More faculty survey results, plus the survey instrument

Tools of the Trade, flickr user John of Austin

In our recent Faculty survey we asked what kinds of scholarly materials, what kinds of experts, and what kinds of tools were important to faculty in doing their research.

In terms of tools; “search tools, databases, and websites” are important (rated Important or Very Important) to over 90% of all faculty — which is not particularly surprising.

The next most important kind of tool were “bibliographic management tools” — which are important to 71% of Science & Engineering faculty, 52% of Social Science faculty, and 47% of Humanities and arts faculty. “Specialized or customizable software” is important to 62% of Social Science faculty and 50% of Science & Engineering faculty — but only to 25% of Humanities and Arts faculty. Specialized computing infrastructure is important to 46% of Science & Engineering folks, but only 30% of Social Scientists and only 15% of Humanists.

So, to summarize, books (print and electronic) and e-journals are important to everyone, experts with scholarly & technical chops are really important to humanists, data and methods experts are important to social scientists, and specialized tools and infrastructure are important to science & engineering folks. Stay tuned for additional multivariate analyses, and analysis of the 147 pages (w00t!) of qualitative data.

In the interest of sharing and transparency, I am also making a short version of our survey instrument available here (PDF), under a CC-BY license. If any of you decide to use any of the same questions, please let me know — it might be very informative to pool data and see what kinds of differences we might find across institutions — after all, I’m on record as claiming that libraries aren’t all the same, and that big research libraries are different from other academic libraries. It would be fun to test those hypotheses with comparable data from other institutions.

What kinds of experts are important to Faculty?

In an earlier post about our recent survey of Stanford faculty, I wrote about the kinds of scholarly materials faculty rated as Important or Very Important to their research. In the same survey, we asked faculty “How important is support from the following kinds of experts for your research?”; followed by a list of 5 different kinds of experts. In general, it is the Humanists and the Social Scientists who are most likely to say support from various kinds of experts is important to their research. The Humanists are most likely to say “Staff with both technical and scholarly expertise” and “Reference or Research Librarians” are important; while Social Scientists are most interested in support from experts in emerging areas of library services–such as programming, GIS and statistical analysis, and metadata support. Specific results summarized below:

• Overall, 64% of faculty rated “Staff with both technical and scholarly expertise” as Important or Very Important. There were big disciplinary differences, however, with 81% of Humanities & Arts faculty rating the combination of scholarly and technical expertise as Important or Very Important, compared to only 58% of Social Science faculty and 46% of Science & Engineering faculty.
• “Reference or Research Librarians” are likewise Important or Very Important to a much higher percentage (81%) of Humanities & Arts faculty than to Social Science (56%) or Science & Engineering (35%) faculty.
• Social Scientists are slightly more likely to say that “Programmers, Database Administrators, or Web Developers” are important to their research, with 55% of Social Science faculty rating such experts as Important or Very Important, compared to 45% of Humanities & Arts faculty and 41% of Science & Engineering faculty.
• Social Scientists are also more likely, by a rather large margin, to say that “Statistical, GIS, or other kinds of methodology or software specialists” are Important or Very Important. Over half of the Social Science faculty (52%, to be exact) said such experts are important, while only 14% of Humanists and 27% of Science & Engineering faculty said so.
• “Data managers, archivists, or metadata specialists” are also important to a higher percentage of Social Science faculty (46%), than Humanists (27%) or Science & Engineering faculty (21%).

My big take-aways are that we ought to be hiring or developing humanities and social science librarians with strong scholarly and technical expertise; which for the social scientists ought to include strong statistical and methodological training. Hmm … seems I may have said that before.

Statistical software consulting in Green Library at Stanford. Photo by Chris Bourg

Stanford announces prize for innovation in research libraries

Today Stanford University Libraries announces the Stanford Prize for Innovation in Research Libraries – SPIRL, an award that is intended to recognize and celebrate individual research libraries for sustained and significant innovation in any operational area. Nominations with documentation may be made by institutions or individuals and are due by 15 January 2013.
I often brag about all the awesome innovative things my colleagues here at Stanford Libraries make happen, but I/we are well aware that research libraries and librarians across the world are doing amazing things. I’m thrilled that we will be identifying and celebrating the innovative programs happening in other research libraries. The prize is open to any and all areas of research library operations, including (but not limited to):

discovery & navigation; reader & research services; publishing; metadata development, adaptation, sharing, and harvesting; acquisition and processing of library materials in any/all formats, digital and physical; collection development and management including various forms of efficient storage & retrieval; preservation and archiving, digital and physical; marketing and public relations; staff training & development; fund-raising and asset acquisition; organizational development; assessment and re-engineering of practices; standards development; digitization and provision for user adaptation of digital information objects; course and learning management systems/services; knowledge management; outreach, bibliographic instruction, information heuristic instruction; and reader/user assessments and surveys.

