Posts tagged with quantitative in Blog Tiny Studies

When planning an assessment project in the Library, one important step is to consider whether your project should be vetted by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at U-M, a committee that ensures studies with human subjects are ethical, that subjects are protected from unnecessary psychological or physical risks, and that subjects are participating in a fully informed, voluntary manner. This post details when your data collection may be subject to a full IRB application and review process.

The 2018 Library Assessment Conference (https://libraryassessment.org/) brought together a community of practitioners and researchers who have responsibility or interest in the broad field of library assessment. This post recaps the conference poster content presented by Laurie Alexander and Doreen Bradley about how analytics advanced the Library's internal understanding of the course-integrated instruction provided by Library staff.

Document Delivery provides traditional Interlibrary Loan Borrowing service, and scanning and delivery service for books and articles from material owned by the U-M Library. As a result of a successful pilot to provide free Local Document Delivery for faculty and graduate students, the department next sought to change the fee-based service for undergraduate students and staff. Departmental managers wondered: What would happen if we made scanning and delivery service free for these patron groups?

Not everything a library wants to know is available via web-scale analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Often, custom instrumentation and logging are the best way to answer usability and analytics questions, and can offer better protections for patron privacy as well.

Continuing the discussion about survey design (see Let's Talk about Surveys, Part 1), you’ve decided a survey is an appropriate methodology for what you want to find out and are thinking about what questions you want to ask. But how you ask these questions and structure them within the survey itself, as well as the question formats and options you give people for responding all require careful consideration.

Doing a survey is often the default research method thought of when you need to answer questions about what people like, expect, or want, among other things. While surveys are likely to be considered the easiest option, you can’t conflate “easy to create” with “easy to create well.” Even if a survey is an appropriate methodology for the question you’re looking to answer, the questions you ask, the way you ask them, and the options you give people for responding all require a thoughtful approach.

In this study, engineering librarians Leena Lalwani, Jamie Niehof, and Paul Grochowski sought to learn from graduate students in the College of Engineering (CoE) how these students could benefit from more instruction on U-M Library resources.

In the second of two posts, Informationists from the Taubman Health Sciences Library share their research project to improve library integration within the U-M School of Nursing curriculum. Using a mixed methods approach, they are investigating undergraduate student information seeking needs and behaviors.

In two blog posts, Informationists from the Taubman Health Sciences Library share their research project to improve library integration within the U-M School of Nursing curriculum. Using a mixed methods approach, they are investigating undergraduate student information seeking needs and behaviors.

Like many academic research libraries, the University of Michigan Library has a promotion process for its librarians. And, like many libraries, the policies need to be reviewed on occasion. The Promotion and Appointment of Librarians (PAL) Task Force was charged by the Librarians’ Forum with reviewing our promotion process and making recommendations to better align what we do with the goals of both individuals and the Library. This Task Force utilized various qualitative and quantitative research methods to get the best data (described below).