Learn about preliminary results of research undertaken to answer the question how have the Core Competencies for Electronic Resource Librarians, adopted in July 2013 by NASIG, affected the qualifications for and responsibilities of electronic resources librarians as they are depicted in job ads posted between 2012 and 2014.
1. (How) Have the Core Competencies
for Electronic Resources Librarians
Influenced the Position?
ER&L, February 23, 2015 Sarah W. Sutton
ssutton3@emporia.edu
@sarahwws
4. Research in progress
(How) Have the Core Competencies for
Electronic Resources Librarians influenced the
position?
5. Research in progress
(How) Have the Core Competencies for
Electronic Resources Librarians influenced the
position?
(How) Have responsibilities and qualifications
for electronic resources librarians changed over
time?
7. Hartnett’s findings
Responsibilities increasingly
found in job ads:
• acquisitions
• budgeting
• licensing
• link resolvers
• web scale discovery
systems
• ERMS
• authentication & proxy
• usage statistics
Responsibilities decreasingly
found in job ads:
• cataloging,
• general technical services
and systems-related
responsibilities
• use of and experience
with databases
• web site development
• staff training
• bibliographic instruction
• reference
8. Research in progress: Job ads 2010-
2014
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Numberofadscodedwitheachresponsibility
Year
Change in job responsibilities over time: 2010 - 2014
Acquisitions
ERM
Licensing
Link Resolver
Usage Data
Web-Scale Discovery
Website Editing*
Reference*
Cataloging*
Training*
9. Research in progress: Job ads 2010-
2014
Responsibility Sources
E-Resources Management 668
Acquisitions 434
Supervision 415
Vendor Relations 359
Usage Data 344
Trends & Developments 343
Professional Service 340
Licensing 313
Website Editing 291
Leadership 278
10. Research in progress
Factors other than the CCERLs affecting trends:
– Advances in technology
– Additions or reductions in other positions’ and/or
responsibilities
– Source of ads
• What about public libraries?
• Expanding the pool of sources
11. References
Hartnett, E. (2014). NASIG’s Core Competencies for Electronic
Resources Librarians Revisited: An analysis of job advertisement
trends, 2000–2012. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 40(3-4),
247–258. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2014.03.013
NASIG Core Competencies Task Force. (2013). Core competencies
for electronic resources librarians. NASIG. Retrieved from
http://www.nasig.org/uploaded_files/92/files/CoreComp/Compet
enciesforERLibrarians_final_ver_2013-7-22.docx
Sutton, S. (2011, May). Identifying Core Competencies for
Electronic Resources Librarians in the Twenty-First Century Library.
Texas Woman’s University, Denton, TX.
12. (How) Have the Core Competencies
for Electronic Resources Librarians
Influenced the Position?
ER&L, February 23, 2015 Sarah W. Sutton
ssutton3@emporia.edu
@sarahwws
Editor's Notes
Good afternoon everyone, I’m so pleased to be here today to update you on my on-going research on competencies for electronic resources librarians. I’m so sorry to not be there in person, as some of you might know, a few weeks ago in Chicago I fell down some steps and broke my ankle. I’m grateful to the conference organizers for taking the trouble to arrange for me to present to you remotely.
What I hope to accomplish in about 10 minutes is this: a brief explanation of the background of the Core Competencies for Electronic Resources Librarians and ERL competencies in general, a brief explanation of how my research questions have been developing and the research that has influenced that development, and finally I want to share with you some preliminary results of my current research and some of the new questions that it has generated.
I started researching competencies, in the form of responsibilities of and qualifications, for ERL jobs back in 2008 and 2009. That initial research resulted in a skeletal list of competencies which are described in my dissertation. In 2011 NASIG invited me to chair a task force that was charged with fleshing out the competencies that emerged from my dissertation research. The task force wrote a policy document which NASIG subsequently adopted in 2013. Most recently, Eric Hartnett of Texas A&M University has expanded on the electronic resources competencies research by examining job ads for ERLS all the way back to 2000 in order to reveal longer term trends. He published his results last summer in the Journal of Academic Librarianship.