Rare book digitization at Stanford Libraries, photo courtesy of Stanford Digital Production Group

You get the idea … we really are looking for nominations from all corners of the research library world. Basically any significant innovations that “have measurable impact on the library’s own clientele as well as the potential for influencing the practices and/or standards of research librarianship generally.” Note that while appropriate use of technology is assumed, the prize is not inherently about technology. For example, if Stanford Libraries’ programs were eligible (we are not, for obvious reasons), our Concierge Project would be just as competitive a nomination as our rare books digitization program.

Nomination are due on January 15 — please help us spread the word. I can’t wait to see what sorts of innovative stuff comes our way.

Awesome new library website, Part 2: The multiple stakeholders challenge

One of the biggest challenges of a library website project (maybe any website project) seems to be figuring out what gets top billing. Top billing in this sense usually means front page.
Our library website has many different types of users and a seemingly endless number of stakeholders. One of the best and most common ways to account for multiple users/stakeholders is to develop personas, which we did early on in the project.

Developing the right personas is only half the battle, though. The real challenge is figuring out how to balance their sometimes conflicting needs. There is simply not enough room on a website (at least not on a well-designed one) to put all your users’ main needs on the front page.

Screen shot of ribbon, with Collections panel highlighted

One really clever and elegant way our awesome design team came up with to meet this challenge is the central ribbon on our new site. Clicking on any of the central ribbon items does not take you away from the homepage – it simply changes the content on the bottom half of the homepage. It basically allows us to have multiple views of our homepage — 5 different views without scrolling, but we can add as many panels as we want after the scroll. I love it.

Of course, the real test will come once we go live and start to get actual user behavior and feedback, but I’m feeling very confident that our folks came up with a really smart solution to an often vexing web design challenge.

Defining Public Services for large research libraries

For the meeting of the ACRL Public Services Directors of Large Research Libraries Discussion Group at ALA Annual this year, I volunteered to kick off a discussion on how we define “public services”. The topic got listed on our agenda as “Defining Public Service in Large ARL Libraries”, which makes it that much more interesting for someone from Stanford to lead the discussion ;-).

Here are my notes so far (meeting starts in 3 hours):

How should we define Public Services for ARL institutions?

While I’m not one to avoid controversy, as the only non-ARL institution in the group, it would take far more hubris than even I can conjure up for me to suggest how public services ought to be defined for the rest of you. So what I will do instead is talk about what I want out of this group, in the hopes that enough of us have similar aspirations for this group that we can reach some consensus on our boundaries and our value to one another.

There are literally hundreds of conversations, meetings, presentations, discussion groups at every ALA convention related to public services, so the big question for me is what is the unique value of gathering as Heads of Public Services at Large Research libraries? Or what could be our unique value?

For me, the unique value is in talking to peers – peers in terms of kinds of institutions (research libraries — very, very large research libraries), and peers in terms of scope of responsibilities.

With that in mind, I think for large research libraries public services are research services; and as AULs, or directors, or whatever our titles are, we should be talking at the strategic level

Rusty spoon from Flickr user Quasimondo

What does that mean? One thing it means, is I don’t want to spend an hour talking about laptop lending policies – which is what happened at my 1^st one of these, and I wanted to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon. I don’t want to talk about course reserves, or how to staff the reference desk, or text-a-librarian services. And, yes, I’ll say it — I don’t particularly want to talk about undergraduates — not in this group. Again, there are hundreds of other groups and places where we can talk about library services for undergraduates. But this is the only group with a focus on publics services for research.

