30 · Survey Results: Survey Questions And Responses
CORRELATION OF LIBRARY USE AND USERS’ RESEARCH OUTPUT AND/OR OTHER MEASURE
OF SUCCESS
21. Has your library studied or has plans to study any correlation of library use and users’ research
output and/or other measure of success (such as publications, grants, etc.) as shown in the matrix
below? N=55
Yes, we have studied this correlation within the past three years 1 2%
Yes, we plan to study this correlation within the next 12 months 3 5%
No, we have not studied and have no plans to study this correlation 51 93%
22. If your library has studied this correlation within the last three years, how many studies have been
conducted? N=1
Number of studies: 1
Comments
Plan to study this correlation
Cornell and Columbia are just starting a grant project with funding from CLIR and the Delmas Foundation, the main
goals of which are to determine the kinds of services and support our libraries can provide to address attrition and
completion rates for PhD students in the humanities and to propose possible Library intervention strategies to improve
those rates. Cornell’s Graduate School and Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Science are providing additional
support. A pilot project will involve focus groups with Cornell and Columbia’s humanities students in all stages of
their PhD work, as well as recent graduates. Interviewers will then develop a questionnaire based on information
from the focus groups and administer it to 20 to 25 students from 3 or 4 departments at each institution. Both the
focus groups and the interviews will include follow-up print surveys. At the end of the process, the project hopes to
have answered the following questions: at what points in their programs are graduate students in the humanities
particularly vulnerable? how does regular use of library services and collections impact attrition and completion rates?
what library services could be envisioned as part of an intervention strategy to improve these trends? How would such
intervention be measured? and how can the library re-conceive its physical space to provide graduate students from
across disciplines with an intellectual sense of community? The assessment will be completed by March 2011. If the
project findings suggest the libraries can positively influence humanities doctoral work, the project will formulate the
components and implementation time line for a graduate student preparatory program at both institutions.
The Assessment CF team will be proposing strategies to study this correlation. However, the specifics have not been
determined yet.
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