The library is still scary—a new look at reference by way of an old concept

The use of qualitative data to explore library concerns has been implemented in a variety of libraries—public, academic, special—by numerous researchers. Professionals who interact with users and provide reference help and research support are continually baffled by dwindling numbers of reference questions, despite the fact that there seems to be more information to make sense of. In academic libraries in particular, librarians have sought to discover what holds students in particular back from approaching librarians and asking questions. A brief review of the literature reveals attempts to explore this research question, with numerous articles on library anxiety (Mellon, 1986; Kwon et al., 2007; Onwuegbuzie et al., 2004).

Mellon (1986) used a grounded theory approach to discover the elements of library-related fear. The study revealed the following concepts:

Library anxiety can be defined as “an uncomfortable feeling or emotional disposition, experienced in a library setting, which has cognitive, affective, physiological, and behavioral ramifications” (Jiao et al., 1996, p. 152). In a way, library anxiety very closely mimicked other more well-known types of anxiety, like the type of anxiety that may arise with public speaking, flying, or going into a new work setting for the first time.

Mellon’s work (1986) provided a qualitative way to make sense of what students were feeling, and later, another researcher developed a scale to measure levels of library anxiety by way of the Library Anxiety Scale (Bostick, 1992).

This scale has been used extensively by researchers to assess their students’ resistance to going to the library, asking for help when they need it, and the impact on their academics (Veal, 2002; Jiao and Onwuegbuzie, 2007; Battle, 2004; Anwar et al., 2004). In fact, Bailey (2008) suggests that “most subsequent research on library anxiety has been based more on Bostick’s work than on Mellon’s original study” (p. 95). Bostick is best known for articulating five major components of library anxiety: barriers with staff, affective barriers, comfort with the library, knowledge of the library, and mechanical barriers (Onwuegbuzie et al., 2004).

The Mellon study itself is notable for several reasons. First, it used a theory-generating approach to formulate a qualitatively based framework for library anxiety. The data came first, the theory second. Written content generated by the students participating in the study was analyzed for repeating patterns and themes related to their personal research processes, a method called the constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Eventually, these repeating patterns and themes surfaced Mellon’s three theoretical constructs or main ideas—in this case, concepts related to library anxiety. In quantitative studies, the data are used to test pre-existing theory about some phenomena. This marked the first time that a study of this nature used a qualitative approach to document elements related to fear, shame, and unease in a library setting. Finally, it was a large-scale qualitative study (for a library setting).

One of the more interesting phenomena related to the Mellon study was the slew of research that followed (Joseph, 1991; Keefer, 1993; Mech and Brooks, 1997; Shoham and Mizrachi, 2001; Westbrook and DeDecker, 1993; Kracker, 2002; Van Kampen, 2004; Bostick, 1992; Kuhlthau, 1991; Kwon et al., 2007), and the numerous articles by Jiao and Onwuegbuzie (1997a, 1997b, 1999, 2001, 2002). Mellon’s work also led to a number of variational studies on the same theme. Researchers have studied graduate students (Jiao and Onwuegbuzie, 1997a); doctoral students (Van Kampen, 2003); foreign students (Anwar et al., 2004; Shoham and Mizrachi, 2001; Abusin and Ngah, 2010); undergraduate students (Kuhlthau, 1988); distance learners (Veal, 2002); at-risk students (Jiao et al., 1996); non-traditional students (Mellon, 1989); and offcampus adult learners (Collins and Veal, 2004). Measures such as the Study Habits Inventory (Jones and Slate, 1992), the Self Perception Profile for College Students (SPPCS), the Computer Anxiety Index, and the Social Interdependence Scale (SIS) have been compared with the Library Anxiety Index to shed light on confounding factors related to anxiety.

