What is your library story? Change the headlines!

Over the past few years libraries budgets and positions have been cut. Libraries have been portrayed to be on the path toward extinction. However, people often don't realize the resources they are using are provided from libraries, such as searching in Google Scholar. However, we all can share our library stories and library impact to change the headlines.

Check out this video by Gale Cengage Learning, which features some of the statistics from our Library Data and Student Success Project, as the video features public, school, and academia libraries.

Summer Presentations, Library Journal mentions and more

Like most folks it has been a busy summer around here so far. Here are a few places are work has been presented or mentioned:

ALA in Las Vegas
Jan was part of a panel on June 30, 2014 during ALA entitled, Sticking with STEM: How the Academic Library Can Help to Retain Successful Students.

• How can librarians assist with student diversity and retention in the STEM and health science fields at their institution? During this session, three speakers will discuss how library services and instruction can aid student performance overall, as well as highlighting specific retention issues for student groups underrepresented in the STEM fields. Ample time will be provided for audience questions and discussion. This is a joint program between the ACRL Science and Technology Section and the ACRL Health Sciences Interest Group. The STS Poster Session will immediately follow.

What's So Sacred About Privacy?
We are working to get a conversation going about the relationship between privacy and data collection. Our short talk at the CIC CLI conference presentation accomplished this on a few levels including this thoughtful piece in What's So Sacred About Privacy? in Peer to Peer Review in Library Journal By Barbara Fister on May 29, 2014.

Presentation at CUNY Reinventing Libraries: Reinventing Assessment Conference
Kate presented on behalf of the project at the CUNY Reinventing Libraries: Reinventing Assessment Conference in New York City on June 6, 2014.

• Now What!?! Exploring the Next Steps for Large-scale Library Assessment Projects
  The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Libraries are entering the fourth year of a large-scale data analysis project. Yet challenges and questions remain. A more streamlined authentication system and a new discovery layer have required us to re-assess our data collection techniques and goals. We will discuss some of the successes, as well as questions of patron privacy, resistance to data collection, persistent and growing data gaps, complex policy issues, and more.
  
  
• The presentation was also part of a write up on the conference in Library Journal, CUNY Helps Libraries Take Stock By Meredith Schwartz, Ian Chant, and Matt Enis
  

Driving With Data
Our project was mentioned in a foot note in Driving With Data: A Roadmap for Evidence-Based Decision Making in Academic Libraries from Ithaka S+R from May 2014.

Transforming Learning and Higher Education

Shane and I just presented at the University of Michigan for the CIC CLI conference (May 21-22, 2104). We were part of a block on assessment: http://www.cic.net/calendar/conferences/library/2014/cli/program

It was Pecha Kucha (Lightning Round) style so we briefly discussed our ongoing data project and tried to get a conversation started on the balance between patron privacy vs. data collection and analysis.

Shane found this great image for the start of the slide deck:

I think they are going to put the slides up on the site--but we are happy to share.

Slides from Tate Conference 2014

We had a great time presenting on our project at the Tate Conference--mostly academic advisers, student affairs, career advisers, and a variety of other folks focused on students.

In addition to sharing our project, we talked about examples when it could be helpful for advisers, etc. to know whether students had or had not used the U Libraries. For example, what if a student showed high libraries use...maybe they would be good candidates for a UROP proposal, or how to help students to build research skills even if their courses don't require it at the moment but will in the future, or if a student was a academic probation...

Here are slides

Upcoming presentation

We will be presenting at the 2014 John Tate Academic Advising Conference on Thursday March 13, 2014 on campus here at the University of Minnesota

Our session details are as follows:

Isn't all on Google!?! Myths and Realities of Student Library Use
Presenters: Kate Peterson, Shane Nackerud, Jan Fransen, Kristen Mastel

Want to help your students engage more academically? The Libraries could help. The University Libraries, with OIR, have collected and analyzed data to gain a picture of library use at the U. Learn more about how library use relates to student success and retention.

More details: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/acadweb/aan/tate_award_conference/

"As space"

We are beginning work on some future space plans in our largest library on campus. Based on all of the data we collected for our Student Success projects, the new work group wanted to know about what we could pull out to inform the space project. Logical, right?

But disappointing because the answer is not much. When setting up the data collection for our original project we wanted to know who was "using the libraries" in one or more than one of the ways we outlined. But we didn't collect the "what" that was being used (e.g. collected that x student checked out a book but not which book; gathered that x student used a computer in one of the libraries but not which library, etc.). This was a deliberate and thoughtful decision for our initial project to protect user privacy.

Yet we are now unable to go back to the data and try to find out more about the "what." We are now trying a little of this. For our space project we have flipped this--gather data tied to a specific place but not x student. So we can get a snapshot (e.g. College) but not to the depth of our earlier work. Below is a quick chart of use of the library computers in 2012-2013 in the largest library on our campus and the associated colleges.

Using data across universities

Today's NPR story How college applications change in the era of Big Data, mirrors our study of student library interactions. It is encouraging to hear how colleges and universities across the nation are not only collecting and using data for marketing purposes, but also for retention, and student engagement. Hopefully this will mean more support for libraries in mapping library data to student data with institutional research offices, along with collaborating on research projects, and looking at the campus holistically, rather by each individual unit. What conversations and decisions could happen if all units across campus logged interactions into one system?