Researching Research Support

Many librarians suspect a misalignment between what students actually need to facilitate curricular research, what librarians think students need, and the librarian-curated tools created to meet those perceived needs. Specifically, academic librarians often create online, asynchronously accessible, research guides in order to aggregate relevant sources and outline research strategies.  

Unfortunately, two problems persist: 1) If created without a specific request, guides may not meet a real on-campus demand and 2) Even if these guides meet an expressed demand, they might not effectively address students/user needs due to confusing navigation, use of jargon, or other barriers. 

Following best practices outlined in user experience (UX) research, and expanding upon the body of existing literature on creating more navigable research guides, Washington and Lee University Library adopted a mixed-methods approach in order to identify actual user needs and the utility of existing locally-curated research guides. 

Unique to this study is the incorporation of a member of the primary user community as a co-investigator: an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college. Librarians' separation from the current undergraduate experience can serve as a barrier to fully identifying needs, as level of education, research experience, and pervasive library jargon creep into study design. Student collaboration throughout the study design process, from IRB proposal to data analysis, diminishes the likelihood of miscommunication between the investigators and the user population. 

This presentation will not only outline identified research needs and the utility of support tools at a specific institution, it sketches a student-centered methodology for user-experience that can be implemented elsewhere. Ensuring students know how to access research guidance and are receiving the support they actually need are integral to library efforts to ensure equity of access--solidifying the need to revisit long held assumptions and practices while researching research support.  

Recording: https://youtu.be/P_5uZgIuU4Q