Journal Club

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3 years of hilj.club

Time flies when you are having fun (and also sometimes when you aren’t).

A long time ago I had an idea for a way to make reading journal articles from HILJ more rewarding by encouraging discussion. You can read the back story up to the launch of hilj.club in an editorial I coauthored with Tom Roper (his blog still a good place to find him in retirement) or you can get a feel via the About page.

So – how has it gone?

Since the launch of the hilj.club website in August 2019 there have been some fairly distracting times (cough) which broke up the planned regular schedule of quarterly posts. Ignoring the hiatus from June 2020 to June 2021 we mostly got posts out. A total of 11 articles have been featured since the site was launched (following pilot posts on other platforms / venues) with a range of authors each bringing their own feel to proceedings. Most followed a reflective format but we also had a dialogue style post on a KM related article. Some tough questions have been set by the authors – not all of which got answered.

How are the numbers?

Not terrible – the web stats have risen pretty steadily (if you believe web stats). Interaction wise the idea was that people would comment on the posts or elsewhere if it suited them. Comments have never been huge and the last few posts have notably not drawn so many – perhaps a sign of the times. There is definitely evidence of impact in the downloaded article stats that are provided to the HILJ Editorial Advisory Board with a lift to articles that are featured in #HILJClub.

Is it worth it?

From my perspective #HILJClub is pretty low maintenance. I like writing the odd post and reading articles I might not otherwise off the back of peoples selections. The small team involved has stayed pretty small and chips in where they can. Authors have all had a nice little piece of CPD to log while frequently scratching an interest itch. At various times the posts have sparked debate, people have had local journal clubs off the back of them and some wrote blogposts in response to things that took their fancy. All this feels like a decent cost / benefit balance. The good news is that a number of posts are already assigned to authors so there should be another year of #HILJClub fun to follow.

Curious as to what people think might make it better / more interactive / worth their time? Answers in the comments box please (or on twitter!)

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Journal clubbing – beyond saints, spies and salespeople

I had been planning to read this article on analogies for liaison roles since it came out so was pleased it was selected for my work journal club

BEYOND SAINTS, SPIES AND SALESPEOPLE: NEW ANALOGIES FOR LIBRARY LIAISON PROGRAMMES – Peter Barr and Anthea Tucker – In the Library with the Lead Pipe 19 Sep 2018

Working in a functionally aligned service it is always interesting to see how others experiences tally with ours.  Locally we have also done a great deal of work around things like Customer Service Excellence so debates around the language of the market in HE are ones we have thought about a fair bit (to the point where I spoke at an event we organised on the student as customer).  We had common experiences with the authors about needing to explain a new role within a functional model and the difficulty other departments could have in understanding this.  Looking at the website for their service it seems they retained some aspects of the traditional subject liaison role that I am not sure this was significant.  In contrast to the authors experience we did not experience a drawing away from the other functional teams.  While it has not always been easy there has been concerted work to bring teams closer together with part of the role locally specifically focussed on liaison internal to the service.

The article considers a range of analogies that have been used to help explain the role of liaison staff and suggests some other possibilities.  It was interesting to see how comfortable people were with these or not and we considered a few alternatives (the fixer perhaps).  I liked the idea of selling being not just about commercial imperatives but also “to convince of the worth of” this tallies with the strong thrust around impact and advocacy in NHS libraries.  There was a somewhat adversarial position taken that viewed sales as purely negative when there is scope for us to work with suppliers in more positive ways – they have things we want to buy and an interest in developing the use of resources (I recognise not all relationships will be positive).

I was glad the article came down ultimately to building and presenting our professional identity as librarians.  We can learn a great deal from the way other people go about their work but we should be strong in our own professional base.

 

 

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Journal Clubbing – Understanding Academics: a UX ethnographic research project at the University of York

Summer edition of my team journal club this time we read

Blake, M. and V. Gallimore (2018). “Understanding academics: a UX ethnographic research project at the University of York.” New Review of Academic Librarianship: 1-25.

I picked this article as I was interested both in the methods used and the potential findings.  I lead on UX work and Uni of York consistently do interesting things in the liaison and engagement sphere so this was an easy one to select.

