Introduction module

Hello class members...

I think my perception of librarians and other information professionals is definitely centered around the day-to-day interactions I see and take part in at the reference desk. This is my own bias and I need to work past it. To start with, this is only the front end of reference services at Kent State University. The librarians here are all involved in their own projects that I normally don't hear about it. Some of them only have 4-8 hours of desk time a week. Going further, I have only really gotten to know reference services at KSU. Other universities and colleges, and other information repositories, all have their own cultures as well as unique programs and degrees that likely shape their libraries' services.

If I was basing my perception of libraries and reference librarians solely off of my own experiences as a student reference assistant, I would say that librarians generally help patrons find secondary sources of information. I very rarely get approached by patrons looking for data. In most instances when they are looking for data, it is in a historical context (documents, first-hand accounts, photographs, etc). This probably has something to do with the fact that most of the patrons who approach the reference desk in the traditional manner are undergraduates. Typically the kind of work undergraduates do does not involve producing knowledge in the way a researcher does, but rather seeking out and interpreting, maybe synthesizing, already established knowledge. This means the bulk of reference questions lead to book and journal sources.

Obviously, in an academic setting, knowledge IS being generated. Professional researchers collect data, whether qualitative or quantitative, and analyze that data to draw conclusions. The research process and conclusions get documented and published in academic journals. This is how knowledge gets advanced. Undergraduates do do this, but at a much lower capacity. Both of the articles we read this week focused on professional researchers, likely graduate students and PhDs. As a possible future academic librarian, I will probably spend a lot of time communicating with researchers. That is why it is a good idea to understand the environment and processes involved in social science research.

The model that Meho and Tibbo is similar but also very different from other models of information seeking behavior, like Carol Kuhlthau's. In classes like Access to Information, I think we focus on library patrons coming to the library to solve some information need assuming they will find it in the library. This might mean a book they want to read, or sources for a homework assignment, or learning how to do something they need to do. Social scientists (and any other scientist) cannot do this at a library in the traditional sense. They must make observations about their topic of study, and usually this means observing some phenomena in the real world. What I gathered from both of the articles we read was that there is now more than ever an opportunity to change this in some respects. By understanding how researchers go about their research, we can design repositories that facilitate the sharing of usable data. By having access to not only the published findings of researchers, but also their data, other researchers would be able to share, collaborate, innovate, and further their respective fields of study. We as librarians should be advocating for the development of these sort of data repositories.

Sadly, I was not even aware that these were already being used by institutions. There interfaces are somewhat foreign to me (I looked at the Odum Dataverse and Harvard Dataverse). I will make it a point to become more familiar with the repositories themselves and also the concepts that they employ.