Posts tagged with quantitative

Showing 11 - 20 of 22 items
Text: Keep Calm and Don't Forget About IRB Review
  • Craig Smith
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.
Image of poster presented at the 2018 Library Assessment Conference.
  • Laurie A Alexander
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.
Person handing a book to another person
  • Merrie Fuller
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?
Image contains letters spelling ANALYTICS, above a set of colored pencils.
  • Ken Varnum
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.
happy face with a check mark next to it followed by a neutral and sad faces
  • Heidi Burkhardt
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.
happy face with a check mark next to it followed by a neutral and sad faces
  • Heidi Burkhardt
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.
Information literacy needs of engineering grad students: survey results
  • Paul F Grochowski
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.
Photo from a dictionary, highlighting the word "research."
  • Emily Capellari
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.
Photo from a dictionary, highlighting the word "research."
  • Kate Saylor
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.
Word cloud: promotion, librarian, interview, focus group, competitative analysis, survey, mixed methods, quantitative, qualitative
  • Rachel Vacek
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).