A Library of Apps - American Library Association...A Library of Apps Gabriela Castro Gessner, Erin Eldermire, Neely Tang, and Kornelia Tancheva* Introduction Academic libraries have

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The Research Lifecycle and the Future of Research Libraries:A Library of Apps Gabriela Castro Gessner, Erin Eldermire, Neely Tang, and Kornelia Tancheva*

IntroductionAcademic libraries have traditionally supported the research lifecycle, a term that describes the cyclical research process—from idea to implementation to dissemination and back to idea. The role of the library in this process has typically been concentrated in two aspects of the research lifecycle, specifically, the acquisition of materials (via purchasing or borrowing agreements), and the search for information (via teaching, reference, or finding sources to support researchers), often with a special emphasis on teaching students to locate reliable information sources. Yet, does “search” for information equal “research”?

Stamatoplos1 notes that many academic librarians tend to “equate student research with processes of infor-mation searching.” Genuine research experiences, he continues, “entail real hands-on experience in research conception, design, conduct, and dissemination and make inherent contributions to a discipline.” In other words, research is about much more than finding and evaluating knowledge sources, the traditional focus of information-literacy initiatives. Research is about asking questions, about synthesizing ideas, and about creative problem solving. These are the skills of research that are also valued by employers. Clearly, being able to assess the quality of the information one has on hand is a necessary skill, but this skill alone is insufficient to justify the existence of today’s academic library. Instead of focusing on this relatively narrow facet of research, academic libraries should provide services at multiple stages of the research lifecycle. In fact, the research lifecycle ought to drive the library’s response to the question, “what should we do?”

Vaughan et al.2 parsed out the research lifecycle into five general areas and elaborated on library services that support those areas, such as the library’s traditional role in finding literature to assist the development of ideas; learning about grant seeking tools; preparing data managements plans for grant proposals; managing citations during the process of conducting research; and depositing research output in repositories (table 1).

Although Vaughan et al.,3 involved forty-four librarians in identifying services in relation to the research lifecycle, their list does not include certain aspects of the research lifecycle that researchers regularly engage in, such as thinking (what we call brainwork below), note-taking and writing for publication. This comes as no surprise, as one would be hard pressed to find examples of library services or programs that cater to these less tangible aspects of the research lifecycle. But why hasn’t the library traditionally been involved in these prac-

* Gabriela Castro Gessner is Research and Assessment Analyst at Cornell University Library, [email protected]; Erin Eldermire is Head, Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library at Cornell University Library, [email protected]; Neely Tang is Off-Site Public Services Librarian at Cornell University Library, [email protected]; Kornelia Tancheva is As-sociate University Librarian for Research and Learning Services at Cornell University Library, [email protected].

mailto:[email protected]




tices? Is it because there is no role for the library in these components of the research lifecycle? Or is this an area that needs exploration?

To address these questions, our team asked researchers at Cornell University, from undergraduates to senior faculty, to log their activities and whereabouts for a day of research, after which we interviewed them. This paper describes our findings as they relate to the research lifecycle and proposes a vision for the library of the future that takes into account current research practices of dedicated researchers.

Project DescriptionWe conducted 21 in-person interviews with “serious researchers” at Cornell University in the spring of 2015. We defined “serious researchers” as those individuals who were actively engaged in research at the time of the study. We expected faculty to be engaged in research activities by default; we screened graduate students by asking whether their own research was underway at the time of the study, and undergraduates had to be involved in the production of their own honors thesis. Interviewees included nine faculty members, nine graduate students, and three undergraduate students from Anthropology, Biomedical/Veterinary Sciences, English, Government, History, Information Science, Latin American Studies, Management, and Natural Resources (table 2).

A team member met with each interviewee for a 15-minute introductory session, during which they ex-plained the purpose of the study and gave the interviewee a map and a form on which to record their move-ments and activities for their research day. Follow-up interviews were, in most cases, scheduled the day im-mediately following the recording day; in a few cases, two days separated the recording day and the interview day. Two team members conducted each interview, either in the library or another agreed-upon location. The interviews were recorded and transcribed.