What did these various studies reveal about addressing library anxiety, and possible solutions? How did these studies actually impact library services? Jiao and Onwuegbuzie (2002) found that cooperative work and cooperative learning groups “reduced levels of academic-related anxiety for many students” (p. 75). They also found that social interdependence on other students and on librarians plays a significant role in the reduction of library anxiety. The students who rely in a positive manner on others for help tend to be more comfortable using the library, whereas the students who are not cooperatively inclined are less so. One way to address library anxiety in this context is by creating opportunities for students to work in groups and with librarians in a way that is natural and non-threatening, perhaps organized by a course instructor. Librarians embedded in certain lectures may also help to establish their presence as a helpful team member. Onwuegbuzie et al. (2004) suggest three main areas that should be addressed in terms of reducing library anxiety—the physical environment, library instruction, and reference services. As Bailey (2008) points out, these suggestions are not new or earth-shattering; they are, in fact, the same suggestions librarians hear in terms of improving all levels of customer and user service. Nonetheless, the focus on library anxiety provides an interesting perspective from which to view the user experience. Jiao and Onwuegbuzie (1999) further suggest that librarians pay attention to Wine’s (1980) cognitive-attentional-interference theory— that is, pay attention to those elements in the environment that increase anxiety and avoidance and decrease focus and positive study behaviors. Librarians are left to decide how this will look in a practical sense, but reducing confusing environmental elements like bad signage, poor web usability, and segmenting library instruction so that sessions are highly subject- or assignment-specific are good places to start.

Jiao and Onwuegbuzie (1999) also examine self-perception, and found that students who are self-perceived as perfectionistic tend to have higher levels of library anxiety. Aspects that focus on psychological and emotional wellbeing of students are normally not the purview of librarians. However, awareness of the relationship between library anxiety and certain psychological elements can only help: “The more [teaching librarians and faculty] know about their students’ levels of self-perception, the more effectively they can design and implement measures to help at-risk students to change their psychologically unhealthy and educationally counterproductive self-perceptions and to lead them to academic success” (1999, p. 147). Ansari (2009) found that library anxiety was related to the size of the academic library. Unfortunately, the size of the library is not something that can be easily changed; however, librarians and other teaching professionals can design more welcoming, smaller, and more manageable spaces within pre-existing libraries. Group study spaces, open study enclaves, and reading spaces can all serve to make the library not feel as expansive as it really is.

Library anxiety is not discussed quite as often these days, but the proliferation of technology has created other (real or imagined) challenges for users that impact their behavior when in information seeking and use mode. Chat reference is a good example, with a wide variety of literature published over the past 15 years (Arnold and Kaske, 2005; White et al., 2003; Radford, 2003, 2004a, 2004b; Ronan and Turner, 2002), including qualitative studies (Ward, 2004; Luo, 2007), and related studies about online anxiety (Wang and Chang, 2008). Feeling overwhelmed by too much information, not knowing where to look for expertise, being confused about copyright and plagiarism may all bring about a certain level of anxiety that researchers can continue, and have continued, to explore using qualitative and quantitative data.

Still with us: the library website (The Rutgers Study)

The library website can perhaps be the most useful and the most frustrating information element for both users and those who work in library and information settings. Librarians and others quickly discovered that keeping up with the changing technological environment and having a website that is reflective of what users are used to in their daily lives just is not possible. For many, this means that library websites are often out-of-date, or at least they feel that way. Today, the website is seen by many as nothing more than a gateway to a host of services for the user, whereas, previously, the website in and of itself was the focus. Generation of dynamic content, the creation of my-library suites (personalized services/information on demand), and 24-hour live chat are all ways that libraries have sought to enhance their virtual presence. More recently, libraries are working with mobile technology to reach out to the many users that gain access on-the-go, through their mobile devices. North Carolina State University Libraries Mobile (2010a) was launched in 2009 and allows users to “search for available computers, find hours and locations of branches and library services, look up items in the catalog, and even see the coffee line using the Hill of Beans webcam” (North Carolina State Libraries mobile website, 2010b). MIT (2010) also provides users with mobile access to certain library services, as well as do University of Nebraska Lincoln, Rice University, and the University of Texas. The addition of mobile-enabled content does create a number of additional considerations for those working with library web designs. The library website remains the main source of communication with the user. Qualitative approaches can help librarians and others to determine what services and improvements are going to be most beneficial. And even for the old-fashioned website, these approaches can provide a refreshing and novel look at the user. The following is an example of how qualitative methods informed the redesign process for a university library’s website.

