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Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog » Blog Archive » Zotero Everywhere
News on more great stuff from Zotero today!

Zotero is THE tool for organizing my doctoral treatise. I use tags to organize my literature review (400+ citations, though some will clearly not make the cut as I continue to shape and refine my topic). I have notes attached to the citations. I've attached copies of the documents. I've backed up (citations to Zotero.org, contents to a network storage option). I've used folders to group citations as I've gathered resources, though now all of the sources still of relevance are going into one main folder. And of course I use the Word plug-in when I'm writing.

Items on my Zotero wishlist: vendors who stop breaking the translators, the ability to mass add a tag to a selection of citations, style-guide specific title case modifications (not just title case and lower case, but how about APA case?) - I know this would mess up proper names, but that's what happens with lower case now. At least an "APA case" would leave the first word and the first word following a colon in upper case so that I don't have to manually change that every time!

iOS 4.1 and my 3G

Thanks, Steve. I have an iPhone again. I ran the upgrade to iOS 4.1 last night (within a couple hours of release) and "presto!", my iPhone is behaving like a smartphone again: One (!) slide to unlock; quick response to touches on the screen, easy sliding between pages - the whole way, not just halfway to the next screen; and just all around snappiness. It was just in time, too. My daughter's Android phone arrives today, and I was beginning to think a droid was in my future. Maybe Steve has lured me back into the iPhone branch of his cult just a little bit longer...

Today's plan

It took me a couple days to get through the LibQUAL+ literature. Today I'm going to work on writing that section of my literature review. I did run across some interesting material which was critical of LibQUAL+ and the whole SERVQUAL/gaps model approach to measuring service quality. That will add a useful dimension to the lit review, but also gave me some additional, alternate project ideas.

In particular I liked the survey created by Einasto (2009), based on the SERVPERF model. SERVPERF uses a single measure, rather than the three-part SERVQUAL/LibQUAL+ model of acceptable level/perceived level/desired level. Eianasto used a single, 7-point Likert scale, but mapped each number to a point on a range that still incorporated the idea of user expectations (from 1 = "does not meet my expectations at all" to 7 = "corresponds to an entirely acceptable level").

Einasto, O. (2009). Using service quality monitoring to support library management decisions: A case study from Estonia. The International Information & Library Review, 41(1), 12-20. doi:10.1016/j.iilr.2008.08.001

Day 7 (already?)

The month seems to be flying by. I took Saturday off and did yard work and other things around the house. Over the rest of the long weekend I made some progress pulling together and beginning to sort through the literature on LibQUAL+. I had already looked at dissertations published that touch on the survey, but hadn't dug into the rest of the literature. Today I'm planning to finish reading through that literature (ambitious goal) and hopefully come out the other side with a schema for presenting that literature in a lit review. Kyrillidou (2009) has a VERY complete literature review. I'm planning for mine to be more focused, as the object of study is not the survey itself, as it was for Kyrillidou. I'll look more closely at how the literature deals with disciplinary differences (where it does), or at other LQ+ research that touches on either my proposed methodology or some other aspect of my particular interests.


Kyrillidou, M. (2009). Item sampling in service quality assessment surveys to improve response rates and reduce respondent burden: The "LibQUAL+ Lite" randomized control trial (RCT). University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, IL. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2142/14570

Day Three

Yesterday I made good progress on the section on library research related to "the faculty." I did find some research that dives into disciplinary differences a bit, but without any substantial theory. These studies tend to express disciplinary differences because a survey had different categories for faculty to assign themselves to. Today I need to write up this section.

I also started looking more exhaustively at existing studies that use LibQUAL+ data. I had explored dissertations (there are only a few), but yesterday did some searching in LibraryLit and Library, information science & technology abstracts. I hadn't realized what a weak database LibraryLit is. There are few abstracts, and the attached resources in WilsonSelectPlus  are terrible scans. I am also frustrated that the Zotero filters for the database (in FirstSearch) dump almost all of the data in a notes field. 