Interview transcripts were coded using a schema that was developed by the research team working with Nancy Fried Foster, anthropologist with Ithaka S+R. Further details on the process for developing the coding

TABLE 1Stages of the research life cycle and supporting library services

Research Lifecycle Stage

Idea Development

Funding Proposal Conducting Disseminating

Library Services Find sources Find funding sources

Prepare data management plan

Manage citations

Select journals

Adapted and modified from Vaughan et al., 2013.

TABLE 2Participant researcher distribution

Humanities Social Sciences Sciences Total

Groups M F M F M F

Faculty (senior) 1 1 1 3Faculty (junior) 1 1 1 1 2 6Graduate students 1 2 3 2 1 9Undergraduate students 2 1 3Total 2 6 2 5 2 4 21

ACRL 2017 • AT THE HELM: LEADING TRANSFORMATION

Gabriela Castro Gessner, Erin Eldermire, Neely Tang, and Kornelia Tancheva534

schema can be found in Tancheva et al.4 Research activities and allied concepts were categorized into nine codes as illustrated in table 3 below.

Each transcript was manually coded by two independent coders, and where coding differences occurred, we agreed to retain rather than discard codes. When coding was complete, we scanned the coded manuscripts and each member re-read all the transcripts to review or apply assigned codes to ensure consistency and sum-marized the results.

In the fall of 2016 for the purposes of this paper, we used coding software (MaxQDA 12) to review our pre-viously assigned codes and re-analyzed the transcripts, tallying code frequencies both in the aggregate and by participant groups. Since our interests were in exploring research activities beyond those traditionally supported by libraries, we focused our attention on only five of the original nine codes: academic activities, brainwork, seeking information, self-management/discipline and technology.

Findings and DiscussionThe complete findings of the original study are detailed in Tancheva et al.5 The most important , and most per-tinent to the research cycle and the role of academic libraries in it, among them include the distinction between research and search, the interrupted and yet continuous nature of research and of search(ing), the ubiquity and flexibility of technology, and the self-management practices invoked by all researchers to accomplish their work.

In our interviews, we found that research is simultaneously linear, in its overarching goal from idea to manuscript; and chaotic, as researchers constantly negotiate tasks and move from one activity to another.

TABLE 3Thematic codes and related research activities and concepts

Code Name Subcodes, related activities and concepts

Academic activities* • note-taking • writing (including production, editing, formatting, etc.)• managing information (including storing and organizing information)• field- and/or lab-work

Brainwork* • thinking and sensemaking, (understand, translate, figure out, etc.)

Circum-academic activities

• networking (conferences, hall-way conversations, lunches, etc.)• use of social media for academic purposes

Library Resources • Use of library resources online• Use of library resources physically (in building, books, print, etc.)

Obstacles • interruptions in academic/research work• problems and their workarounds

Seeking information*

• information seeking for academic purposes• information seeking for non-academic purposes (weather, cooking,

entertainment, etc.)• reading

Self-discipline / Self-management*

• Tactics employed to manage researchers’ own habits (going paperless, turning devices off, etc.)

Space • Work environment—location, setup, noise, space, etc.

Technology* • presence or absence of• hardware• software

Note: * denotes codes discussed in this paper.

MARCH 22–25, 2017 • BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

The Research Lifecycle and the Future of Research Libraries 535

Our interviews revealed not only that researchers distinguish between search and research, but that they are constantly engaged in a fluid and non-linear mix of search, research, and marginally related academic activities.

Adapting Vaughan’s et al.6 model as in table 4 below, the practices of researchers summarized into five codes can easily be distributed over the entire research lifecycle. This helps to convey the linearity of research and also where similar activities fit different goals. What is not conveyed is that similar activities, such as note-taking, for example, enjoy different degrees of intensity or focus depending on the researcher’s goals, which may explain the idiosyncratic practices and constant task negotiation that researchers referred to in their interviews.

In what follows, we detail in depth the five activities gleaned from our participants and aim to unpack the research process into distinct behavioral practices that may help us develop customizable library services that support researchers in most, if not all, aspects of the research lifecycle. Although our sample was small and it is difficult to draw conclusions about differences in the research processes of undergraduate students, graduate stu-dents, and junior and senior faculty, we did look for variations based on the professional stage our interviewees were in. Our main focus fell on the overall population, however, and in the aggregate, activity distribution was highest for academic activities and lowest for brainwork (fig. 1).