Starting in January 2009, the Rutgers University Libraries began the process of reconceptualizing the library website. The website had been through various iterations and, like many library websites, felt cluttered and confusing. Website redesign can go one of two ways—either an outside design firm is brought in to redo the site, or internal staff is commissioned to lead the charge. After investigating a number of large commercial firms, the staff at Rutgers decided that a more personalized and user-driven approach to the redesign might be best. An anthropologist was brought in to lead what would become an ethnographic study of the library’s website and its users. Specifically, the study examined how graduates, undergraduates, and faculty used the website to access information and conduct research, and how the website helped them to integrate the library into their work. The role of the anthropologist was to inform the library team about the ethnographic process, its design, inputs, and outputs. Since conducting an ethnographic study was very different than just doing a usability study, the process was new to many of the librarians and staff involved. The end goal was to amass a rich collection of data about users that could not be gotten through just a questionnaire or observation session alone. These data would then need to be analyzed, examined for patterns, then somehow used to interpret user needs—all with the end goal of designing a more useful website, keeping the current users and attracting new users.

Gathering the data for the Rutgers study involved two strategies—conducting a survey and extended in-person interviews with participants. These two approaches, one of which produced quantitative data and the other qualitative data, were combined during the project’s findings phase. Core and project teams consisting of library faculty and staff directed the study, with the visiting anthropologist taking the lead.

A total of 6,390 graduate and undergraduate students completed the initial survey. The survey respondents covered a variety of disciplines, with 1,395 (21.8 percent) from the arts and humanities, 497 (7.77 percent) from business, 1,952 (30.51 percent) from the social sciences, and 2,546 (39.79 percent) from the sciences, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM).

For the qualitative portion of the study, 21 undergraduate students and eight graduate students participated in semi-structured interviews.

The result was an 82-page ethnography (White, 2009), which describes in great detail the work and research habits of the students. The interview questions focused on the culture of research, student habits, and website use as they related to general site navigation, issues of design and efficacy, problems with vendor-related content and links, federated searching, interaction with librarians, the use of bibliographic management software (RefWorks, Zotero, etc.), and social networking (White, 2009).

Each interview took anywhere from 40 to 60 minutes. The interviews were videorecorded, and conducted by the lead anthropologist. Each videotaped session was then viewed by various members of the project team, and during these “co viewing” sessions team members were able to discuss informally their observations and thoughts about the information from the interview. The interviews were each transcribed by an independent transcription company, which produced more than 800 pages of raw text. The lead anthropologist then used a software program (HyperResearch) to facilitate the coding of the data. It was this coding that allowed for the various repeating ideas and themes to be revealed.

The findings from the study ran the gamut from the expected to the shocking. One of the more interesting findings was that “website users do not want to read and be instructed, except perhaps by choice” (White, 2009). The study also revealed that users wanted a tool, not just a “vehicle for library information” (White, 2009). In other words, providing access and acting as a gateway were no longer enough. In the end, the Rutgers team established seven redesign principles and a corresponding list of priorities to guide the actual redesign of the website: flexibility, integrations, information literacy, simplicity, context, self-sufficiency, and process (White, 2009). The general priorities were to make access easier, make finding e-journals simpler, improve navigation, surface high-demand resources, match user expectation in Web 2.0 in color layout, widgets, and services, improve personalization and context, simplify design elements, fix what’s broken, and improve the top page (White, 2009).

The Rutgers Libraries website is still being redesigned according to the study’s findings. The decision to gather qualitative data and compile an ethnography of the culture of student research allowed the Rutgers team to develop greater insight into the research habits and needs of the users. From the beginning, the study focused almost exclusively on the user, as opposed to the traditional process of website redesign where the site itself is the focus. The ethnography remains a very powerful tool for understanding today’s user, especially when combined with quantitative data, which can be analyzed inferentially. The novelty in the ethnographic approach is primarily evidenced by the creation of the ethnography, the “thick description” (Geertz, 1973), which provided a way to understand the culture of research within the academic context. Repeating ideas gave way to themes that were then examined for their relationship to the redesign of the website. The themes related to the website and its use came directly from interaction and discussion with the users, so the users themselves generated these ideas.