Some things I do want to talk about:

• Digital humanities support—what are you doing, where in the organization does it happen, how are you coordinating it and sustaining it?
• What skills, education, knowledge do you expect from your subject librarians and how is that reflected in hiring, professional development, etc.?
• Data support – not just data management plans, but actual data acquisition, management, analysis, publishing/sharing, and preservation.  Big data. Confidential data. Proprietary data.
• What is the changing (or not) relationship between collection development and research support at your institution?
• GIS support, visualization tools, the creation of online exhibits and archives, online collaborative research environments
• Support for creating digital data – how do you support faculty who want to do text-mining on set of print materials not yet digitized? What is the service model? What is your funding model?
• What is your experience in negotiating with vendors to give researchers specialized access to data?
• What are you doing about providing information and options/platforms for alternative publishing models for scholars?
• What are some successful models for providing reference and instruction for graduate students? How many of you have subject librarians teaching or co-teaching in methods classes (in humanities and social sciences especially)?

Bottom line is I want this group to focus its discussions and sharing on our unique challenges as AULs at research-intensive universities – which as far as I can tell is RESEARCH SUPPORT. There are hundreds of other groups and sessions and sets of people I can talk to about teaching, about information commons, and reference, and course reserves, and all manner of support for undergraduates. And god forbid I even need to talk to someone about laptop lending policies, it doesn’t have to be someone at a research library. But, this is the only group that shares my focus on supporting scholarly research.  For me personally, I need that kind of group – I need a place I can go where we can wrestle together with the changing nature of research and the role libraries and librarians can play.

I think I’ve become a Feral Humanist

This morning, I had the pleasure of giving the opening talk at the ABLD/EBSLG/APBSLG Joint Meeting being hosted here at Stanford. I don’t often get the chance to give a “think piece” sort of talk, so it was actually both challenging and loads of fun to prepare for. The theme of the conference was Business Library ROI: Measuring Usage and Identifying Value, so I decided to talk about my concerns with the ROI framework, calling my talk How ROI Killed the Academic Library: A Cautionary Tale.

My final slide. Pretty hokey, huh?

A funny thing happened as I wrote the talk … I realized that I very well may have become a Feral Humanist. I ended up talking about books, and archives, and even serendipity. I blame my humanities colleagues, at Stanford and on-line. You know who you are. Feel free to read the full talk and judge for yourself. Or, just take a look at my concluding remarks:

Perhaps I have presented an overly romantic, even mystical portrait of academic libraries – and at a time when libraries and higher education are under the gun to get practical. But what I am suggesting is that if we don’t defend the hard to define and even harder to measure qualitative importance of libraries, who will?

And, I suspect that many of you probably agree with me, at least in principle, that universities ought to have great libraries, with expert staff and awesome collections and a range of services in support of teaching and research. But of course, we all face constraints in the forms of budgets, space, and competing priorities.

So, yes, by all means find good ways to measure our contributions to the aims of higher education. But also, please, take opportunities to evangelize on behalf of the immeasurable impact of libraries – make sure your administration knows that there is value in books that aren’t read, in data that hasn’t been used yet, in archives yet to be discovered, and in the mere fact of great libraries.

Proposal for Combined Sciences Library at Stanford

Stanford University Libraries has developed a Proposal for a Combined Sciences Library at Stanford (PDF). This library would combine the collections of Falconer Biology Library, the Swain Chemistry & Chemical Engineering Library, and the Mathematics & Statistics Library.

The combined science library allows for a stronger and deeper service program than is possible with separate facilities, as well as a collection more appropriate for faculty and students in these disciplines, who are primary users of digital collections. The library will provide a broad set of services and collections to support research and learning, with a focus on user services and outreach, and will embrace the move to digital collections and data services while providing access to physical collections. Perhaps most importantly, the library will foster a sense of community within the developing quad.

In the interest of transparency, we are sharing the proposal widely. Included in the proposal is a detailed, creative and data-driven vision for physical library spaces, as well as a great discussion of trends in use of online journals versus e-books. Some key points from the proposal:

• the three central elements of the new library program are collections, services and staffing, and user space.
• We anticipate a 75% reduction in on-campus physical collections in the combined science library.
• the use and acceptance of eBooks has been increasing, as more and more titles are available as eBooks.
• The reduction in on-campus physical collections and the consolidation of physical branches in the combined science library will allow a redesign of the staffing model, reducing the number of clerical and paraprofessional staff and increasing the number of professional staff. This change in staffing enables us to fundamentally change the nature of the library service, increasing the nature and extent of the services we can provide to faculty and students.
• Survey data, focus groups, usage data and comments from users all reinforce the fact that there is strong need for library space for quiet study and quiet small group collaboration.

