But the nagging question is how much interests it will draw from the target audience, that is, academics.  Librarians often worry about marketing and outreach. But there is also the undeniable fact that researchers like to do their research themselves.  Also, they tend to think that they already know what the best way of going about doing their own research.

Once I was told by a colleague that ILL requests are highly confidential because that may reveal what a researcher is currently working on. That is, nobody wants to be scooped in their research.

I often thought that the promotion guidelines for academic librarians in a faculty system should be changed to put less emphasis on traditional paper publishing and more on services and activities that vitalizes library services and the profession. Perhaps, should something similar take place for academic faculty?  There is no doubt that Web 2.0 technologies open up great possibilities for facilitating and promoting more fresh research agendas.

“Scholarly publishing 2.0 offers much more to the research process than the simple content management system of blogs and wikis. It does not just give the opportunity to help find collaborators for a project, and possibility of easing the communication process within a research group. It also offers the opportunity to publish new forms of data and can blur the barriers of the research group. The traditional research paper has obvious limitations in terms of the type of information that can be conveyed. It is not just video and audio that are unsuitable for the paper format, but also the huge amounts of data that may be collected in the research process. The open data movement is about sharing as much of the data as possible, while the open notebook science movement is about sharing as much of the whole primary record as possible. Both of these are focused on enabling others to use the mass of information behind a journal article to inform further research. The web also offers new opportunities for more open peer review, widening the opportunity for those who want to provide and receive feedback on research.”

Photo from: http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/attachments/month_0908/385045_1_wCtIMwnz5I5Z.jpg

But academics have been quite slow in adopting Web 2.0 technologies. Much of it can be blamed on the over-emphasis on the traditional research paper in academia.

“Academics worry as much about being scooped and not getting credit for their work as the potential for slipping standards in scholarship.”

There should be a way to give credit to academics who try an alternative way of scholarly publishing such as blogs, wikis, etc.  Ideas only get better through feedback and open discussion.  Publishing traditional research papers can’t be the only means to contribute to scholarship.  On the other hand, researchers should know that like in any other groups, if you won’t share with others, others’ won’t share with you.

Also, think about the amount of work that goes into writing up one small research paper.  There is a long literature search process.  Large sets of data are often compiled.  Interesting but not necessarily relevant papers are discovered, read, and then set aside.  If these pre-research work can be shared among scholars, how much more effective can research be?

Now, what kind of systems can help us to store, organize, and share such pre-research work?  It is a fertile ground for research.

But, really, what would be the internal –and not external such as promotion criteria and job title– difference between faculty librarians and staff librarians? One may naturally assume that librarians who are faculty will be expected to spend more time on scholarship and research while librarians who are staff may focus more on daily library services. But is it really the case? Not many librarians in a faculty position actually can afford time for research and scholarship except outside their normal work hours and the weekends. Taking a sabbatical for research would be a rare luxury.

Although it is a nice thing for a librarian to be given a faculty status, there is a big difference between an academic librarian’s daily activities and those of a usual teaching faculty member. Not every librarian teaches regularly; no academic faculty is expected to provide services like what a library offers on a daily basis.

For librarians classified as non-tenure-track faculty, there is even a stronger inconsistency between their everyday work and what is expected of them. While there is no tenure issue that may justify spending time on research/scholarly activities, as faculty they are still expected to engage in some level of research/scholarly activities while performing all other library service-related duties.  It is problematic that while librarians are expected to spend most of their time on providing library services, research and scholarship may function as a more important criteria for evaluation and promotion later on.

On the other hand, there is a strong component of research in every librarian’s work. Particularly these days, librarians are expected to keep up with changing technologies and to be innovative in planning and executing both traditional and new library services. This requires a significant amount of research. But if you are a librarian classified as staff, your research activities may not be properly recognized and rewarded.

So we have problems in our hands. Should librarians focus on traditional scholarly activities such as writing research papers? Or should they rather invest more of their time on researching on and implementing new services and programs? Should librarians be given more time for continuing education and research? Or are librarians to be clearly distinguished from academic faculty because of the nature of each group’s daily work is significantly different?

In his recent article in Library Journal, “the Value of Innovation: New Criteria for Library Scholarship” Eric Schnell, Associate Professor/Librarian of Prior Health Sciences Library of Ohio State University argues that academic libraries need to create rewards systems based on the unique attributes of our field as well as individual departmental goals and needs and that recognition and achievement must be measured using criteria that both value the activities of academic librarians as they exists today and are flexible enough to adapt to future changes.

I think it is a high time to resolve the inconsistency between what academic librarians do on a daily basis and the criteria by which those librarians are rewarded, recognized, and promoted. And it should begin with admitting that academic librarianship is quite different from other areas of scholarship. Academic librarianship involves the continuous development of new customer services and the refinement of internal processes, as Schnell correctly points out. Furthermore, the continuous development of new customer services relates to many different areas such as metadata, collections, web services, systems, reference, and instruction.

The traditional model for faculty activity—teaching, scholarship, and service— is not a basis upon which librarians’ activities and academic librarianship can be properly evaluated, measured, recognized, and rewarded. We need to find a way to reward librarians who work differently and appropriately in the fields of their choice so that they can prosper no matter how they choose to pursue and develop their academic librarianship. We need a definition of academic librarianship that would represent well what successful librarians do most of their time, not what they may do during the weekends or outside the work hours in order to meet the promotion criteria.

The session was designed for those librarians who are new at research and publishing in LIS journals.  In order to promote participation in discussion, the presentations were given verbally with/without a handout in a small room.  Partially, this was because of the lack of funding for discussion groups.  But the informal setting and a small number of people around the table made the session much more informative and interesting to both presenters and attendees.  The session provided a wonderful opportunity to gather practical tips and to find encouragement. (In addition, I really loved the fact that in a discussion group there are no committees, no annual membership dues, no officers, and no formality.)

The session consisted of three 10-minute presentations and discussion.

• Writing to Write: Kickstarting the Publication Process by Emily Drabinski
• Best Practices for Beginners: Getting Published-From Inspiration to Publication by Lisa Carlucci Thomas & Karen Sobel
• Targeting Teaching Faculty for Collaborative Publications by Linda Hofschire

Here are a few take-aways from the session I wrote down:

• To get movitated, use deadlines, generate good ideas, write them down right away, set aside time to write–get up 30 min. early everyday.
• To become good at writing, write everyday a certain amount in whatever form.
• To overcome the fear of being published, begin with book reviews and conference proposals and look out for call for proposals.
• To find topics to write, look at research papers and check out the topics for further study.
• Network and collaborate with other colleagues.
• Try to incorporate research into daily work duties sucah as instruction, digitizing, cataloging, etc.
• You can use data sets used for other research.
• Bear in mind the tension between topics of your interests and topics that are more easily published.
• Work with teaching faculty and suggest writing a certain section of a paper such as research method if you gathered and analyzed data.
• Have a particular journal in mind.
• Don’t despair if rejected. Revise and send to a different journal.