Disruption and the information seeker

These days, information service providers, media outlets, merchants, and educators want to know more about the digital habits of users from all age groups. As discussed in Chapter 4 of this book, there is great interest in the habits of young people born between 1980 and 1994, but the interest does not end there. Mobile and wireless technologies will continue to disrupt the way information services are provided in a variety of settings. Disruptive technologies include those that cause a “major change in ‘the accepted way of doing things’, including business models, processes, revenue streams, industry dynamics and consumer behaviour” (Gartner Group, 2010). The initial definition of disruptive technology was coined by Bower and Christensen (1995), who define such technologies as those that can render the surrounding industries and organizations obsolete by presenting unanticipated technological changes and the subsequent impact. The Gartner Group, an international information technology research firm, defines the most disruptive technologies for 2008–10 as follows:

From a library point of view, there are several technologies on this list that are already having an impact on the way services are provided, including cloud computing, user interfaces, and social networks. In fact, none of the items on the list are a surprise, nor are they that new. They were at the time of their creation and continue to be disruptive because, in many cases, those of us in library settings were not able to adequately anticipate their impact on us as professionals, or on our users. Lafferty and Edwards (2004) state that the academic library faces some of the same challenges presented by disruption as do commercial entities. “It should come as no surprise if at some time in the future, the university disappears in the face of disruption. However, it may be that institutions survive and only their libraries disappear” (Lafferty and Edwards, 2004, p. 255). The authors suggest that higher education itself, scholarly publishing, and the academic library are already at risk. While some researchers suggest that the disruption has already happened (Hawkins, 2001), those of us who work in library settings recognize that the disruption is a slow progression that is hard to predict, and that it is very much still happening.

How have researchers examined the impact of disruptive and other technology, and what can libraries learn from these research efforts? There are some intriguing examples. Jones et al. (2004) examined the relationship between geographic space and people’s social, communication, and information interactions, to “clarify the role of place information in social interaction” (p. 202), with the end goal of designing a place-aware community system, to “incorporate the concept of physical places into systems” (p. 202). Modern-day disruptive technologies like wireless, RFID, and GPS now allow for people, places, and information to be connected (p. 203), but relevance and meaning are not always factored in. The researchers used qualitative methods “to explore people’s actual personal experiences of place, everyday activities, and associated information needs” (Jones et al., 2004, p. 204). Participants kept a place diary, and participated in semi-structured interviews. The study revealed some interesting findings, which in some cases may be relevant to libraries:

Libraries encounter a wide variety of users, each engaged in different activities relative to where they are physically or virtually. Some users have very rigid patterns of use and habits, and utilize the same resources over and over again. Other users are open to the power of serendipity, and browse/search for information in a less structured way. Users may (or may not) fit into the following information/activity pairings described by the authors:

The researchers concluded that the location or type of information alone does not determine information needs; rather, it is the relationship between “user routines” and “social relationships” (Jones et al., 2004, p. 210).

The impact of place-aware technology such as GPS and RFID has been discussed and some programs even implemented in a number of public and academic libraries (Shahid, 2005; Erwin and Kern, 2003; Kern, 2004; Choi et al., 2006; Golding and Tennant, 2007). However, the literature tends to focus much more on the technology rather than on the user. One research approach might therefore be to learn more about the social implications of place-aware technology on research practices, resource use, and teaching. In the academic library, this can be even more relevant if there is a broader interest on the campus about integrating place-aware technology with distance learning, mobile technologies, and learning management systems such as Blackboard and Sakai.

In another study aimed at understanding the impact of disruptive technologies on users, Brown et al. (2000) used participant diaries to learn more about how people capture information—whether the information consists of photographic images, movies, or notes on paper. Their analysis of 22 user diaries helped them to construct a design and analysis taxonomy (p. 438). The researchers justified theirproject by citing the lack of literature on the topic, despite a growing need to understand how users capture information in everyday life, particularly in the workplace. Fast-forward to 2011, and think about the various reasons that a library user needs to capture information.

It is not unusual to find college students who, when faced with the fact that they cannot download the entirety of an article for whatever reasons, take a screenshot of the available pages with a cell phone or PDA for later reference. The same is true for images and photographs found in books and reserves materials—as opposed to making a photocopy, or checking out a book, students take a picture with whatever technology they have available and refer to that image when need be. This type of information capture is relatively common (Doermann et al., 2003; Barreau et al., 2006), and the technology to increase resolution, sharing, and ease of use is always being improved, yet little can be found in the library and information services literature about these practices as they relate to information gathering. Certainly, learning more about these capture practices, by way of user diaries, unobtrusive methods, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews might be very enlightening for librarians.

So far, this book has explored qualitative research activities as they relate to library and information service users. The next chapter takes a slightly different approach, and examines the potential for workplace research on the library, with a focus on the people who work there.

References