Article Review #2

Ashley Smith

October 7, 2011

Article #2

Bell, S., & Sarr, N. (2010). Case study: Re-engineering an institutional repository to engage users. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 16(S1), 77-89. doi:10.1080/13614533.2010.509517

Introduction

Institutional repositories (IRs) provide a digital medium in which faculty and graduate students can preserve and disseminate their scholarly work with relative ease.  In 2003, the Libraries at the University of Rochester launched UR Research, an IR initiative that was mostly ignored by the academic community.  To figure out how to obtain academic buy-in of the IR, the Libraries conducted two work-practice studies that focused on the work habits of faculty and graduate students to determine how to redesign an IR that could easily be incorporated into their work flow.  I chose to critique this article because I’m interested in learning about the kinds of features that make an IR attractive to its users.

Problem Statement

The authors focus their research study on how to design an IR that will that complement the work needs of faculty and graduate students.

Literature Review

There is no literature review in the article; however, there is a note section at the end of the article which refers the reader to a literature review written by different authors in a different journal article. 

Method

The researchers designed and conducted two separate work-practice studies on two segments of the academic community, faculty and graduate students, to discover how they use digital technology to do research and disseminate their scholarly materials.  These segments came from diverse academic disciplines: humanities and social and physical sciences.  The researchers videotaped one-hour observations and followed up with phone and group interviews. 

After they finished gathering data from their field work, the researchers transcribed the videotaped observations and interviews and analyzed their findings.  Work-practice studies have their roots in anthropology, and the researchers analyzed the data through a combination of anthropological means and a creative process. 

Caveat

I had a few problems with this article.  First, the authors didn’t discuss or summarize the salient points of their methodology in this article.  Instead, they referred the reader to two previous articles that described the University of Rochester work-practice studies.  I had to read those other articles to gain more in-depth information on the research methodology.  Another problem was how the authors gave little detail of how they analyzed the data.  Despite several readings, I’m still unclear on what exactly it means to analyze data by anthropological means combined with a creative process.  The researchers don’t provide further information about this particular kind analysis, and that raises concerns about the research study’s validity and reliability.  My last problem was the lack of a literature review in the article.  It would be helpful to have some context of how the researchers decided to apply work-practice studies in their research on adapting IRs to better suit faculty and graduate students’ work needs.

References

Foster, N.F. & Gibbons, S. (2005).  Understanding faculty to improve content recruitment for institutional repositories. D-Lib Magazine, 11(1).  Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Randall, R., Smith, J., Clark, K. & Foster, N.F. (2008).  The next generation of academics: A report on a study conducted at the University of Rochester. Retrieved from the University of Rochester, UR Research website: https://urresearch.rochester.edu/institutionalPublicationPublicView.action;jsessionid=C6C1FBA84936017FBC34F70A0EA70C06?institutionalItemId=5600&versionNumber=1