Undergraduate Research Librarian

As is common at smaller libraries, my title only describes part of my job. I and my new colleagues at my first professional situation wear many hats over the course of our working day, and the next day may exchange those hats for different ones. But of all the hats I wear, this is the one I find most personally intriguing, perhaps because I’m still not sure of its shape, or even what it looks like.

Doing one’s own research, versus completing an assignment derived from a class curriculum, requires a sophisticated command of information literacy skills. While students performing research at the undergraduate level may have more curricular, library, and even faculty support and assistance than graduate students, they are still required to formulate their own topics, do their own background reading, synthesize their own ideas, and write their own reports. Librarians can help at each stage of the process, but our task is necessarily more specialized than when teaching instructional sessions geared toward class assignments. Just as undergraduate research is intended to culminate and synthesize what students have learned in their courses, information literacy tailored to undergraduate research must not consist merely of a review of basic skills. Rather, it should build on and extend them, providing the maximum benefit to the student.

Undergraduate research

Undergraduate research programs are not new, though they seem to be gaining in popularity. The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR), an umbrella organization for institutions engaging in undergraduate research programs across the United States, was founded in 1978, and within the past decade has increased its institutional membership ninefold (CUR website, August 2, 2005). Many of its members are universities like mine, small, private, without the massive funding available to larger universities. Complementing CUR is the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), primarily concerned with staging events at which undergraduate researchers can present their work.

Despite the growing popularity of undergraduate research programs, there is a dearth of literature about how libraries and librarians can support such programs. For institutions that are already research-oriented, little change may be necessary. However, many of the schools at which these programs have been established are not traditionally research-oriented. In addition, the research needs of undergraduates are arguably different enough from those of graduate students to require special consideration.

The programs themselves vary from institution to institution, but may take one or more key forms. One of these is a capstone project in the student’s major, which at PLU is completed during the student’s final semester. Capstone projects are formulated by the student with advice and approval from a faculty mentor, and by their nature require the student to do background research in the subject area.

Summer research is another form of undergraduate research program. At PLU, students in the summer research program work closely with faculty and one or two fellow students on original research projects. They may assist faculty members with their research, or work on projects of their own. These students are more likely to be provided research literature by faculty mentors, but may need to do additional independent reading.

In addition to these projects, upper-division students may have course assignments geared toward preparing them to complete their capstones. While not part of the undergraduate research program per se, these projects may require specialized assistance and instruction from librarians.

The information needs of these students and the assistance they require may well be unique in form, if not in nature. As upper-division students, many of them have already had basic instruction in library skills and information literacy. However, as undergraduates, they do not yet have expert familiarity with the literature of their field, nor the advanced level of access to the journals, professional organizations, and conferences that help confer that expertise. Their access to the literature is still chiefly through the library, and the tools the library provides for searching and browsing. In “Desperately seeking citations: Uncovering faculty assumptions about the undergraduate research process,” Gloria J. Leckie underlined some of the problems these students encounter, particularly when faculty expect research expertise from students who have yet to develop it (1996).

Library support of undergraduate research

PLU’s library collection and services have traditionally supported the university curriculum. This is not unusual for an undergraduate or mostly undergraduate institution, particularly a smaller one, but it does mean that as the undergraduate research program becomes part of the institutional culture, adjustments will be required.

A traditionally non-research-oriented institution will be limited in the number of resources it can provide, and even large universities are forced to pick and choose among resources due to expense. This heightens the importance of librarians ourselves as resources, who can help students wring the most meaningful information possible out of the databases, journals, and monographs that we do own or have access to. In addition, the PLU library has made fast, efficient interlibrary loan service a priority, and taken advantage of the lower costs and greater access afforded by consortial membership.

It is in reference and instruction, however, that our key support of undergraduate research may be achieved. These students require advanced information literacy skills that build on their basic understanding of database searching and critical evaluation of the results. So far, I have found that while these students are fast searchers and quick evaluators of results, they are often unaware of the more sophisticated features of a research database, such as the use of controlled vocabularies, the ability to restrict searches to specific types of literature or resource availability (such as review articles, or documents available directly through the PLU library), and the use of citation chaining in finding additional resources, particularly on narrow topics. My personal experience also reflects that of Leckie, as well as Huerta and McMillan (2004), in that students are often stymied at the outset by the problem of topic selection.

