A discussion of user needs in anthropology and ways in which academic liaison librarians could support the lifecycle of qualitative research in a holistic way.

1. The liaison librarian:
connecting with the
qualitative research
lifecycle
Celia Emmelhainz
July 9, 2015

2. - what we think we do –
traditional library responsibilities in
collections, instruction, and outreach

3. - first encounters –
the need for someone to guide us in
a new research environment

4. - key informants –
people who can point you to resources,
ideas, or people for your research

5. - a new place –
faculty and students in a new campus or
new project may need the librarian as ‘key
informant’

6. Masters in anthropology /
fieldwork in W. Mongolia

7. Masters in library science /
fieldwork in Kazakhstan

8. User Needs in
Anthropology

9. Undergraduates

10. • Orient themselves with Wikipedia and Google
(Colon-Aguirre & Fleming-May 2012)
• Use some resources well and miss others
entirely (Cheney 1971)
• Seek friends before consulting librarians
(Fleming-May & Yuro 2009)
• Perceived challenge is figuring out what the
professors want (Leibiger 2011)
Undergraduates…

11. “First, I discuss it with my friends,
maybe ask them, what is the
relationship between these two?
And when I come to the internet…
some people are sharing what
they think about it.” – Anel,
Kazakh student

12. “Sometimes we find information
but we don’t know how to absorb
it, how to analyze it. We get a lot
of tables—numbers, numbers,
numbers, but… this kind of stuff is
difficult to analyze” – Nursultan,
Kazakh student

13. “[Students] don’t know how to
use library resources, don’t
know how to differentiate
sources.” – James, US
anthropologist

14. “You would need to rebrand the
librarians as experts in particular
areas… research coaches…
students can really benefit from a
librarian who helps them think.” –
Nathan, ethnographer in
Kazakhstan

15. Graduate students

16. • Seek faculty & fellow students before
librarians (Harrington 2009)
• Struggle with trying to read it all (Harrington
2009)
• Skip references that are hard to access
(Kayongo & Helm 2010)
• Prefer to use remote-access (Kayongo & Helm
2010)
• Need help with using datasets and
government docs (Gibbs et al 2012)
• Focus on publication & getting grants
(Harrington 2009)
Graduate Students…

17. ”Researchers today are buried,
we can’t keep up with the
important research… and we fall
back on reading only the few top
journals in our field or articles by
authors we know.” – Allie, anthro
graduate student

18. ”Honestly, when I consulted our
area librarian, did not find the
resources helpful. . . I used the
libraries only as a source for
obtaining books and articles and
help with EndNote” – Graciela,
anthro grad student

19. ”For linguistic anthropologists,
more than coding software,
training on using transcription
software would be helpful.” –
Mark, anthro grad student

20. Changing skillsets

21. Internationals:
Crossing Library
Cultures

22. “Interlibrary services was very
helpful. It especially helped me
when I need books from other
libraries.” — Ji-eun, Korean
graduate student in the US

23. “I was never taught formally how to use
the library resources, so I didn’t know
about their search methods... I tried to
[seek] help from the rest of my group,
especially the native student.” – Ryan,
US student abroad

24. “The catalog is a bit complicated, so
librarians helped a lot, with book
search, with periodicals...” – Sauat,
Kazakh graduate student in the US

25. Faculty

26. • Anthropologists seek ‘comparative, foreign,
rare’ resources (Bachand 2013)
• Anthropologists make broad use of field data,
pictures, maps (Hartmann 1995)
• Consult colleagues and bibliographies;
librarians not a primary source of information
(Folster 1995)
• Use peer feedback quite heavily at all stages
of the research lifecycle (Shen 2013)
Social Science faculty…

27. “I use librarians for the classical
stuff - searches of arcane material
and obtaining copies of otherwise
rare sources.” - Mike, R1
anthropology professor

28. “I was just talking to a friend the
other day about how the way we
use libraries has changed so
much… we never physically go
there, but we do rely on the
librarians quite a bit.” – Malika, R1
anthropology professor

29. “One thing that comes up in
promotion is how to document
impact… one of the librarians
helped me [use] PlumX to capture
internet citations… and put my
published work in the campus
archive” – Sarah, R1 anthropology
professor

30. “We experimented with digitizing... field
notes [into] a fully digital qualitative
database... storing them on… a 3.5
inch floppy disk... Now, 13 years later,
we have a shoebox of 3.5 inch disks
with files saved in 1990s proprietary
software.” – Lisa Cliggett (2013), R1
anthropologist

31. - defining our role
- speaking to the gaps

32. Finding Ethnographic Data

33. Browsing and RSS Alerts

34. Coding Qualitative Data

35. Visualizing Qualitative Data

36. Visualizing Qualitative Data (2)
http://www.r-bloggers.com/words-in-politics-some-extensions-of-the-word-cloud

37. Self-Archiving in an IR

38. Altmetrics & Citation Tracking

39. Guide for Qualitative Archiving

40. Setting Metadata Standards

41. - where we go from here -
- embedding in networks
- connecting newcomers
- observing user needs
- guiding in new skillsets

42. Questions/
Discussion

43. Selected Sources
• Cliggett, L (2013). Qualitative Data Archiving in the Digital Age: Strategies for Data
Preservation and Sharing. The Qualitative Report, 18, 1-11.
• Emmelhainz, C (2014). Controlled vocabulary standards for anthropological datasets.
International Journal of Digital Curation, 9(1): 185-192.
• Emmelhainz, C (2015). Supporting the expatriate social scientist: Faculty research and
information access in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Journal of Librarianship and Information
Science, 1-13. doi: 10.1177/0961000615591651
• Fellows, I (2012). Words in politics: some extensions of the word cloud. R-bloggers,
http://www.r-bloggers.com/words-in-politics-some-extensions-of-the-word-cloud/,
accessed 5 July 2015.
• Hart Research Assoc. (2012) Attitudes toward re-envisioning the UC Berkeley Library,
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/AboutLibrary/Hart_Survey_Report_Re-
Envisioning_UC_Berkeley_Library.pdf
• Luning S (2013). Anthropologists in the company of gatekeepers. Blog post for Leiden
Anthropology, http://www.leidenanthropologyblog.nl/articles/anthropologists-in-the-
company-of-gatekeepers, accessed 5 July 2015.
• Rigby, M (in press). You and Your User Community, in Anthropology Librarianship, edited
volume in press.
• UC Berkeley (2013) Report of the Commission on the Future of the UC Berkeley Library,
October 2013.
http://evcp.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/FINAL_CFUCBL_report_10.16.13.pdf,
accessed 3 July 2015.

44. Image Sources
1. What we can do: Prof. Felix Chami of Dar es Salaam,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelgallagher/5599807571/
2. A new place: Starr East Asian Library, by Wally Gobetz,
www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/6977670271/
3. First encounters: Anthropologist at work, by Ken Anderson,
www.flickr.com/photos/kenanderson/2769205164
4. Fieldwork and research photos by author,
www.flickr.com/photos/meadowsaffron/8144260436
5. Word cloud from: Fellows, I (2012). Words in politics: some extensions of
the word cloud. R-bloggers, http://www.r-bloggers.com/words-in-politics-
some-extensions-of-the-word-cloud/, accessed 5 July 2015.
6. Screenshots by author.