) of faculty member respondents had recommended them to students in 2014 as compared to 27% in 2011.
 The library professionals who responded indicated that their institutions did not evaluate the success of distance educators and students’ awareness of the library’s services and resources (54%, n = 97) nor the success of any promotional campaigns they may have undertaken (84%, n = 151). Both the respondents (37%, n = 54) and the authors recommended partnering with faculty members as a best practice to promote the library.
 Conclusion – More libraries should be marketing specifically and regularly to distance education students by leveraging existing communication and organizational structures. Assessing these efforts is important to understanding their effectiveness.

Too Long; Didn't Read: The Case for Academic Zines

Too Long; Didn't Read: The Case for Academic Zines