Overall it left us wanting more.  The methodology section was very light and did not address a number of questions that would have been useful to support the article.  There is no detail of the recruitment strategy or of the semi structured interview schedule for example.  We wanted to know more about the cognitive maps and it would have been great to see a bit of these. While we know that new contacts were made we do not know to what extent the data were gathered from already friendly faces.  They would at least have been sufficiently well disposed towards the library to engage in an extended interview exercise.

The description of academic lives was felt interesting but not surprising. We did wonder if there was a nervousness in writing something that would be published and visible to the interviewees given the emphasis on relationship building.  Generally we wanted to push further into the questions.  A colleague had recently attended a “secret life of an academic” talk where a number of important topics were discussed that have not surfaced in the article at all.  We wondered about the absence of research data management from a library perspective.

Finally we wanted to know more about the changes that had resulted.  This was clearly a major undertaking and the need to see impact from this was felt imperative.  The section on how the data was used to generate user requirement for a change of Reading List software would have been brilliant to read – how did they do this? what difference did it make versus what was known already? etc.

Having said all this – it was a good article for our journal club prompting lots of discussion.  We had useful thoughts on what we might want to know from academics and how we might ask them.  And colleagues at York definitely have expertise and experience we would value!

 

 

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Journal Clubbing – Principles and practice in impact assessment for academic libraries

A change of tack at the team Journal Club with a paper on impact assessment

Christine Urquhart, (2018) “Principles and practice in impact assessment for academic libraries”, Information and Learning Science, Vol. 119 Issue: 1/2, pp.121-134, https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-06-2017-0053

It was a different paper in that it was a literature review so was rather more general than some of the articles we have been using.

We found the idea of reciprocal value propositions worth exploring.  What happens when these go wrong?  There is a danger in both sides being willing but not always able to deliver on what they might wish for.  Opportunities for using value co-creation could also be imagined.  The idea of student reviews on the value of particular reading list choices could potentially lead to some tricky conversations but would only be providing a formal recognition of discussions that already take place amongst the students.

In many areas the literature points to the importance of strategic alignment with our organisations wider goals.  This is not revolutionary but worth trying to do well.

Discussion on the time involved in qualitative data work along with more generally on gathering and managing feedback should help us in future to more carefully frame what we are trying to achieve.  GDPR should also drive care over data collection and retention. Just because data might be available does not mean it is practically or ethically desirable to use it.

I found the referenced paper Mengel, E. and Lewis, V. (2012), “Collaborative assessment”, Library Management, Vol. 33 Nos 6/7, pp. 357–364. [Link] on developing a set of measures for a balanced score card particularly interesting given the difficulty of this task and passed it to relevant colleagues.

Overall we found a lot to discuss in the paper but I am not sure it worked as well as some of the research papers we have used previously.  Too often we were left with too little information without going on to read the underlying papers.

 

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Journal clubbing – impact of physically embedded librarianship on academic departments

After something of a gap it was good to have a return of the Journal Club at work.  The article this time was

The Impact of Physically Embedded Librarianship on Academic Departments – Erin O’Toole, Rebecca Barham, Jo Monahan 2016 Portal: Libraries and the Academy

This was interesting for the team as a way to consider how librarians might best approach closer working with faculties and in particular whether physical collocation is important.

The article examines the impact of a shift to three liaisons being based more with their faculty following changes to the delivery of enquiry services within the library.

There is a big emphasis on counting different routes to interactions.  The picture from these figures is unconvincing.  There are a number of variables that can be controlled for.  There is little consideration of any change in the type, quality or depth of the enquiries.  This would be more useful to know – a fall in enquiries could be a positive thing if more useful enquiries are replacing them.

Given the focus on quantitative data it was also disappointing to not have any examination of data around their use of Libguides.

Generally the study would have been more interesting by including qualitative elements. There is a brief mention of chats with faculty and it would be these interactions that are interesting.

So a helpful paper from prompting discussion but not one where you can draw much that is transferable.

