Why didn't we think of asking that? Findings from a collaborative study on research behavior

Presentation given at Boston Library Consortium Networking Day, May, 2019.

Findings from an ethnographic interview study of humanities PhD. students.

Transcript

1. Why didn’t we think of asking that? findings from a collaborative study on research behavior Emily Singley, Boston College May, 2019 BLC Networking Day
2. the study: Boston College and University of Notre Dame 10 humanities PhD students 30 hours of ethnographic interviews
3. the method: open-ended, unstructured questions
4. what we learned….
5. It’s about following the conversation
6. people help them navigate
7. people are access points “The biggest resources have been people” “My advisor is going to be familiar with the big names that are engaged in this discussion” “He just listed off items, just 20 items on the spot, without a hesitation. It was amazing.” “The professors are really good at handing me a bunch of stuff to read.”
8. the world is their collection
9. library catalog Google Scholar Google Wikipedia YouTube Facebook WorldCat Twitter academia.edu Amazon Google Books websites faculty websites finding aids blogs library databases national library catalogs archives scribd.com SciHub Hathi Trust they go everywhere
10. library access is too hard "When I want to download something through BC's databases it takes like 6-7 steps. One click should be enough." "It's not user friendly at all." "It fails somewhere along the way and leads to a generic journal page.” "I could find the articles but then I couldn't actually read them."
11. illegal access is easy "I see it on Google, get the link and copy and paste into SciHub and there's the article - that's it." "so far there is nothing that I couldn't find there [on SciHub]" The library should "Just do what SciHub does."
12. would we do it again? What worked What didn’t work We learned things we would not have thought to ask Need more ethnographic interview training We got a genuine“in their own words” glimpse into the lives of graduate students Transcribing took too much time
13. re-thinking research services
14. the end @emilysingley emily.singley@bc.edu monica.moore.238@nd.edu Moore, Monica, & Emily Singley. “Understanding the Information Behaviors of Doctoral Students: An Exploratory Study.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 19, 2 (2019).