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Category: Project

Description: From the perspective of academic librarians, enterprise level academic research in science, engineering, technology, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines can seem like an inscrutable black box: grant funding enters on one end, and peer-reviewed publications emerge from the other. In an attempt to become more directly involved in this process, academic librarians have tried many different methods of outreach to researchers. The literature provides many such examples, ranging from developing innovative services that support faculty research to providing curriculum integrated information literacy training to students to help mold future scholars. However, many of these outreach strategies nevertheless place librarians in passive roles, in which they must wait for invitations from disciplinary faculty to collaborate on conducting research projects or designing student assignments. While subject liaison models of librarianship that emphasize outreach have shifted some librarians into more active roles that aim to impact the entirety of the research lifecycle, the efficacy of this model can be limited by the physical, technical, and cultural barriers that separate researchers from librarians. In an attempt to demystify the enterprise research process and to test the efficacy of a novel model of faculty engagement, a group of science librarians embedded themselves into research groups at their institution by attending lab meetings. While this initiative was conceived as a means of supporting faculty research and encouraging team science, this project has revealed that important student learning occurs during the course of routine lab meetings. Consequently, the preliminary results of this project suggest that attending research group meetings enables librarians to deliver point-of-need research support and to provide instructional services in an authentic context that highlights the utility of information literacy skills to faculty and students alike. We suggest that lab-integrated services present the opportunity for librarians to support the research enterprise as well as the teaching mission of their institutions simultaneously; these findings will challenge the prevailing view within academic libraries that research support for faculty and information literacy instruction for students are separate and distinct library services. While novel in an academic research setting, this model of outreach shares features with the clinical informationist model, which has been implemented in healthcare settings as a method of facilitating evidence-based practice. Based on previous studies that have evaluated the efficacy of clinical informationists, this pilot project uses ethnographic methods to capture the activities of research groups and will use the data generated to explore how librarians can impact their user communities through this method of engagement. This project record provides access to ethnographic instruments we designed for this project, as well as papers, presentations, and posters that have resulted from this work.