Academic ActivitiesAcademic activities refer to the activities in the pursuit of scholarly endeavors related to research and the pro-duction of knowledge, and not surprisingly, was the most frequently activity described. These activities encom-

TABLE 4Areas of the research life cycle, supporting library services (Vaughan et al.’s stages at top), and

research activities of serious researchers (authors’ codes below gray band)

Research Lifecycle

Stage

Idea Development

Funding Proposal Conducting Disseminating

Source: (Vaughan

et al)

Library Services

Find sources Find funding sources

Prepare data management plan

Manage citations

Select journals

Codes Research ActivitiesAcademic Activities

note-takingmanaging informationwriting

note-takingmanaging information

managing informationwriting

note-takingmanaging informationwritingfield-/lab-work

managing informationwriting

Source: this research

Brainwork (B) B B B B B

Seeking Information (SI)

SI SI SI SI SI

Self-discipline (SD)

SD SD SD SD SD

Technology T T T T T



pass note-taking, writing, managing information and conducting field- or lab-work, and are generally difficult to extricate from specific research goals since they spill into many aspects of the research process. In the course of our interviews, participants exemplified these fuzzy lines by talking about academic activities in the course of engaging in all these tasks, as stated by this faculty member:

…. then I stopped for a little bit, and I read the articles that I had printed. And then I sort of started to formulate, like, an outline of what I would want to talk about in the presentation. And I kind of went back and forth between reading the articles and sort of making notes about how I wanted to structure the lecture. (Junior Faculty, sciences).

Differences in code frequencies among groups are not significant since group size varies between three and nine participants, but overall, it’s evident that for all four groups (undergraduate, graduate, junior faculty, senior faculty), managing information and writing were the two activities they engaged in the most (n=316 and n=259, respectively; table 5). Within groups, senior faculty seem more or less to be balancing both writing and managing information, while junior faculty spent more time writing than managing information. Graduate stu-dents, our largest participant group, spent almost equal time writing and taking notes, but occupied more time in information management activities, as did undergraduates. Differences between groups could be based on stage in their academic life or in their research goal. It is worth noting that information management activities go beyond the use of citation software, but include practices that allowed participants to handle information in various ways, such as choosing not to print articles or saving items in temporary storage for later consumption. In other words, managing information is broader than traditionally defined for current library services.

FIGURE 1Research activities by their frequency from 21 interviews

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AcademicActivities

SeekingInformation

Technology Self-Discipline Brainwork

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Research Activities by Code



Seeking Information Although activities deemed as seeking information were categorized separately from other academic activities, such as writing or managing information, they are an integral component of any academic endeavor as exempli-fied by the high frequencies for both the academic activities and seeking information categories. Coding these tasks separately was, in some ways, a library-centric approach, since librarians not only organize knowledge and provide discovery systems to support scholarly activities, but provide online and physical access to the research materials used.

The acts or tasks of seeking information included discovery and acquisition of information related to aca-demic activities, such as finding articles, images, data sets and/or citations in support of research and knowledge production by way of search engines, library catalogs, databases or experts in a particular field (e.g. in person, via email or via list serves). An effort was made to distinguish seeking information in the pursuit of academic activi-ties from those used in non-academic endeavors, such as consulting sources about the weather, shopping, enter-tainment or food websites. The almost constant activity of checking email or catching up on social media (twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) was coded as academic or non-academic depending on the context provided by par-ticipants, such as, for example, whether they utilized twitter or Facebook primarily for academic reasons or not:

…then I open the email, and then I open Safari and then there’s Facebook. So I turn it off and I kept working just on the hard copy, no distractions until 11:50 when I turn the phone back on because I wanted to use the thesaurus app to look up different types of words. (Undergraduate student, humanities)

In specific instances, where it was clear that these information seeking activities were in pursuit of allied academic activities, such as contacting publishers, organizing conferences or engaging with other scholars, the activities were coded as circum-academic activities.