 

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Journal clubbing – strategic engagement: new models of relationship management for academic librarians

My team journal club discussed the following paper this week

Strategic engagement: New models of relationship management for academic librarians

Jeanette Eldridge , Katie Fraser , Tony Simmonds , Neil Smyth . (2016) New Review of Academic Librarianship.

Very much hot off the press having been published earlier this month!

We had a highly productive discussion reflecting the paper echoing our own ongoing work on development of new models around liaison and engagement.  I found the concept of “bridging conversations” helpful as an alternative way to present what I have always thought of as the translation service I operate between HE and the NHS. The focus on senior academics and professional services colleagues was greater than in our approach and we were left wondering who does carry out the liaison that is no longer covered by the team in the article?

It would be good to have seen more robust research around the extent of engagement roles in Russell Group (and beyond) institutions.  Investigation focused on information from websites when a conversation might have been both more straightforward and useful. We do not use engagement as a term in either our team name or job titles so may have slipped through the net.

The importance of resolving ambiguities within the library about the new model chimed and prompted discussion of how we might need to continue this work locally.  Also interesting was that the model appeared to have been compromised by the subject related needs of some disciplines.  I am very aware of some of the tensions around this in health with specialist knowledge around systematic review valued by those we work with.

There would be definite value in meeting with the team at University of Nottingham to share experience.

 

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Journal clubbing – Exploring Customer Engagement for Deeper Relationships

We had the latest round of our team journal club last week.  The paper this time was

Bettina Peacemaker & Jill Stover Heinze (2015) Moving Users, Moving
Results: Exploring Customer Engagement for Deeper Relationships, College & Undergraduate
Libraries, 22:3-4, 261-272, DOI: 10.1080/10691316.2015.1081084

This proved to be a great discussion starter.  It examines the research around customer engagement in the business literature and places this in the context of seeking to increase engagement in the academic library environment.

While the language is firmly in the “customer” model it was easy to look beyond this to the arguments being advanced about collaboration and engagement.  The model in libraries has frequently been one of “Here is the beautiful service that (as experts) we have designed for you – enjoy” followed by disappointment at uptake.  We have increased our openness to feedback for the things we provide in this way we have not always moved far from this model.  Business process management models can also drive us towards there being a right way for something to be done to match our work flows.  Are these approaches going to drive engagement and partnership?

I was interested in the idea that the experiences people have with us drive emotion that in turn fuels engagement.  Our libraries can be places of very big highs and lows – there are days where people will feel we have saved their life or ruined it.  Powerful things happen around us!

We explored how we might better work with the information we have about users and non users to better communicate with them. I heard about an interesting example in public libraries lately where they wrote to all the people who had not visibly used the service for a year saying “we miss you” and it drove a big return of uptake from the targeted group.  There is also the question of how much time we spend working with those who are already engaged versus those who are not.  Generally we need to do more with the information we already gather from activity and feedback.

A big theme of the paper is the need to cocreate services and to engage people with a view to addressing their problems rather than focussing on our own agenda.  Reading lists is a live topic at present and was highly illustrative of the potential for a different approach that might takes us forward faster in the end.

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Journal clubbed

Our latest team journal club considered “The promise of academic libraries: turning outward to transform campus libraries” by Kranich, Lotts and Springs.

I picked this paper as it looks at how someone has been seeking to develop their liaison model through community engagement.  The team involved have clearly been exploring in a period of change and in some ways this paper felt like them reaffirming publicly some of the results.

We were very interested in the way they piggy backed on groups set up for other projects to have “community conversations”.  These gave space for senior staff of the institution to get together to talk about a wide range of questions across the scope of the institution.  While the links to library drivers were interesting it was the whole picture of the objectives and issues in play for the institution that was most useful.  The fruits of these discussions were then fed back to the library teams to give them a much stronger picture of the priorities and direction of travel of the university.  Similar conversation sessions were also held with library teams building internal understanding of work in progress and direction of travel.  Use was made of the ideas from the Harwood Institute and these look helpful as a framework.

Areas around impact were weaker. Some of the measures proposed sound very hard to assess with any accuracy.

Generally it was a positive paper as a statement of intent and helped drive a good discussion.

