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.

CUNY Students’ Technology Stories

We were delighted to present at yesterday’s Teaching & Technology Conference at Baruch College — many thanks to the always awesome Luke Waltzer for inviting us. The other sessions we went to were terrific: I think I will always want to begin a conference morning with pipe cleaners and paper folding, the Baruch students’ who presented were wonderful, and Jim Groom’s keynote was both fun and thought-provoking, an ideal combination (and we appreciate his complementary words about our presentation, too).

We decided to do something a little different this time around and really focus in on individual students, highlighting their experiences with using technology for their academic work as technology stories. We’re happy to share our slides and notes from the presentation — take a look and let us know what you think.