When I wrote the abstract for this presentation last fall the question I was considering was this one. But as I dug deeper, I realized that this is a very complicated question that simply conducting a content analysis of job ads was not going to answer fully. In fact, it has a bit of a which came first aspect to it in that in the initial research it was job ads informing the creation of the competencies and now it’s, potentially, competencies informing the job ads.
Learn about preliminary results of research undertaken to answer the question how have the Core Competencies for Electronic Resource Librarians, adopted in July 2013 by NASIG, affected the qualifications for and responsibilities of electronic resources librarians as they are depicted in job ads posted between 2012 and 2014.
At any rate, I realized that I needed to simplify things to start out and so, using Eric Hartnett’s research as a jumping off point I revised my question to have the responsibilities and qualifications for ERLs changed over time, and if they have, how have they changed. Now that IS a question the answer to which we can explore by examining job ads.
In his 2014 paper, Hartnett published a comparison of the frequency with which a set of job responsibilities appeared in ERL job ads to the frequency with which the qualifications related to those responsibilities were sought. For example, this illustration from his paper shows that between 2000 and 2012, there was an increase in the number ERL job ads that described positions as having responsibility for budgeting while at the same time, in those same ads, experience in and knowledge of budgeting processes was increasingly a required qualification for the position.
My own current research entails a content analysis of ERL job ads from 2010 to 2014. I’ve collected over 700 ads (although there is still some duplication) and begun to examine the responsibilities of ERL positions described in these ads. My initial purpose is to compare any trends that appear to those that Hartnett’s study revealed. His study indicated that the responsibilities that were increasingly appearing ERL job as were acquiring, implementing, and evaluating electronic resources while those that were decreasingly appearing ERL job ads were, for the most part, more general responsibilities of librarians in academic libraries.
In this chart you can see that my results suggest increases in almost all of the areas of responsibility that Hartnett examined. Some of the increases are greater than others, and those roughly correspond to the responsibilities that Hartnett found to be decreasing: Cataloging, Reference, and staff training. It’s worth my repeating here that these are preliminary results of my research. I’ve selected to present here the responsibilities revealed in my analysis that initially appear related to Hartnett's and some additional refining of my categories of responsibilities is needed. Also, as I’ve mentions, the job ads I’m using are not entirely DE duplicated so the trends in this chart may be slightly exaggerated.
Here are the 10 responsibilities that appear in the job ads I’m analyzing. The sources column indicates the number of ads in which each responsibility appeared. Again they seem to correspond in general to Hartnett’s in that they are most are specific to electronic resources (ER management, acquisitions, vendor relations, usage data, and licensing) and/or to a position above entry-level in an academic library (supervision, leadership, keeping up with trends and developments in the field and ongoing service to the institution and/or the profession.
As is often the case with research, mine has caused me to think about my data and my research questions in ways that didn’t occur to me at the start of the project. For example, in both my original job ads research and in this new project, I’m beginning to wonder how the results might be confounded by external forces such as advancing technology. For example, I imagine that not many of the job ads from the early 2000s contained responsibilities or qualifications related to web-scale discovery. In the data I’m seeing an increase in that category but it seems more plausible that that particular trend is more influenced by the increase in the use of that technology. Other trends in responsibilities and qualifications over time could be influenced by trends in the responsibilities and/or work load of other librarians.
And interestingly, in this most recent round of job ads I’m seeing more and more ads for ERL positions in libraries other than academic libraries. This caused me to question the pool of sources from which I’ve been collecting job ads which are heavily weighted toward academic libraries. Just this spring I’ve begun to seek out additional sources of ERL job ads, ones that are more likely to contain ads for positions in other types of libraries. The increasing number of ads for ERL positions in public libraries has me beginning to wonder who is managing e-resources in other types of libraries, and in turn, to wonder whether we ought not to expand the pool of sources in which we are searching for job ads to analyze.
Well, that seems like as good a place as any to stop. I’d be happy to answer questions.
Good afternoon everyone, I’m so pleased to be here today to update you on my on-going research on competencies for electronic resources librarians. I’m so sorry to not be there in person, as some of you might know, a few weeks ago in Chicago I fell down some steps and broke my ankle. I’m grateful to the conference organizers for taking the trouble to arrange for me to present to you remotely.