A possible danger is that these students will equate computer literacy with information literacy. Having mastered the basics of searching and acquired a familiarity with the interface, they may feel that they already know everything they need to know. Students with passable searching skills have been shown to turn to familiar measures when they encounter difficulties with more sophisticated resources and techniques (Brown, Murphy, and Nanny, 2003). Therefore, the advantage and relevance of advanced skills must be demonstrated. Students may not realize that the ability to distill a valid topic from the research literature is also an information literacy skill, one that may depend more on knowing where, what, and when to browse than on one’s ability to construct a sophisticated search.

Another instructional model might be called discussion-based. A discussion session with a faculty mentor and roughly a dozen students in a research seminar earlier this fall proved to be an interesting and potentially very constructive way of tailoring library support. With the professor’s encouragement, students asked direct questions about how to improve their literature searches, as well as more service-oriented questions such as how to deal with network outages and glitches in subscription databases and ILL delivery. This arrangement placed the students on more equal footing with the librarian, and allowed them to take direct control of their information needs.

This is also an example of a librarian going to the patrons, rather than the other way around. PLU’s campus is geographically divided into two distinct areas, its library located in a corner of the campus distant from some classroom buildings. In addition to going to the seminar meeting to talk with the students, I also walk to lower campus twice a week with a laptop to provide reference service to students and faculty there, a practice begun by my predecessor at PLU. While this serves the needs of the student population as a whole, not only students engaged in undergraduate research, it also puts a librarian physically closer to the students at their point of information need.

Participatory instruction sessions, particularly including structured opportunities for students to work on their chosen topics or to ask specific questions in a supportive environment, may be helpful, as they were in the case study cited above. However, as budding expert researchers, these students will soon discover—if they haven’t already—the iterative nature of the literature review process. One-on-one consultancy sessions with individual students may be more fruitful, particularly since different students are likely to be at different stages of their projects, depending on the discipline, the student’s preparedness, and the amount of library research required. These sessions are also closer to what they’ll encounter in the professional world if they continue as researchers.

These individual appointments go by many names at many institutions. My favorite term is the personalized research consultation (gleaned along with other names from Cardwell, Furlong, and O’Keeffe, 2001). Cardwell, et al describe three institutions that use a formal process for scheduling research consultations with students. PLU’s process is less formal, but the applications of a consultation model to a student research program are obvious: not only can such consultations be tailored to individual student projects, but they take a form that we hope to encourage in the worlds of academic and corporate research. Obviously, this is the most time-consuming of the three models, but it may be the most effective means of assisting students beyond the classroom. Collaboration with faculty, which has often been championed in literature on information literacy in academic libraries, can help ensure the best use of the student’s and the librarian’s time, especially in cases where the librarian co-teaches the course (Huerta and McMillan, 2004).

These are obviously only the first steps in exploring this issue, slight adaptations from existing practice on a campus that already has a strong tradition of faculty-librarian collaboration and a library that sees heavy student use. The dearth of research literature on library support of undergraduate research suggests that this is an area which deserves systematic investigation, particularly if the trend toward widespread implementation of undergraduate student research programs continues.

Genevieve Williams is a librarian at Pacific Lutheran University.

Brown, Cecelia, Murphy, Teri J., and Nanny, Mark. (2003). Turning techno-savvy into info-savvy: Authentically integrating information literacy into the college curriculum. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 29, 6, 386-398.

Cardwell, Catherine, Furlong, Katherine, and O’Keeffe, Julie. (2001). My librarian: Personalized research clinics and the academic library. Research Strategies, 18, 97-111.

Council on Undergraduate Research. (2005). CUR website. Retrieved October 18, 2005 from http://www.cur.org.

Huerta, Deborah, and McMillan, Victoria. (2004). Reflections on collaborative teaching of science information literacy and science writing: Plans, processes and pratfalls. Resource Sharing & Information Networks, 17, 1/2, 19-28.

Leckie, Gloria J. (1996). Desperately seeking citations: Uncovering faculty assumptions about the undergraduate research process. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 22, 3, 201-208.

National Conferences on Undergraduate Research. (2005). NCUR website. Retrieved October 19, 2005 from http://www.ncur.org.