Conference Agenda

Background

The Library of the Law and Administration Faculty of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow is currently preparing a complex reform of its website and profiles in social media in order to comply with the best benchmarks in this domain. This operation has been preceded by a two-stage study of Library’s users’ information needs and expectations concerning the website’s future architecture and design. We purposefully limited the target group to active scholars and academic teachers only. The paper exposes the results of the study and possible practical implementations of its empirical findings. The research project discussed herein is the first large scale mixed-method survey conducted in our Library.

Objectives

We defined the objectives as follows:

1) discover, with the utmost precision achievable, actual needs of faculty members staff regarding the offer of resources and services displayed by the Library via its website and social media profiles;

2) assess the concordance of discovered user’s needs with the best benchmarks as recognized optimal models of law libraries website design and organization;

3) compare obtained findings with similar studies (e.g. McAllister & Brown, 2020; Uwaechina & Eze-Onwuzuruike, 2019) and identify potential particularities of local law scholars; and

4) assess the feasibility of implementing modifications recommended by faculty members.

Methodology

The study is a mixed-method research relying on the application of: 1) a large scale online survey addressed to the whole community of the faculty members and 2) a focus group interview with 10 scholars, fully transcribed and explored via discourse analysis conducted according to the principles of the cognitive imaging method.

Outcomes

The main outcome generated by the study is an accurate panorama of information needs and expectations expressed by the faculty members with respect to the Library’s website and social media profiles. Indications emerging from this first-of-this-kind research will guide modifications and extensions introduced in the Library’s website so as to better address and anticipate scholars’ requests. The study is in line with current research trends that stress the utility of improving libraries’ communication via digital media in order to sustain users’ satisfaction (McCaffrey, 2019; Indrák & Pokorná, 2021; Fu, 2021; Mărginean & Kifor, 2021).

References

Fu, Y. (2021). Experiencing the academic library in the digital age: From information seeking and user experience to human information interaction. [Doctoral dissertation]. UCL (University College London).

Indrák, M., & Pokorná, L. (2021). Analysis of digital transformation of services in a research library. Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication, 70(1/2), 154–172.

McAllister, C., & Brown, M. (2020). Wrangling weirdness: Lessons learned from academic law library collections. Retrieved December 19, 2022 from https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/charleston/2019/collectiondevelopment/21/

Mărginean, E., & Kifor, C. V. (2021). Academic libraries as user-centered organizations. Case study: Quality of services provided by LBUS Library. In MATEC Web of Conferences, 342, (p. 09002). EDP Sciences.

McCaffrey, C. (2019). Transforming the university library one step at a time: A ten year LibQUAL+ review. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 25(1), 59–75.

Uwaechina, C. G., & Eze-Onwuzuruike, J. (2019). The role academic law libraries in meeting information needs of legal clientele. Library Research Journal, 4, 133–137.

Information literacy is a tenet of school librarianship (ALA & AECT, 1988, 1998; AASL, 2018a, 2018b). Although most school librarians were once classroom teachers, these individuals do not always possess adequate information literacy skills (Burchard & Myers, 2019) even though it has been shown that the students of teachers, who possess these skills, have higher levels of information literacy themselves (Solmaz, 2017).

Do students leave library school with the skills to answer their own information needs? Does preparation for the profession encompass essential skills necessary for success (Whitton, 2019)? In this paper, authors will provide a holistic view of the responsibilities and information necessary to meet those responsibilities while sharing selected results from a recent study exploring the professional information needs of early-career school librarians and library school students wishing to become school librarians. Utilizing a mixed-method approach, we used surveys and interviews to explore and understand the information needs of participants as well as ways they met those information needs.

Initial results revealed the source of support for these early career professionals resided in participation in professional learning communities and networks, whether ad hoc or more formal. Early-career school librarians relied on the mentoring found in these groups to ensure their success. Responsibility lied with the employer and preparation program to build on students’ and early-career school librarians’ inherent and emerging information literacy skills to foster expertise. We anticipate that additional analysis will aid school library preparation programs and school administrators in developing a more strategic approach to supporting the success of the future and early-career school librarian.