Day Two

Yesterday was productive, I think. It's been so long since I've made real progress on the treatise that it is hard to measure productivity. I managed to resist the allure of email until my 4 p.m. goal (though I heard it singing it's siren song about 3:40). I put together a stronger outline for my first chapter on my desktop, thanks to some Post-its. I also did a little editing of my most recent intro draft, too, based on my new outline.

The problem I'm having is that the ceiling fan doesn't seem to respect my "geek cave" - I may actually need to invest in some better sticky notes! (If you haven't seen the Post-it "man cave" commercial this won't make sense)

Today's goal is to attack another chunk of the intro. In particular I plan to work on the section about how academic librarians tend to conduct research about faculty (when we conduct research at all) at the macro, "the faculty" level, rather than at a more granular discipline or departmental level. I found a number of interesting articles about library/faculty relationships yesterday (Anthony, 2010; Christiansen, Stombler, & Thaxton, 2004; Ithaka, 2010; Kempcke, 2002; Kotter, 1999). All of them used "the faculty" as the unit of analysis, though some did mention the issue of disciplinary subcultures. 

Yesterday I also dug into the recent discussion and research on academic library "return on investment." Though not specifically on ROI, one gem of a paper I came across in the process (Gibson, 2009) talked about the "nascent" state of "research and development" operations within academic libraries. I highly recommend the piece, and plan to share it with whomever we hire for the newly-created position of Assistant Director for Research and Analysis.

Pardon the sloppy citations -- need to get back to the treatise work!

Anthony, K. (2010). Reconnecting the Disconnects: Library Outreach to Faculty as Addressed in the Literature. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 17(1), 79-92. doi:10.1080/10691310903584817 

Christiansen, L., Stombler, M., & Thaxton, L. (2004). A Report on Librarian-Faculty Relations from a Sociological Perspective. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 30(2), 116-121. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2004.01.003   

Ithaka : Faculty Survey 2009. (2010). Retrieved September 1, 2010, from http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/faculty-surveys-2000-2009/faculty-survey-2009 

Gibson, C. (2009). Playing on “practice fields”: Creating a research and development culture in academic libraries. In Pushing the edge: Explore, engage, extend (pp. 304-316). Presented at the ACRL 14th National Conference, Seattle, WA: Association of College and Research Libraries. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/events/national/seattle/papers/304.pdf

Kempcke, K. (2002). The Art of War for Librarians: Academic Culture, Curriculum Reform, and Wisdom from Sun Tzu. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 2(4), 529-551. doi:10.1353/pla.2002.0081 

Kotter, W. (1999). Bridging the great divide: Improving relations between librarians and classroom faculty. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 25(4), 294-303. 

Day One

Today I begin a one-month professional leave to draft my Ed.D. treatise proposal. I've nearly as absent from my treatise work as I have from this blog over the last several months. Now I have a luxury I've never had before - time away from work while in school. Granted, I have taken small chunks of vacation time to work on various projects. I have never, however, had 31 days at my disposal to focus on school work.

This leave is breaking some long (too long, I think) ground in our library system. Since we implemented the Academic Professional status about seven or eight years ago no one has applied for a professional leave. The professional leave option was written in as a substitute for a research leave/sabbatical, which is, of course, available to tenured faculty. We didn't want to lose the opportunity to focus on professional development along with the loss of the option of tenure for librarian. So I'm happy to turn over this sod, and also feel an added sense of obligation to make this endeavor produce results.

I have done some work over the last few months on the treatise. Most notably I've moved from planning a qualitative research methodology to a quantitative project. I always expected I would do a quantitative project until I got mired down in a path that led to lots of faculty interviews. I feel that my current trajectory of using existing data sets will be a better fit. I plan to use data from the Faculty Survey on Student Engagement (FSSE - pronounced "fessy"? "fussy"?) and LibQUAL+ (short "i" for those of us steeped in phonetics during our elementary days, long "i" for others) to explore disciplinary differences and local departmental culture.

Here I go...