#irdl

My two wonderful colleagues, Kris Brancolini and Marie Kennedy, and I wrote a book together based on our experience with the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL), an IMLS-funded program that provides professional development opportunities for academic librarians to improve their research skills. The book is titled “Enhancing Library and Information Research Skills: A Guide for Academic Librarians”, in which we covered the whole spectrum of being a practitioner-researcher in the academic library setting.

Last week I went to the beautiful campus of Loyola Marymount University for IRDL 2017. I’m glad that this wonderful research methods training program received funding to continue for another three years – more academic librarians will benefit from it and gain important skills to become more competent and confident practitioner researchers. I had great conversations with the participants this year. They were all working on interesting projects – e.g. how ARL libraries design their fundraising page on the library website, how students understand or misunderstand library jargon, how students’ interpretation of research differs from faculty’s expectation and observation of their research behavior, just to name a few. I can’t wait to read more about these great projects in journal publications.

In the past week, I taught during the day, and worked on other projects at night (yes, it’s a productive week for me!). Particularly, I took full advantage of LMU library’s subscription to SAGE Research Methods, and read a number of articles about the research method – interview. There are different ways to use interview in gathering qualitative data. Here’s a summary of them from the SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research:

Convergent interviewing - a technique that aims to collect, analyze, and interpret people's experiences, opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge that converge around a set of interviews. It was created primarily to address issues in under-researched areas. It permits in-depth interviewing by promoting a cyclical research process that requires ongoing analysis as part of the overall strategy. Interviewers engage in a constant comparative reflexive process that permits detailed rich content and theoretical sampling as researchers seek to continuously test emerging interpretations from early interviews in subsequent interviews.

Cognitive interviewing – it encompasses a variety of approaches for eliciting qualitative data on how participants interpret and respond to a wide variety of situations. Cognitive interviewing increasingly is used in the evaluation of technology interfaces such as websites and tools for informatics. It is used in education to understand how students think about content and respond to test items and in marketing to understand how to evaluate products better.

Conversational interviewing - an approach used by research interviewers to generate verbal data through talking about specified topics with research participants in an informal and conversational way. Interviewers and interviewees rely on taken-for-granted assumptions about how everyday talk occurs and how speakers make meaning of one another's utterances. In emphasizing features of mundane conversation, conversational interviewers strive to facilitate a research environment in which participants feel free to participate in extended discussions of research topics in a less hierarchical environment than that convened in structured interview settings.

Narrative interview - an interview that is organized to facilitate the development of a text that can be interpreted through narrative analysis. Narrative analysis is guided by a theory of narrative, and these theories of narrative vary in the influence of the reader, the text, and the intent of the author on interpretation. For this reason, the content and structure of a narrative interview will depend both on the theory of narrative being used in the analysis and on the research question.

Interactive interviewing -  an interpretive practice for getting an in-depth and intimate understanding of people's experiences with emotionally charged and sensitive topics such as childbirth, illness, loss, and eating disorders. Emphasizing the communicative and joint sense-making that occurs in interviewing, this approach involves the sharing of personal and social experiences of both respondents and researchers, who tell (and sometimes write) their stories in the context of a developing relationship.

The critical incident technique (CIT) - originally, it refers to a set of procedures to collect direct observations of human behaviors in a way that facilitates their use in solving practical problems and developing broad psychological principles. Over the years, it has been increasingly applied to studying psychological states or experiences, and emphasis has shifted from direct observation by experts to retrospective self-report in interviews.

The third and final Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL) took place in June. IRDL is an IMLS-funded project that seeks to create a learning opportunity and a support system for academic librarians who want to improve their research skills and increase their research output. Twenty-one librarian scholars gathered at the beautiful campus of Loyola Marymount University and went through a 9-day intensive research methods training program. This year, quite a number of librarians were working on topics involving populations that are understudied in library research. Here are a few examples:

1.      How international students use the library and how does the library contribute to their success and growth in life

2.      How Chinese international students interpret “Authority is constructed and contextual”

3.      How scholars who study materials in non-English languages but publish in English use citation management software

4.      What is the experience of librarians of color in residency programs

5.      What are the barriers for women to seek leadership positions in libraries

During the Institute, there were two hours scheduled each day for the participating librarians to consult the instructors and IRDL directors about their research projects. I enjoyed these consultations immensely. It is always pleasant to chat with people who are enthusiastic about their research. The projects about understudied populations reinforced my idea of offering a research methods course that focuses on researching special populations. Every semester there are always students in our MLIS degree program proposing to conduct research about the library and information needs/behavior of a population that is traditionally underserved or understudied in libraries. For instance, in the past semester, a student proposed a survey study to examine the library needs of people who are quadriplegic. As our libraries strive to meet the needs of diverse user populations, it would be helpful if our librarians know how to properly design studies to generate practice-informing evidence about different populations, especially the underserved or less privileged ones.

