Keeping Up To Date Has anything changed? APLA Conference June 13, 2015 Heather Pretty, Sue Fahey, Erin Alcock Memorial University of Newfoundland

Why do librarians keep up to date? Research interests Papers / Presentations Evidence based practice ◦ Solutions to issues that arise in day-to-day work ◦ Ideas to improve day-to-day work Tenure / Promotion Curiosity / Discovery Dissemination

How do librarians keep up to date? Journal articles TOC lists / RSS feeds Conferences Database searches Social media ◦ Twitter, facebook, blogs, etc. Research collaboration services ◦ Mendeley, ResearchGate, zotero, etc.

What’s the current situation? Scholarly communication practices of academic librarians and archivists at ARL institutions (Sugimoto et al., 2014) 26.6% reported reading daily (n=160/601) Most popular ways to stay up to date (n=599): ◦ 80.6% peer-reviewed journals (n=483) ◦ 76.6% conference papers and proceedings (=459) ◦ 65.4% magazine and trade journal articles (n=392) ◦ 64.4% websites (n=386) ◦ 61.6% blogs (n=369)

Keeping up to date at MUN Libraries “Commonly noted challenges and barriers include time constraints, lack of support, and lack of research training or experience.” (Hoffman, Berg, & Koufogiannakis, 2014) Increasing amount of scholarship being produced Upswing in the use of social media and social networking Day-to-day work responsibilities take precedence Objective -- To study how MUN librarians keep up to date with their professional research interests, and to increase awareness regarding the various tools and methods for keeping up to date among MUN librarians.

Methods Design – Before and after survey methodology. Received Ethics approval Subjects – 34 practicing MUN librarians. Setting – Memorial University Libraries.

Before and After Survey First Survey Distributed ◦ December 2014 Second Survey Distributed ◦ February 2015

Interventions December: Research Fair Presentation ◦ Push vs. Pull: Keeping Up to Date with Professional/Research Interests January: SpeakUp! Discussion ◦ Sugimoto’s article regarding “scholarly communication practices” February: Brown Bag Session ◦ Mendeley group “MUN Librarians”

Who are our respondents?

Do you have an additional graduate degree beyond your MLIS? Do you have collections responsibilities?

Who are our respondents? How many presentations have you given and/or papers published in the past 3 years?

Did anything change? Before After Are you a member of a citation sharing or research collaboration service?

Did anything change? BeforeAfter Do you use reference management software?

Are you satisfied with your current strategy for keeping up to date? BeforeAfter

Next steps Why are academics using Mendeley? ◦ “participants did not engage with social-based features as frequently and actively as they engaged with research-based features” (Jeng, He, and Jiang, 2015) ◦ “users who joined more groups seemed to have a stronger motivation to increase their professional visibility and to contribute the research articles that they had read to the reading list” (Jeng, He, and Jiang, 2015)

Next steps Mendeley ◦ Encouraging activity by MUN Librarians ◦ Adding relevant articles to the MUN Librarians group ◦ Starting conversations Renewal of ethics clearance through 2016 Survey ◦ December 2015

Thank you References Hoffmann, K.; Berg, S. A.; Koufogiannakis, D. (2014). Examining success: identifying factors that contribute to research productivity across librarianship and other disciplines. Library and Information Research, 38(119): Jeng, W., He, D., & Jiang, J. (2015). User participation in an academic social networking service: A survey of open group users on Mendeley. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(5), doi: /asi Sugimoto, C. R., Tsou, A., Naslund, S., Hauser, A., Brandon, M., Winter, D. S.,... Finlay, S. C. (2014). Beyond Gatekeepers of Knowledge: Scholarly Communication Practices of Academic Librarians and Archivists at ARL Institutions. College & Research Libraries, 75(2),