Lab-Integrated Librarians: Engagement with Unreachable Researchers

Subject liaison librarians are working at the crossroads of the practical and emerging needs of researchers, seeking to connect with them throughout the research life-cycle rather than at the beginning when literature reviews are conducted or at the end when a scholarly publication emerges. In STEM disciplines, where research is oftentimes conducted in secure lab facilities, engagement is particularly challenging. In 2016, librarians at North Carolina State University embarked on a project to overcome this difficulty by joining selected research groups and attending regular lab meetings. This paper’s findings will suggest that lab-integrated services present the opportunity to support the research enterprise as well as the teaching mission of universities simultaneously, and will challenge the notion of research support for faculty and information literacy instruction for students as separate and distinct library services. The paper will close with a discussion of the lessons learned from this pilot project and a discussion of the long-term sustainability of this type of program. Institutional Context North Carolina State University (NC State) is a land grant university located in Raleigh. NC State has approximately 34,000 students enrolled across twelve colleges representing all major academic fields of study. Part of the 16-campus University of North Carolina (UNC) System, NC State is the flagship institution for STEM teaching and research in the UNC System. The College of Engineering is thus one of the larger colleges at NC State, with over 10,000 students. Between 1984 and 1987, NC State acquired a 1,000-acre tract of land to expand upon, and created a master plan for this new campus, which was named the Centennial Campus in honor of the 100 anniversary of the University. Centennial Campus is one mile from NC State’s historic main campus and is home to academic departments and centers, as well as a growing number of corporate and government partners. Two colleges have relocated to Centennial Campus – the College of Textiles moved to Centennial Campus in 1991, and the College of Engineering began moving its many departments and centers in 1989, and continues to this day. At present, the engineering move is about 75% complete. Library support at NC State is fairly centralized for a university of its size, with two major research library buildings (one on the historic main campus and one on Centennial Campus) and three small branch libraries. The library on Centennial Campus, the James B. Hunt Jr. Library, is a recent addition to the University, opening in 2013. Thus, for most of its existence, Centennial Campus had no central library and NC State has never had a dedicated library for engineering students and faculty. Evolution of a Service Model In 1998, subject librarians for engineering and textiles began to work on a model for delivering library services to engineering – a large, diverse community without a library, that was (and still is) located on two different campuses, and that has been slowly but steadily relocating from the main campus to Centennial Campus every few years as new buildings have been constructed. This model would also address differences in engineering curriculum and research practices that tend to reduce engineer’s use of and reliance on libraries compared with other disciplines. The resulting service model was: • engagementcentered to show engineers the value proposition that libraries bring to their teaching and research as well as to provide the opportunity for continuous learning about these users’ needs; • locationindependent with librarians traveling to where the users were and where no service was tied to a specific location or service point; • responsive to the unique information needs of engineers; • strategic in approaching outreach to this large and diverse community of users as well as the management of liaison librarians’ responsibilities. For example, our three librarian unit shares responsibilities to provide coverage at the College level for engineering and textiles, rather than serving specific departments. This service model was implemented in 1999-2000 and continues to the present day. In more recent years, opportunities have developed to collaborate with researchers at multiple points in the research life cycle, particularly as they find, collect, manage, and communicate large sets of data. These opportunities represent a promising new approach to engagement that fits with the existing service model. One obstacle exists, however: that most of our researchers work in lab environments that are inaccessible to outsiders. Even for those that don’t work in secure labs, the interactions between a principle investigator (PI) and his/her students occur in a setting librarians do not typically have access to; in order to continue to develop services that meaningfully support engineering and textiles researchers, it was necessary to get behind the “closed doors” of the research lab. Literature Review Engineers’ reticent use of libraries has received a thorough examination throughout the literature. In previous studies, students from STEM disciplines consistently report lower usage of libraries than students from the humanities and social sciences, and Tenopir suggests that engineers who do use libraries are reluctant to ask for assistance when looking for information. While Chang and Eskridge suggest that engineers during their undergraduate and graduate training are inducted into a culture of non-library use by their instructors and faculty mentors, even among engineers that make use of the libraries, physical visits and direct interaction with librarians have dwindled since the ascension of easy to use full-text search engines. Hemminger et al. found that as early as 2007, the wide availability of electronic resources had transformed the information seeking behaviors of academic scientists, who increasingly reported nearly exclusive use of web-based resources and fewer visits to physical libraries; Niu et al. corroborated these findings via a nationwide survey in 2010. While the proliferation of online resources may have exacerbated non-use of libraries by engineers, concerns about STEM students’ use of the library and faculty members’ perceptions of the library has attracted the attention of librarians for decades. As early as 1979, Davis and Bentley suggested that librarians could form meaningful relationships with disciplinary science faculty and improve perceptions of librarians by getting involved “in the teaching process” and through “attendance at departmental meetings.” In the subsequent decades, engineering librarians have taken that advice; the literature abounds with examples of engineering librarians impacting the engineering curriculum through partnerships with engineering faculty. But while engineering librarians have made remarkable gains in shaping the education of engineers by integrating information literacy into engineering curriculums, meeting with students a handful of times in a lecture setting cannot overcome the dominant culture of library non-use that exists within engineering disciplines. Likewise, meeting with faculty members once or twice a year through attendance at department meetings or instruction planning sessions will not transform faculty information seeking behavior, either. The literature enumerates numerous additional reasons that engineers may not use physical libraries, ranging from the practical (having to travel some distance compared to the convenience of remotely accessing online resources) to the psychological (the phenomenon of library anxiety). To overcome this, the scholarly record reflects numerous innovative efforts by STEM liaison librarians to reach these hermetic students and researchers. Previous initiatives recorded in the literature include reorganizing staffing at service points to provide subject specialists with more time for advanced research questions, revamping libraries’ web presence to make subject specialists more visible, launching satellite reference services within academic buildings, creating workshops and services that cater to the needs of STEM students and faculty throughout the research lifecycle, as well as developing fun extra-curricular programming to encourage STEM students and researchers to visit the physical library. While getting engineers into the library remains a challenge, studies continue to confirm that graduate students and faculty in science and engineering frequently use online library resources, and Soria determined that undergraduate students conducting research or pursuing careers in science, technology, or health affairs were more likely than their peers to view having access to a world-class library as important to their success. Consequently, we suspect that engineers’ and scientists’ low use of physical libraries does not reflect a lack of information needs; rather, we hypothesize that these low usage rates indicate that physical libraries do not integrate well with the work flows of engineers in the academy. To overcome this challenge, one possible service model that engineering libraries can look to for inspiration is that of the clinical medical librarian or informationist, which health science and medical libraries have used for decades in order to meet the information needs of clinicians and other health care workers. The role of the informationist arose as a response to the increasingly challenging problem of making “the critical link between the huge body of information hidden away in the medical literature and the information needed at the point of care,” or what became known as the “literature-practice gap.” To help bridge this gap, librarians began accompanying clinical teams during rounds. While these services started with humble “evidence carts,” the effectiveness of this service has increased with digital resource access, and studies have shown that making evide