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Journal clubbing

The latest paper discussed in our team journal club took a bit of a kicking.

The Library Student Liaison Program at Eastern Washington University: A Model for Student Engagement

This paper covers a project where a student was paid to become a student liaison working directly for the Library.  They worked 15  to 19 hours a week during term time reporting directly to a fairly senior member of Library staff. They were set three main goals – enhance communication with the student body, articulate student perspectives / determine priorities to meet student needs and increase student participation in library programmes.

In common with the paper about the Library street teams (discussed last time) the paper tells us about what they did but falls down on the evaluation.  There are few attempts to address how the programme will be evaluated and where figures are provided they are frequently partial. For example we have no context to claims of an improvement in the affect score on Libqual+.  Changes to enquiry levels are discussed but without absolute figures.

In critical appraisal terms it falls at the first hurdle with a focussed research question lacking.  Like much LIS research we get a case study approach.  Applicability of the model proposed is quite limited locally with a very different institution involved and large sums of money required (at least $5K in pay for student at 2006 prices).  The commitment of staff time to managing the role was also substantial.

On the positive side we can see many of the initiatives that were proposed or introduced correspond to work we have in place or under consideration / development.  It also prompted lots of discussion of various paths for student engagement and ways to gain the student perspective.

So not a paper to change our practice but plenty to stimulate debate (and a nice blast from the past with them proudly reporting making 192 friends on MySpace).

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In the journal club

Yesterday was the last of a trial series of journal clubs at work.

These were intitiated (myself and Lynne Meehan plotted them over coffee) to provide a forum where the then Research and Learning Liaison team could examine their practice, consider the research base, learn more about research methods and generally carry out some useful CPD. While a number of participants were familiar with the concept of Journal Clubs most had not participated before.  We drew on this handy guide to running a successful journal club. (you can see our introductory Journal Club discussion if you like).

During the year we aimed to meet on alternate months and generally had around half the team in attendance.  The September session was (slightly predictably) cancelled due to competing commitments that month.

We looked at the following:

February – A report “New roles for new times: transforming liaison roles in research libraries” from the Association of Research Libraries.

May –  Evaluating the Impact of Academic Liaison Librarians on Their User Community: A Review and Case Study Louise Cooke, Michael Norris, Nial Busby, Thomas Page, Ginny Franklin, Elizabeth Gadd, Helen Young New Review of Academic Librarianship Vol. 17, Iss. 1, 2011

July – Creating information literacy partnerships in Higher Education Clare Joanne McCluskey Library and Information Research Vol 35, No 111 (2011)

September (cancelled but paper had been picked) – Mirna E. Turcios, Naresh Kumar Agarwal, Linda Watkins, How Much of Library and Information Science Literature Qualifies as Research?, The Journal of Academic Librarianship

November – Michael M. Smith, Leslie J. Reynolds, (2008) “The street team: An unconventional peer program for undergraduates”, Library Management, Vol. 29 Iss: 3, pp.145 – 158

The papers provided plenty of grist for the mill with an hour of wide ranging conversation each time. I do not propose to dredge my memory for the earlier ones but would recommend the new roles paper and suggest not worrying too much about the one on how much of the LIS literature qualifies as research (answer – not a lot).

The street team paper yesterday was a disappointment.  I selected it quite quickly as it spoke to a lot of our current interests.  Sadly the paper is big on describing what they are planning to do but predates them actually going live (there are signs of them having done so). I had hoped that it would be less descriptive and more about impact and what worked. For all that I was interested to see the thoroughness with which they planned for the recruitment and training of those who would be involved.

We debated to what extent this model depended on factors in the US academic library environment (like high levels of student employment in the Library) and possibly also the business students targeted. We generated some interesting ideas for how we might work more closely with students in the UK. The example of the NHS Evidence Student Champions was used as one model that has seen participation from our students already with benefits in terms of promotion, engagement and peer to peer learning. I think Journal Clubs are a great form of CPD.

Are others engaged in doing this face to face?  Or online (I am aware of the Library Leadership Reading Group for example).  Now that all CILIP HLG members get HILJ as part of their benefits I wonder what might be done using this on a quarterly basis?