While we are aggressively soliciting feedback from Stanford faculty, staff, and students; I’m also interested in comments and reactions from colleagues and other Feral Librarian readers. What do you think?

Library Concierge Project: Session 1

Our Library Concierge Project is now in full swing, and we have completed our first training session(s).

Despite some concerns about the appropriateness of the term Concierge, we stuck with that name for a couple of reasons– first, staff were already using the term; and second, no alternate term emerged as a clear front-runner (insert Republican primary joke here). So, the project is officially known as the Library Concierge Project (LCP).

We decided to set up a Library Concierge Project site in CourseWork, Stanford’s primary course management system (based on Sakai). I really wish I could give public viewing rights to the project site, but all of CourseWork requires Stanford authentication.

Key elements of the project and the project site are:

• Sign ups: Over 250 staff members (about 65% of our total staff — everyone from Subject Specialists to catalogers to mailroom clerks to system administrators to …. you get the picture) have joined the site and are participating in the project. That figure alone is pretty exciting to me. Yes, we have made a big push among staff and managers about how important this is, and how valuable it will be; but I’m still extremely pleased that such a large number of our staff are participating in something that is not explicitly required. We are running at least 3 sessions for every training topic, with max enrollment at each session capped at 50 (so that we can use our own instruction room, and to maintain the possibility of interactive sessions). The Sign up tool allows us to require folks to sign up for one of the sessions and ensure we don’t exceed the Fire Marshall’s posted room capacity limits.
• Course Materials: For each session, we can add supplemental materials and presentation slides. For example, the next topic is Copyright and Intellectual Property Issues, so we have already linked to the 2011 Charleston Conference “long Arm of the Law” presentations. We are posting all presentation materials on the site after the sessions as well; so we will are building up a nice repository of materials. Future new staff will be able to go back and review old session materials when they arrive.
• Session Videos: We are committed to filming every topic and streaming the video on our project site. I want to share as much as I can about this project with a very wide audience, so despite the fact that I hate how I look and sound on video, here is an 8-minute clip I uploaded to YouTube of me introducing the Concierge Project and our goals. Unfortunately, I am the only 1 mic’ed up, so there are moments where I nod along knowingly to answers and comments you can’t hear. At the end of the clip, the camera guy’s cell phone rang — which was ironic given how important he told me it was that I take my iPhone out of my pocket during the presentation.
• Chat Room: We used the Chat Room to provide a backchannel for online discussion and questions during the sessions. Any questions or comments in the Chat Room that don’t get addressed during the session are answered later in the Forums.  For Session 1, the Chat Room was pretty active with a great mix of comments, questions, and answers — it was a great way to have people talking to each other (which is one of the implicit goals of the project).
• Forums: We are hoping that the Forums will turn into a rich source of conversation and peer learning in between the monthly sessions. We already have over 70 messages in the Forums, so we seem to be off to a decent start.

Because we are using CourseWork so extensively for the project, and because CourseWork support is part of Academic Computing Services, with is part of SULAIR (the acronym for our full organization: Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources); we included an overview of CourseWork in our introductory session. Future topics are likely to include:

• Copyright, Intellectual Property and Licensing Issues for Libraries
• Numeric and Spatial Data support
• Digital Humanities Support
• Special and regular collection development
• Multi-media and other technology support
• All about e-books
• Digitization programs (Google, HathiTrust, plus our in-house programs/projects)
• Instruction and reference
• All about Technical Services

We are actively soliciting topic suggestions from our staff, and expect the list of topics to keep us busy with this for some time to come.

Responses to the project from our staff have been primarily positive, with suggestions for additional topics and requests for examples of good Concierge moments. One staff member asked me if we could keep a public tally of Concierge moments — my response so far is to post them in the Forums for all to see and celebrate. We may also start a Concierge of the Month award of some sort. It really is quite satisfying to be working on a project that is generating such interest and feedback from staff; and which I firmly believe will ultimately benefit our patrons.
So, please wish us continued luck, and stay tuned for more news as the project rolls along.

Speed Dating with Faculty

Amid the troubling news out of Harvard last week, it seems like a good time to share a small success story:

Last week, I was asked to give a 5 minute presentation to the faculty who are part of Stanford’s Faculty College project. The Faculty College project provides “groups of faculty the space, time and resources to create new team-taught courses, to make a major change in a department’s curriculum or to establish new cross-disciplinary teaching endeavors.” The 25 or so faculty involved meet once a quarter this year, and will start their teaching next year. Their meetings are jam-packed with presentations and discussions, so I was actually pretty pleased to finagle 5 minutes on the agenda to talk about the way the Stanford Libraries could support their projects.