Since participants were explicitly asked to pick a day of research for recording research activities, it is not surprising that seeking information related to academic endeavors (n=469) has a higher frequency than non-academic (n=368) information seeking behaviors. What may be surprising, however, is that information seeking for non-academic activities follows closely in code frequency. This underscores a theme that emerged from our

TABLE 5Code frequencies for academic activities for all participants

Academic Activities

Group Non-specific

Note-Taking Managing Information

Writing Field-/Lab-Work

Faculty (senior) 8 15 44 36 5

Faculty (junior) 30 48 68 96 13

Graduate students 36 97 159 95 12

Undergraduate students

58 34 45 32 23

Total 132 194 316 259 53

Note: We calculated averages for all code frequencies based on the numbers of participants per group, but the averages do not significantly change the ratios, except in a few instances and only minimally. For clarity and continuity we show and discuss frequencies in tables and charts and throughout the paper.



interviews that information seeking activities are fluid and researchers engage in finding information on a vari-ety of things throughout the day, both academic and non-academic, even when it is an intentionally dedicated research day. In fact, to some degree it helps explain the number of self-monitoring practices that all researchers tapped into to keep them focused on their intended goals for research (see section under Self-Discipline).

TechnologyThe use of technology is inescapable and permeates everything researchers do. In our interviews, technology applied broadly to the use of hardware (phones, computers, tablets, etc.), software (Zotero, GIS, LaTex, etc.), social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc), online spaces and websites (Library, Google, Pandora, Netflix, NY Times, etc.), as well as the deliberate use of more traditional technological tools, such as pencils, notebooks, post-its, planners, etc.

Technology in all its forms is both an enabler and a dis-rupter. As an enabler in the research process it allows research to take place outside of library walls and outside of campus—where research, in essence, becomes portable. Thus the academ-ic activities of seeking information, note-taking, writing and managing information are literally located all in one space—a connected device—facilitating the ability to multi-task, whether in practice or in theory. In fact, when our interviewees referred to multitasking, they often couched it in terms of technological enabling or disruption:

I’m sure that it started on Twitter and then that I like read an article, and then found myself click-ing on something else, and then all of a sudden it was 12:00, and I was like, Oh. (Junior faculty, humanities).

Interestingly enough, constant connectivity afforded by technology provides a sense of linearity in the re-search process since scholars can stop and resume where they left off regardless of where they are located in space. They can begin searching for an article using a computer at home, bookmark an article via Twitter in their phones on the bus, and complete the search process on campus by obtaining research materials (articles, books, images) delivered to their computers or offices. Connectivity and rapid switching between tasks, information, tools and applications were nearly universal.

TABLE 6 Code frequencies for seeking information for all participants

Seeking Information

Group Non-specific Academic Non-Academic

Faculty (senior) 5 71 40

Faculty (junior) 23 104 118

Graduate students 69 220 146

Undergraduate students 16 74 64

Total 113 469 368

TABLE 7Code frequencies for technology for

all participants

Group Frequency

Faculty (senior) 68

Faculty (junior) 219

Graduate students 368

Undergraduate students 122

Total 777



In terms of writing, multiple interviewees reported favoring specific software because of its formatting or organizing capabilities (LaTeX and Scrivener, for example), and many mentioned moving away from Microsoft Word. In spite of the benefits researchers perceive in their personal software choices, these choices sometimes incur a cost in terms of effort when it comes to reformatting content in order to work with others, as this gradu-ate student in the humanities explained:

When I’m ready for it to be pretty, I will compile directly from Scrivener into a Rich Text file, and then convert it to Word, and then do final formatting. […]they say everything plays better if you compile it for a Rich Text file, and then open the RTF in Word and re-save it as a DOC file. (Graduate Student, humanities)

Our research found that there is rarely any one application or system that is adequate for the tasks at hand, for all team members. Instead, researchers often use a combination of multiple systems that they know will work best for them and/or their collaborators.

Self-DisciplineIn an interesting way, technology and self-discipline are intricately connected. We heard ample evidence of the disruption that technology makes possible simply by being available, to the point where many scholars actively sought to discipline themselves in the use of technology for non-academic purposes during active research time. But we also heard how scholars employ technology itself to curb their behavior or help them exercise self-control and not wander away from academic activities. The need to discipline their focus led to our development of a code to document those instances of self-management.

