Exploring current practices and Greek and Spanish academic library stakeholder perceptions towards reconceptualizing in-library use data collection ecosystem

Résumé

HE institutions are amid an ongoing transformation in how value is created and perceived instigated by the globalization and neoliberal market-driven accountability and reporting regimes, new technological developments’ impact on information creation, recording and use practices and new pedagogical approaches dictating non-linear interactions between students and institutions. This culture of innovation, premised upon the realization of the necessity to rethink university work and redesign structures and operations to better address the new graduate expectations and market new requirements, are also strongly affecting the academic library service and functions and has begun to impact its strategic vision and priorities. The more attention, student engagement, and institutional alignment are becoming HE administrators’ major concerns, the more curricular and co-curricular activity data acquire additional value to strategic planning and decision making on both an intra- and inter-institutional level. The lack of a systematic collection and capitalization of library use data, that is information about student creative workflows within library walls that could offer valuable contextual weight to both library resources, spaces, and services is seen nowadays as a major obstacle on the path from information literacy to library full integration in the educational process and librarian knowledge leadership on campus. In their attempt to redefine library operations around teaching and learning goals, forward-looking organizations around the globe are already considering from incremental to radical groundbreaking interventions linked to library use metrics and assessment practices. Their overarching aim is to definitely put an end to the uncertainty around operational effectiveness and library contributions to student success and retention. Among internationally most-discussed, academic library data capabilities related topics are the need 1. to parametrize their information services to match user expectations, 2. to find the right balance between professional standards, ethically and professionally correct behavior and institutional goals where patron data collection is concerned 3. to enhance data exchange operational co-ordination between university units 4. to explore ways to support not only librarians but also faculty and student involvement in the analytics realm from a functional, behavioral, informational and organizational perspective. This article-based thesis provides a lateral-thinking directed analysis and evaluation of the Greek and Spanish public academic library data collection and capitalization affordances and prospects. The project is founded on the idea of exploring the possibility of transforming the library into an intelligent organization recognizing the significance of detailed, high granularity, consistent and accurate operational and purpose-oriented user information to the development of effective resources and frameworks to support service personalization and proactive interventions. It is also based on multi-level mixed-model research findings collected between years 2016-2018 with the trifold aim of informing not only theory but also professional development and practice through the implementation of co-operative inquiry and participatory techniques. The study involved two levels of analysis: on the one hand, a contextualization of the academic library in terms of (a) library science programs’ adequacy to equipping new information professionals with the necessary skills and competences to cope with the emerging informational scenario, and (b) Greek and Spanish organizations’ position on the library evolution continuum that together form the foundational block of this creative research on which it has been made possible to establish the subsequent level and sublevels of analysis. The second level of analysis focuses the investigation of (a) the way the two low independence, low autonomy and over-regulated university contexts severely impacted by the economic crisis during the past decade perceive and prepare for a more consistent and systematic library data collection and capitalization within wider institutional learner data analytics schemas beyond traditional reporting practices and (b) librarian willingness and organizational readiness (including infrastructures, policies, culture, institutional support, and stakeholder buy-in) to push forward a paradigmatic change where library data capabilities are concerned. The project’s trifold aim was accomplished by adopting in a more open and nuanced way an epistemological combination, flexible and permeable enough to provide a better understanding of the research questions. The dynamic combination of desk research and sequential qualitative and quantitative methods (surveys, face-to-face, and email interviews, action research, seminars, participatory and co-creative techniques) to collect insights into the community’s perspective towards library data utility to student success and library data association with student success technologies, bringing students, librarians, library directors, library science students and learning analytics experts into the discussion, returned enough baseline data to blueprint challenges, dysfunctions, and considerations for an as yet unexplored research area. Offering a concise and reliable picture, thanks to the quadrangulation of the triangulation process, of the contexts in question, it has made possible the articulation of well-targeted recommendations including: 1. the proposal of a library-based middleware mobile application adding value to both data and personalized service provision and supporting the library consulting and mentoring identity 2. the development of a condensed reference checklist and resulting taxonomy of challenges, risks and requirements that library administrators should be aware of before becoming involved in campus analytics initiatives. Now that library evaluation is becoming more fundamental than ever as its effectiveness and efficiency are considered, under the impact of the new educational theories, an important asset for HE institutions in the international competition, this thesis through the compilation of 8 interrelated studies disseminated, supported and further complemented by an additional set of conference communications and papers, is contributing a new chapter to the Greek and Spanish public university library by identifying, recording, analyzing and reporting on : (a) system deficiencies, attitudes and perspectives that according to stakeholders seem to be sizing down library chances to adopt a new data collection and capitalization philosophy, (b) the need to reshape and revitalize the continuing professional development and official library science programs to inspire librarians to rethink their roles and mandates in the face of the changing circumstances, (c) the role of organizational support, radical collaborations across campus, professional associations’ involvement and stakeholder buy-in in advancing the academic library further into the analytics realm and, (d) the gamut of ethical concerns, privacy risks and practical considerations that should be mitigated so that libraries can reach their full potential in the service evaluation and metrics domain. Findings have gradually contributed to the design and delivery of a number of workshops and the design and development of a library-based IT-driven service, space and resources data collection model assistive to librarian new identity and student engagement and motivation. The work presented in this thesis aimed to stimulate the community’s reflection on the local environment’s potential to successfully address the analytics tsunami and at the same time to offer a value proposition tailor-made to the idiosyncrasies of the contexts under examination. Nevertheless, the host of decisions and resource and methodological limitations (e.g. non-probability sampling, quantitizing or numerical translation of qualitative research) of this first-time exploration of the community’s perspective around existing technological affordances and libraries’ data collection prospects underpin the need to conduct further studies in the future with a larger and more diverse sample size to achieve more accurate analyses and a larger degree of generalizability.