Researching librarians

In my library school, Research Methods is a required course--I took it in the spring. It is acknowledged, by the teachers of the course, that this is not really enough of a research course for those of us who want to do research, become tenured academic librarians or doctoral candidates--the latter will get more as they go along. It is, possibly, too much of a research course for library students destined to become school librarians or public librarians.

There are statistics involved. The math-phobic among us fret about Research Methods from the instant they first hear the words "statistics" (usually within the first few weeks of starting library school, if not before), right through the several weeks of statistics instruction.

We don't learn a lot of statistics, of course, in just a few weeks with no prerequisite. The point seems to be to learn just enough that the student develops a healthy skepticism of statistics--just because there are numbers involved doesn't make it true. With good will or ill, not everything published in a peer-reviewed journal is correct.

Some library students, I think, find this class so traumatic that they never read another professional journal again. There might be statistics involved. And, besides, they learned that you can't trust it anyway. Is that really the take-away message we want to give?

Don't we want to teach future librarians that library literature is wonderful? That it can provide a fast track to evidence-based librarianship, because someone else has already provided the evidence? That it can be a way to connect with librarians who have spent a lot of time and energy considering an issue that interests me? That I might also be able to contribute something to library literature someday?

If I were queen of a library school, here's what I would do. I would have a required course called Library Literature. In that class, we would read tons of journal articles--mostly good, a few bad to teach that healthy skepticism. The final project would be to come up with the initial idea for a research project and to do the literature review for it.

Then, I would have another class where library students actually do a small, possibly publishable if it works well, research project. All academic librarian wannabes would be encouraged, or required, to take the course, as would future LIS Ph.Ds. I would also encourage any student who came up with a good research project and literature review to take this class as well--we need more school librarians and public librarians doing research.

For the second class, I would have a basic knowledge of statistics as a prerequisite. I would probably be flexible on how this was met, but the ideal would be to take a college-level statistics course from a really great math teacher within a year or two of going to library school--that's what I wish I had done and, given the opportunity, I may yet.     #

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