See, IRDL always gives me new ideas and refreshes my perspectives as a researcher/educator. Two weeks flew by very quickly. I appreciate the opportunity to be part of this great effort that seeks to enhance the quality of scholarship among librarians and foster a culture of research-mindedness. Marie and Kris, the two wonderful IRDL project directors, are truly insightful in making IRDL happen, and I’m sure that the IRDL participants will make them proud by raising the bar of library research.

Last week I attended the 2016 conference of Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries, and presented a paper I co-authored with two wonderful colleagues from Loyola Marymount University (LMU), Marie and Kris. In this presentation, we talked about the mapping between librarians’ research confidence and the curriculum of the Institute of Research Design for Librarianship (IRDL), a federally funded program that provides research methods training for librarians. For each topic covered in the training program (e.g. research question development, research design, data collection, data analysis, research dissemination), librarians’ confidence was measured before and after the program, and increase was detected across the board. This was consistent with the preliminary findings of another study we are conducting. In that study, we seek to understand the long term impact of IRDL by asking the participants to describe three incidents where they strongly felt the benefits of IRDL in their work or research. So far we have seen quite a number of narratives about how they felt more confident when working with faculty, talking to people at conferences and interpreting the published literature.

Last week we concluded the second year of the Institute of Research Design for Librarianship (IRDL), an IMLS-funded project that seeks to create a learning opportunity and a support system for academic librarians who want to improve their research skills and increase their research output. It’s another great 9-day institute with librarian scholars from around the country. This year, the project directors made some changes based on the feedback from last year’s cohort so that the scholars could have more time to write and consult with us instructors. I truly enjoyed talking to each scholar about their research projects. I was impressed by the innovation and initiative demonstrated in their projects – for example, one scholar was interested in implementing a texting-based outreach and reference service and see if that impacts students’ library anxiety, and another scholar was thinking about creating library tutorials using Vine and see if that would be an effective way to impart information literacy skills. I can’t wait for them to complete their study and get published.

Among this year’s cohort, three were graduates from my home institution, SJSU School of Information, and two of them took classes with me – one was in my Research Methods class, and another was in my Reference and Information Services class. It’s great to see them become active researchers in this profession and engage in evidence based practices to improve their work. I’m very proud of them. This is exactly what I’m hoping to see through research methods education both in LIS degree programs and beyond (like IRDL).

In the last two weeks of June, the first IRDL cohort gathered in the beautiful library of the beautiful Loyola Marymount University and went through an intensive professional development program focusing on research design and methodology (see my previous post about this program). As a research methods geek, I was thrilled and honored to be one of the instructors there. I was impressed with the IRDL scholars’ motivation, interest and enthusiasm in conducting quality research and enhancing the rigor of LIS research and publications. Their research topics covered a variety of LIS practices, including the quickly emerging area of data librarianship. During my first two days there, I got to talk with all four members of the cohort whose topics were related to data management, data literacy and data service. Our conversations were illuminating and gave me a lot to think about in terms of preparing out students for this area. Among the twenty-five scholars, four were SJSU SLIS alum – one of them took the Reference and Information Services course with me, and another one was my advisee. It’s great to see them at IRDL and chat with them about their experience at SLIS. I’m so proud of what they have accomplished and what they will be accomplishing after IRDL.

There so many memorable moments throughout the program. The highlight was the scholars’ presentations on the last day, where they talked about their research idea and how it had taken shape during the two weeks. It’s very rewarding to see that they are leaving IRDL with a fairly concrete research plan and ready to dive in and churn out peer-reviewed articles one after another. Hopefully by the end of the three-year IRDL grant, we will be able to compile a list of publications resulting from the scholars' research projects at IRDL.

In addition to the great discussions and interactions with the IRDL scholars and my co-instructors Greg and Michael, I really appreciated how well LMU library had taken care of us – the classroom was spacious with a great view, the catering service was wonderful, and our host Kris, Marie and Carol were so thoughtful and warm. I can’t thank them enough for making this experience a great memory of summer 2014.  I’m already looking forward to 2015!