The focus on managing activities was not only for the duration of short-term tasks, such as not checking email while writing or reading an article, but also as a means to help researchers maintain a separation between their professional and personal lives. The strategies employed varied tremendously depending on need and re-search objective, as illustrated by the comments below. All researchers engage in practices to direct their focus to their intended goal, but graduate students seem to employ far more techniques for self-control than other researchers (table 8).

…notification comes to my Gmail address, which I don’t check during the day because I don’t want interruptions from my personal life when I’m trying to work (Junior Faculty, social sciences)

I go there into my research space on the sixth floor and I just breathe or write. It’s a very good hid-ing place and I need hiding places,” (Junior Faculty, humanities)

I have a lot of notebooks, sometimes that’s what gets me inspired to write, to like start writing if I’m in a slump is to get like a new [LAUGH] a new notebook, or like a new pen, like a nice gel pen or something. (Graduate Student, humanities)

So I started using that [Kanban—time management tool] at 11:15 when I started my editing task for my friend at another school and I marked my usual focused chunk as a 25-minute chunk, but I frequently work over that to finish some task before clicking, yes, I’ll take a break now. (Graduate Student, humanities)



BrainworkOne of the most intangible aspects of the scholarly re-search cycle is the act of thinking and reasoning. Much of it is assumed, taken for granted, or simply expected as part and parcel of being an academic in a research university. But thinking, understanding, making sense, processing, synthesizing and developing new ideas pervades all or most of the research activities in which scholars engage. In our analytical coding process we aimed to capture the instances in which scholars men-tioned or in the course of their conversations conveyed

aspects of thinking, although we recognize that in doing so, we effectively underrepresented this in our analysis. Nonetheless, by acknowledging its existence and recognizing it as an important activity we may be able to pin-point areas of potential support not usually considered.

In comparison to all coded segments, brainwork was significantly underrepresented relative to other codes. All groups talked about thinking in some form or another, but most talked about thinking in relation to seeking information for academic related activities. This was the case for all groups, except for junior faculty, who ap-parently talked more about thinking in relation to writing. And unlike other groups, as was mentioned earlier, junior faculty were the only group that engaged more in writing academic activities than other groups.

Some additional observations about potential dif-ferences between researchers depending on their ca-reer stage include the fact that in conducting academic activities, graduate students tend to spend more time managing information, while activities in search of materials (seeking information), junior faculty appear to spend more time than other groups. While the rea-sons for these differences would perhaps not be evident in our interviews, coupled with the findings of the id-iosyncratic search process and that of technological flexibility, they clearly point to the need to customize services in support of the research cycle.

Finally, it is worthwhile looking at some of the code frequencies (and their sub-codes) for specific activities encompassed in thematic codes, not in the aggregate, but separately, as illustrated in fig. 2.

The fact that the three top code frequencies are technology, seeking academic information and seeking non-academic information dovetails very well with one of our original study’s findings, i.e. the ongoing uninterrupt-ed flow of seeking information underpinned by technology. While the fact that technology defines the research process will not come as a surprise, our interviews uncovered that the proliferation of technologies results in heightened value for personal choices that work for the person, in the particular context, for the particular task at hand, and the choices vary and are continuously adapted and updated as new technologies appear.

Our interviews found that the uninterrupted flow of seeking information and the entanglement of academic and non-academic information seeking both contribute to a reality that research is not a discrete process that can neatly fit in a step-by-step process. On the contrary, research is fluid, constant, and idiosyncratic.

TABLE 8Code frequencies for self-discipline for all

participants

Group Self-discipline/Self-management

Faculty (senior) 13

Faculty (junior) 111



Total 315

TABLE 9Code frequencies for brainwork for all

participants

Group Brainwork

Faculty (senior) 9

Faculty (junior) 48



Total 137



ConclusionOur project underscored that research begins everywhere. People are connected, both to each other and to the world around them, in an environment that is growing more dynamic every day. Due to this information ubiq-uity and constant connectivity, the research life cycle has more ports of entry than it once did. Technological flexibility and portability allows different aspects of research to be carried out in a variety of media and become amalgamated into the preferred workflow of each researcher and their desired objective. No less important are the blurred lines between tools for professional academic needs and administrative tasks and personal life, such as email, Twitter, and time-management tools, to name a few. How can libraries support these emerging and evolving research practices?

