Qualitative Research in Academic Libraries

Our springtime of presentations continued this month, and we presented on June 6th at the first ever library assessment conference — Reinventing Libraries, Reinventing Assessment — sponsored by CUNY’s Office of Library Services and held at Baruch College. We were delighted to be sharing a session with our frequent collaborator Donna Lanclos from UNC Charlotte. Donna spoke about the value of qualitative research in academic libraries generally as well as the work she does as library ethnographer at UNC Charlotte, and we spoke about the work we’ve done learning more about how CUNY students use (or don’t use) their libraries.

I threw together a quick storify of the whole session after the conference, though it’s perhaps a bit heavier on tweets from our presentation than Donna’s (because I’m not as good at livetweeting a session I’m in as Donna is). And there’s a great writeup of the conference in Library Journal that includes a discussion of our session. We’ve posted our slides and notes from the presentation here and on the Results and Findings page.