The liaison librarian:connecting with the qualitative research lifecycle

Celia EmmelhainzJuly 9, 2015

- what we think we do –traditional library responsibilities in collections, instruction, and outreach

- first encounters –the need for someone to guide us in a new research environment

- key informants –people who can point you to resources, ideas, or people for your research

- a new place –faculty and students in a new campus or new project may need the librarian as ‘key informant’

Masters in anthropology / fieldwork in W. Mongolia

Masters in library science / fieldwork in Kazakhstan

User Needs in Anthropology

Undergraduates

• Orient themselves with Wikipedia and Google (Colon-Aguirre & Fleming-May 2012)

• Use some resources well and miss others entirely (Cheney 1971)

• Seek friends before consulting librarians (Fleming-May & Yuro 2009)

• Perceived challenge is figuring out what the professors want (Leibiger 2011)

Undergraduates…

“First, I discuss it with my friends, maybe ask them, what is the relationship between these two? And

when I come to the internet… some people are sharing what

they think about it.” – Anel, Kazakh student

“Sometimes we find information but we don’t

know how to absorb it, how to analyze it. We get a lot of

tables—numbers, numbers, numbers, but… this kind of

stuff is difficult to analyze” – Nursultan, Kazakh student

“[Students] don’t know how to use library

resources, don’t know how to differentiate sources.” – James, US anthropologist

“You would need to rebrand the librarians as experts in particular areas… research

coaches… students can really benefit from a librarian who helps them think.” – Nathan, ethnographer in Kazakhstan

Graduate students

• Seek faculty & fellow students before librarians (Harrington 2009)

• Struggle with trying to read it all (Harrington 2009)

• Skip references that are hard to access (Kayongo & Helm 2010)

• Prefer to use remote-access (Kayongo & Helm 2010)

• Need help with using datasets and government docs (Gibbs et al 2012)

• Focus on publication & getting grants (Harrington 2009)

Graduate Students…

”Researchers today are buried, we can’t keep up with the important research… and we fall back on reading only the few top journals in our

field or articles by authors we know.” – Allie, anthro

graduate student

”Honestly, when I consulted our area librarian, did not find

the resources helpful. . . I used the libraries only as a source for obtaining books and articles and help with

EndNote” – Graciela, anthro grad student

”For linguistic anthropologists, more than coding software,

training on using transcription software would be helpful.” –

Mark, anthro grad student

Changing skillsets

Internationals: Crossing Library

Cultures

“Interlibrary services was very helpful. It especially helped me when I need books from

other libraries.” — Ji-eun, Korean graduate student in

the US

“I was never taught formally how to use the library resources, so I didn’t know about their search methods... I tried to [seek] help

from the rest of my group, especially the native student.” –

Ryan, US student abroad

“The catalog is a bit complicated, so librarians helped a lot, with

book search, with periodicals...” – Sauat, Kazakh graduate student in

the US

Faculty

• Anthropologists seek ‘comparative, foreign, rare’ resources (Bachand 2013)

• Anthropologists make broad use of field data, pictures, maps (Hartmann 1995)

• Consult colleagues and bibliographies; librarians not a primary source of information (Folster 1995)

• Use peer feedback quite heavily at all stages of the research lifecycle (Shen 2013)

Social Science faculty…

“I use librarians for the classical stuff - searches of arcane

material and obtaining copies of otherwise rare sources.” -

Mike, R1 anthropology professor

“I was just talking to a friend the other day about how the

way we use libraries has changed so much… we never physically go there, but we do rely on the librarians quite a

bit.” – Malika, R1 anthropology professor

“One thing that comes up in promotion is how to document impact… one of the librarians

helped me [use] PlumX to capture internet citations… and put my published work in the campus archive” – Sarah, R1

anthropology professor

“We experimented with digitizing... field notes [into] a

fully digital qualitative database... storing them on… a 3.5 inch

floppy disk... Now, 13 years later, we have a shoebox of 3.5 inch disks with files saved in 1990s proprietary software.” – Lisa

Cliggett (2013), R1 anthropologist

- defining our role- speaking to the gaps

Finding Ethnographic Data

Browsing and RSS Alerts

Coding Qualitative Data

Visualizing Qualitative Data

Visualizing Qualitative Data (2)

http://www.r-bloggers.com/words-in-politics-some-extensions-of-the-word-cloud

Self-Archiving in an IR

Altmetrics & Citation Tracking

Guide for Qualitative Archiving

Setting Metadata Standards

- where we go from here -

- embedding in networks- connecting newcomers- observing user needs- guiding in new skillsets

Questions/Discussion

Selected Sources• Cliggett, L (2013). Qualitative Data Archiving in the Digital Age: Strategies for Data

Preservation and Sharing. The Qualitative Report, 18, 1-11. • Emmelhainz, C (2014). Controlled vocabulary standards for anthropological datasets.

International Journal of Digital Curation, 9(1): 185-192. • Emmelhainz, C (2015). Supporting the expatriate social scientist: Faculty research and

information access in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 1-13. doi: 10.1177/0961000615591651

• Fellows, I (2012). Words in politics: some extensions of the word cloud. R-bloggers, http://www.r-bloggers.com/words-in-politics-some-extensions-of-the-word-cloud/, accessed 5 July 2015.

• Hart Research Assoc. (2012) Attitudes toward re-envisioning the UC Berkeley Library, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/AboutLibrary/Hart_Survey_Report_Re-Envisioning_UC_Berkeley_Library.pdf

• Luning S (2013). Anthropologists in the company of gatekeepers. Blog post for Leiden Anthropology, http://www.leidenanthropologyblog.nl/articles/anthropologists-in-the-company-of-gatekeepers, accessed 5 July 2015.

• Rigby, M (in press). You and Your User Community, in Anthropology Librarianship, edited volume in press.

• UC Berkeley (2013) Report of the Commission on the Future of the UC Berkeley Library, October 2013. http://evcp.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/FINAL_CFUCBL_report_10.16.13.pdf, accessed 3 July 2015.

Image Sources1. What we can do: Prof. Felix Chami of Dar es Salaam,

https://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelgallagher/5599807571/

2. A new place: Starr East Asian Library, by Wally Gobetz, www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/6977670271/

3. First encounters: Anthropologist at work, by Ken Anderson, www.flickr.com/photos/kenanderson/2769205164

4. Fieldwork and research photos by author, www.flickr.com/photos/meadowsaffron/8144260436

5. Word cloud from: Fellows, I (2012). Words in politics: some extensions of the word cloud. R-bloggers, http://www.r-bloggers.com/words-in-politics-some-extensions-of-the-word-cloud/, accessed 5 July 2015.

6. Screenshots by author.