A 2CUL Collaborative Ethnographic Assessment of Humanities Doctoral Students: Design, Implementation and Analysis

This paper examines the processes taken to design and administer a collaborative ethnographic study of humanities doctoral students within an interinstitutional, collaborative framework. Project organization and management, including the creation of instruments and analysis of results across two local research teams and institutional cultures is discussed. Effective communications, among and between project teams, and time management were identified as critical factors for success. Benefits resulting from the project included an improved understanding of the needs of a key user group, a heightened interest in user assessment and data-driven decision making among staff within the partner organizations, and a deeper engagement with important academic administrators on both campuses. Introduction Ethnographic studies of various user groups have flourished within libraries in recent years. Most of these studies focus on planning service programs, facilities, and end-user interfaces writ large, following a foundational tenet of participatory design—that systems and tools are best designed with engaged input from their users.1 The pioneering effort to design library spaces on the basis of ethnographic research findings at the University of Rochester, since extended to other areas of library service,2 has led several academic and research libraries to ground planning efforts in similar research methodologies. The perceived advantages of utilizing ethnographic research as a planning tool derive from observing subjects in the process of performing their work and capturing their experiences in their own words. Partnered with data measuring actual user behavior, qualitative information gathered from interviews and observations provide a powerful tool for improving customer service and the enduser experience. While many early efforts centered on undergraduate academic work practices, more recent studies focus on the practices of “serious researchers,” a frequently used catchall denoting faculty and graduate students. Examples include case studies produced at the broad discipline level by the Research Information Network, design projects concentrated on advanced researchers,3 and efforts by scholars themselves to examine their own research workflows and the library’s role within those processes.4 Graduate students, and specifically doctoral students in the humanities, represent fertile ground for libraries interested in using ethnographic inquiry for service improvement and planning. Humanities doctoral students are some of the most frequent and dedicated library users, given the nature of their research programs. A number of recent studies show that these students take longer to complete their programs and drop out at a higher rate than those in the sciences and social sciences.5 Contributing factors are numerous and include the availability of adequate funding, prospects for employment after completion, and the quality of students’ relationships with their 2012 Library Assessment Conference 312 faculty advisors—all important prerequisites for completing a doctoral degree in a timely fashion.6 This intense interest in doctoral student completion and retention is underpinned by a growing anxiety about graduate education and the future of the academy7 which has, in turn, spawned a cottage industry of guide books for both current and future graduate students.8 Most research on doctoral student success does not discuss the library as a factor affecting completion or retention. In an attempt to fill this gap, the research libraries at Columbia and Cornell universities conducted a collaborative ethnographic user needs study investigating the needs of doctoral students in the humanities, focusing specifically on the question of whether the library could positively impact student success.9 The study was supported by grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and funding from the respective graduate schools at Cornell and Columbia. This funding covered equipment purchases, incentives for interview participants, training, and some modest staffing support for the project. In summary, the study focused on doctoral students in the humanities at any stage of their programs. Between the two institutions, the research team conducted five focus groups with 27 participants and 45 individual interviews. Data gathered from the focus groups were used to refine the two protocols used in the interviews. Written questionnaires were developed and administered at the end of each focus group and interview session. The interviews lasted between 60 and 90 minutes and were conducted in person by teams of two library staff members, except for two interviews, which were conducted via telephone. The study concentrated initially on students enrolled in English, religion, history and classics doctoral programs, but participation was expanded to include other humanities disciplines at both institutions. History and English were the only two disciplines to overlap and also contributed the highest number of participants. The subjects varied in age from 21 to 75 years old and their academic backgrounds and experience with libraries, archives, and academic writing ranged dramatically. Almost two-thirds of all participants had advanced to doctoral candidacy. Over half of the interviewees had earned advanced degrees (typically a master’s degree) prior to starting their doctoral program. Interviews revealed that even though there is no “typical” humanities doctoral student, there are institutional and library-related concerns that these students share and consider important in their pursuit of advanced degrees. While interviewees confirmed the importance of other factors already identified in the literature (funding, future employment, the faculty advisor relationship), their comments on what the library does and might do to contribute to their success were of particular interest. The opportunities for libraries that emerged from the study included providing work and social space, fostering community, providing access to deep research collections, providing assistance in supporting both research and teaching, and nurturing the development of doctoral students as scholars. The detailed results of the study, including an in-depth demographic analysis, are reported elsewhere.10 The current discussion will focus on the process of conducting a collaborative ethnographic study between two research libraries and student populations. The paper will examine the processes taken to design and administer the study and analyze the resulting data within an inter-institutional, collaborative framework. The project leaders identified both opportunities and challenges while completing the project, including addressing differences in institutional review board (IRB) procedures, crafting instruments, and analyzing results collaboratively, across two local research teams and institutional cultures. Project Organization Team Structure and Project Management By the end of the project, a total of 22 individuals (including seven students) across both campuses had contributed in some way to the success of the study. The core research team consisted of 11 library staff members who contributed their time in addition to their regular duties (see Appendix for a listing of team members). Only the Project Manager from Cornell received a 25 percent leave from regularly assigned duties to support the study. Castro-Gessner, et al. 313 The Columbia team consisted of the Associate University Librarian for Collections and Services (the co-Principle Investigator (PI) from Columbia), the Assessment and Planning Librarian, who managed the overall project and the local IRB process, five staff members from across the organization, including four subject specialist librarians and a paraprofessional access services supervisor, and a graduate student Research Assistant. As the Project Manager for Columbia, the Assessment and Planning Librarian served as the primary liaison with Cornell. Working with the Project Manager, the Research Assistant coordinated the many daily tasks, scheduled interviews, ensured that interviewers were assigned for each interview, prepared interview materials, organized and filed interview recordings, and shared data with Cornell. The Columbia team met routinely throughout the course of the 18-month project. Team members were recruited to participate based on their experience with or interest in user assessment, familiarity with the population to be researched, and ability to dedicate time to a long-term project. The supervisors of each team member were consulted to ensure that time would be made available to dedicate to the project without negatively impacting their primary job responsibilities. Team members were responsible for conducting interviews, data analysis, and the drafting of preliminary results. They were also asked to familiarize themselves with relevant research on the state of graduate education in the humanities (via a literature review assembled by the Research Assistant), and to complete training in ethnographic interview techniques. The Cornell team consisted of several staff members from across the social sciences and humanities library: the library’s director (the coPI from Cornell), two reference librarians, a staff member from access services, an administrative assistant and a Reference Specialist/Assessment Analyst. In addition, two access services staff members and five students served as transcriptionists. Two members of the Cornell team had previous exposure to ethnographic research methodologies through an earlier project,11 and additional participants were recruited based on their subject expertise and experience with or interest in ethnographic research. Prior to the launch of the study, team members researched the issues surrounding doctoral student success and attrition in humanities programs