References

American Association of School Librarians. (2018a). National school library standards crosswalk with ISTE standards for students and educators. American Library Association. https://standards.aasl.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/180828-aasl-standards-crosswalk-iste.pdf.

American Association of School Librarians. (2018b). National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries. American Library Association.

American Library Association, & Association for Educational Communications & Technology. (1988). Information power: Building partnerships for learning. (ED 315028). ERIC. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED315028.pdf

American Library Association, & Association for Educational Communications & Technology. (1998). Information power: Building partnerships for learning. ALA Editions.

Burchard, M. S., & Myers, S. K. (2019). Early information literacy experience matters to self-efficacy and performance outcomes in teacher education. Journal of College Reading and Learning, 49(2), 115–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10790195.2019.1582372.

Solmaz, D. Y. (2017). Relationship between lifelong learning levels and information literacy skill in teacher education candidates. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 5(6), 939–946. https://doi.org/10.13189/ujer.2017.050605

Whitton, C. A. (2019). A study of school librarian job advertisements and the inclusion of AASL standards. Teacher Librarian, 46(4), 26–30.

Our contribution aims to summarise the results of evaluating information literacy instruction focusing on plagiarism prevention and appropriate work with scientific information sources using the HUMAN framework. A team from Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt presented this frameworkat ECIL 2021 (Baldarelli et al., 2022) as a tool for developing the information literacy competencies of German engineering students. We followed up on this initiative by further adapting the framework to the context of healthcare studies in a Czech university.

Czech law mandates that midwives and paramedics receive a bachelor’s degree to perform their work (Act on non-medical health professions, 2004). This entails a requirement to master academic writing, including proper use of information sources. However, these claims usually do not meet the interests and expectations of healthcare students, who are rather practically oriented and, hence, consider the requirement of these academic competencies unjustified. In this situation, we were looking for a way to convince them that it is necessary to address this problem by adopting a different perspective. The HUMAN framework, which had been previously successfully piloted with similarly practically oriented engineering students (Baldarelli et al., 2022) and in a practical-oriented international management course (Trefer, 2022), provided us with such a solution.

In cooperation with the framework’s authors, we created self-study materials (including a video presentation), exercises (consisting of categorisation of the sources used in a preselected scientific article), and a workshop using the HUMAN framework. We subsequently tested and evaluated the materials in class with 27 students of midwifery and emergency medical services study programs. To improve the reliability of the research, we used a combination of research methods: an analysis of students’ outputs from the exercise and a self-assessment questionnaire.

The effect of the teaching method proved to be considerable. Before the lesson, more than half of the students assessed their ability to work with sources as poor or very poor. While after completing, all but one rated their ability as rather good or somewhat good (the average increase was 1.3 steps on a five-point scale). The evaluation of the framework as a teaching method showed that the students appreciated the video presentation but would welcome more examples of the application on specific scientific texts. Another finding highlighted the importance of choosing an appropriate article for student assessment. The analysis of the students’ outputs showed that the findability and availability of full texts of the sources cited in the assessed article played an essential role in their correct categorisation according to the HUMAN framework.

References

Act on non-medical health professions, nr. 96/2004 (2004). Retrieved from https://www.zakonyprolidi.cz/cs/2004-96

Baldarelli, B., Trescher, K., Treffer, A., & Jakobs, L. (2022). Learning how to avoid plagiarism: A new approach in information literacy sessions for computer science and engineering students. In S. Kurbanoğlu, S., Špiranec, S., Ünal, Y., Boustany, J., Kos, D. (Eds.), Information Literacy in a Post-Truth Era, The Seventh European Conference on Information Literacy, ECIL 2021, online, September 20-23, 2021: Revised Selected Papers. Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) 1533. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99885-1_45

Treffer, A. (2022). Design digitaler Lernmedien zur Quellenkompetenzvermittlung. [Unpublished master thesis]. Brandenburg: University of applied Science.