After making an off-hand comment to a colleague that the 5 minute limit felt a bit like speed-dating, I decided to go with that metaphor in my actual presentation. I created a handout highlighting relevant subject librarians and other services (PDF), but decided to skip the PowerPoint since just setting up could eat up most of my 5 minutes.
I started out by telling the faculty group that 5 minutes felt like speed dating, but that I was OK with that. After all, my goal was to convince them to “date the libraries”. The two main reasons they should date us are that “We have lots of common interests”, and “We complete you”. I explained both of those briefly, and concluded with “So I hope you’ll call us”.
I finished with 40 seconds to spare, enough time for someone to ask if the librarians listed on the handout knew they might be contacted or if it would be a “blind date”?
I usually think it is way harder to give a short presentation than a long one, but in this case I think it went very well. I gave them a metaphor that will hopefully Stick, and I also made it clear that I/we really respect their time. If anything, I think some of the faculty wish I had taken up more time, which is always better than the opposite. As Walt Disney (or maybe P.T. Barnum) supposedly said, “always leave them wanting more.”

A concierge by any other name

In November, we kicked off our plan to introduce a Concierge Model for library services here at Stanford Libraries (SULAIR). The general idea is to emphasize “concierge-like” service to scholars, focusing on serving as a single point of contact for the full range of needs a scholar might have. The bulk of our work will be on equipping and empowering our staff to provide that kind of service — which will require a series of cross-training activities. For example, we want the Subject Specialist for Economics to be knowledgeable enough about the range of services we offer that they can be the “concierge” for a faculty project involving numeric data, digitization of government documents, maps, GIS applications, and maybe some visualization software. SULAIR provides all of those services, but spread across many parts of the organization. In our new service model, the faculty member gets access to all those services and resources through the single point of contact instead of having to figure out where each of those services lives in our 400+ person organization.

The kick-off of our new “Concierge” model included a formal presentation, discussion, and interactive use-cases at our annual managers’ retreat; a shorter presentation at our quarterly All Staff meeting; and a follow-up at our monthly managers’ meeting. The best part of all of these presentations and discussions has been learning that librarians and other staff really, really, really dislike the Concierge metaphor.

I have never been so happy to have gotten something wrong. The fact that the term Concierge struck such a nerve with folks has resulted in tons of feedback and engagement, and spurred a spirited and collaborative attempt to come up with a better metaphor. The primary objection to the term Concierge is that it implies a much more subservient relationship to the client/guest/scholar than the kind of collaborative and collegial relationships that we foster within our community.

Some of the alternate labels staff have suggested for our Single-Point-of-Contact model of library services are:

• Ambassador
• Sherpa
• Docent
• (River) Guide
• Steward
• Advocate
• Champion
• Ally
• Match-Maker

In my opinion, each of these suggestions works best if you add Information before the label — i.e. Information Ambassador, Information Sherpa, etc. Which led to someone (my boss, I think) suggesting “Informationist” as the right label. I’m skeptical that we would get buy-in from scholars for a completely new term that sounds very library jargony. And, of course, more than one person has wondered why we can’t simply use the term “librarian”? My answer to that is that very few students, and perhaps even fewer faculty, think of a “librarian” as someone who can help them with statistical analysis, data visualization, multi-media production or any of the other not-typical-library-services we provide in support of research and teaching. And the whole “Concierge” plan is intended in part to address our image and marketing challenge.

At this point, we haven’t settled on the right term, but the debate over labels has helped us to distill some of the key elements of a good “Concierge/Ambassador/Information Sherpa/Whatever”:

1. They are active and pro-active in identifying a full range of Library resources and services that would support a scholar’s research and teaching needs.
2. They have expertise and “insider knowledge” of our organization and of our business — from trends in scholarly communication, to internal and external digitization efforts, to developments in e-book publishing, etc.
3. They work collaboratively with scholars, contributing their particular expertise to a project as a colleague.
4. They provide seamless and efficient access to the very broad array of services and resources offered by the libraries.
5. When acting as the “Champion” for a particular project, they assume responsibility and leadership for the project.

Now if we can just figure out what to call them (us) …