As librarians, we understand the research lifecycle and we already provide services to support aspects of it, as outlined by Vaughan et al.,7 but the complexity is in the increasingly idiosyncratic and individual research processes. Stamatoplos8 proposed that libraries should provide services at multiple points along the research lifecycle; we agree, and suggest that libraries provide customizable services. Libraries play an important role in facilitating discovery and access to information. As our interviews underscored, the evolution of technology has both enhanced and challenged researchers in these two arenas. Our data and analysis support the creation of a library of apps to meet the challenges of researchers working in an ever-changing digital and technological environment. We need to help make the information in our library systems usable in our digital world by con-necting our various resources to the software and hardware that our researchers use to perform their brainwork. Libraries are in a unique position to advocate for our patrons and negotiate interoperability between end user technology and our database and information vendors, and should.

Though we cannot make our library catalogs everything to everyone, we can help to customize it to the needs of the individual researcher by providing them with apps that would make their research process easier. Researchers spend a lot of time creating workarounds or expending tremendous efforts searching efficiently, taking notes, and organizing their data. One avenue for this is for researchers to approach library developers and create applications that would optimize our library systems for the researcher’s work flow or help connect personal chosen technologies to library systems in a more seamless manner. Such applications could benefit the researcher by saving time or adding value. Some examples of applications that might be developed would be mapping and visualization applications applied to personal collections housed within the researcher’s custom-

FIGURE 2Total code frequencies for codes and sub-codes from high to low from all participants

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259194

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ized catalog experience. These easy to use applications could support brainwork by providing a different view of the work the researcher has amassed within the library’s customized website. The goal would be to create a personalized library that would support the researcher’s unique work style and needs. To make customization a possibility, the library will need to work with vendors to allow more flexible access to their product in a manner that will not infringe on their aims.

We believe libraries play an essential role in the research lifecycle beyond material acquisitions and search aid. Our interviews demonstrated the idiosyncratic, interrupted and fluid nature of research, underscoring the need for a similar solution since one size does not fit all. Though searching for information for both academic and non-academic materials were the most common activities our researchers performed, it was facilitated and supported by technology, often in support of the other aspects of the research lifecycle, such as managing infor-mation, writing, note-taking, brainwork, and field- or lab-work. If research is the currency by which universities are recognized, do libraries not have a responsibility to support the research process as it relates to our core ac-tivities? The budget, workforce, and technology investments will be substantial, but our observations provide us with some guidance on how to effectively direct these investments for the research library of the future.

Notes1. Stamatoplos, A. “The Role of Academic Libraries in Mentored Undergraduate Research: A Model of Engagement in the Academic

Community.” College & Research Libraries 70, 3 (2009): 236. doi:10.5860/crl.70.3.2352. Vaughan, K.T.L., B. E. Hayes, R.C. Lerner, K.R. McElfresh, L. Pavlech, D. Romito, L.H. Reeves, and E. N. Morris. “Develop-

ment of the Research Lifecycle model for Library Services.” Journal of Medical Library Association 101, 4 (2013): 312, figure 1. doi: 10.3163/1536-5050.101.4.013

3. Ibid.4. Tancheva, Kornelia, G. Castro Gessner, N. Tang, E. Eldermire, H. Furnas, D. Branchini, and G. Steinhart, “A Day in the Life of a

(Serious) Researcher. Envisioning the Future of the Research Library,” Ithaka S+R, (March 8, 2016), http://www.sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/SR_Report_Day_in_the_Life_Researcher030816.pdf

5. Ibid.6. Vaughan et al.7. Ibid.8. Stamatoplos



http://10.5860/crl

http://www.sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/SR_Report_Day_in_the_Life_Researcher030816.pdf

http://www.sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/SR_Report_Day_in_the_Life_Researcher030816.pdf

Documents

A Library of Apps - American Library Association...A Library of Apps Gabriela Castro Gessner, Erin Eldermire, Neely Tang, and Kornelia Tancheva* Introduction Academic libraries have