Introduction
Understanding user needs is at the core of many outreach efforts. As Northeastern's research interests grew, the library wanted to better understand how it would need to adapt to support the needs of the University’s research enterprise. Liaisons frequently reach faculty and students due to the strong connections between liaisons and faculty and the frequency with which public facing staff meet and work with students.
We wanted to pursue exploring support for a less often reached, but still vital, group of people: research support staff. Postdocs, lab managers and technicians, and research scientists are on the front lines of research and still need resource and information literacy support. Upon discussion and reflection, we realized that our categories of outreach privileged faculty and students, and that this third population of research support staff may have specific needs that were unidentified or that we were not meeting.
Methods
We planned a survey of three colleges in which liaisons had interacted regularly with researchers, regardless of if they were faculty or research staff: College of Health Sciences, College of Engineering, and College of Science. We co-wrote a 14-question survey and used Qualtrics to create the survey. Our questions focused on the respondents’ college affiliation, common job tasks in their current role, how they interacted with the library in the last year, and questions ranking future support options. Full survey is available in Appendix 1.
After writing our survey, we pursued exempt approval from the Institutional Review Board and connected with the Associate Deans for Research at each college to alert them to the survey’s existence. Through one of these Associate Deans, we were connected with our University Decision Support Team who had access to job titles and email addresses throughout the University. Together with University Decision Support, we narrowed our survey population to those with relevant job titles, using key words such as research, postdoc, and lab, to identify roles and eliminating job titles that did not match our targeted audience such as ‘Research Faculty’ or ‘Lab Instructor.’ We included only staff roles, excluding student or faculty roles. We included roles at all Northeastern’s campuses, ultimately identifying 486 staff members to send the survey to via email.
The survey was sent on February 27, 2024, with a follow up reminder sent ahead of the survey’s reported close on March 19, 2024. The survey remained open until March 29, 2024, to allow any final responses to trickle in. We had a total of 70 completed responses (14.4% response rate).
Results
In addition to asking respondents some basic demographic questions, our survey questions addressed two broad areas: 1. library supports and services that this population uses now, and 2. potential support and tools they would find valuable that the library does not currently provide. Importantly, we were intentional about wording in our survey to emphasize that we were not committing to providing these services and instead were gathering data about how to prioritize them. We primarily completed analysis of the results within Qualtrics.
College Affiliation and Job Tasks
Forty-four percent of respondents were from the College of Science, 28% were from the Bouvé College of Health Sciences, and 27% were from the College of Engineering. One respondent identified as being a part of Northeastern’s Roux campus in Portland, Maine, rather than choosing a collegiate affiliation.
The top five job tasks identified by participants were analyzing data (91%), generating and collecting data (88%), writing or contributing to papers (88%), literature searches or reviews (83%), and visualizing data (77%). The least common job task was writing or contributing to grants (67%). Please see Appendix 2 for more detailed data related to this question.
Figure 1: Top five job tasks identified by survey participants.
Library Interaction in the Last Year
By far, the most popular form of interaction with the library was reading or downloading journal articles (86%). The next most popular forms of interaction were using citation management tools (62%), accessing literature databases (56%), using the library website (48%), and entering the building (36%). Print and e-book usage was also popular (32%). Our least popular form of interaction (11%) was using or depositing into the library’s repository. Only 6% of respondents reported not using the library at all in the last year. One respondent reported interacting with the library to cover an APC fee, which was a newly launched program of support.
Of those who entered the building, the majority entered either to use library spaces (27%) or visit the ITS help desk (20%). Others entered for a specific purpose such as a meeting or appointment (10%), to attend an event (8%), or to pick up an interlibrary loan item (8%). Another common reason to enter the building was to ask a library or resources related question (8%), visit the Research Help Desk (6%), or use creative services such as 3D printing or the recording studios (4%).
The survey also asked about interaction with library staff or services in the last year. A majority (51%) had not used any of the services within the last year. The most popular service interactions included requesting an item via Interlibrary Loan (19%), asking a question via email (16%), attending a webinar or other event (7%), and making an appointment or working with a library specialist, such as a liaison librarian, data specialist, or other staff member (6%).
Researcher Ranking of Potential Services
Researchers were asked to rank nine potential services in order of what would be most to least helpful for their research. The services were intentionally broad:
using ORCID IDs
using Pivot (grant database)
interpreting the NIH Public Access Policy/Public Access policies in general
understanding read & publish agreements/authors’ rights
depositing and/or sharing data to comply with funder and publisher mandates
integrating open science and reproducible research practices
analyzing or mining text/data sources
statistics
web scraping and working with APIs
The results were varied. Every service had at least one respondent rank it in their top three, and every service idea had at least one respondent rank it in their bottom three. Over 50% of respondents ranked statistics and ORCID IDs in their top three services. 65% of respondents ranked web scraping and working with APIs in their bottom three choices. One service option, analyzing and mining text/data sources, was controversial. It appeared frequently in respondents’ top three and bottom three choices.
Data Acquisition
Seventy-nine percent of respondents did not feel their group needed help with data acquisition. Of the 21% of respondents who did think their group needed help with data acquisition, they ranked as their top priorities: 1) storing/securing data sets, 2) making data available to a specific group, 3) negotiation with data set vendors, and 4) funding to purchase data sets.
Research Productivity Tools and Support Recommendations
BioRender, Overleaf, and citation managers were the top three research productivity tools mentioned in a free text question asking respondents to share what tools they use regularly and/or consider vital to their research. Seven respondents mentioned ‘nothing’ or ‘no tools’ in the free text response. There were a wide variety of other tools mentioned four or fewer times, which illustrated the breadth of diversity across tool use by respondents.
Figure 2: Most used research productivity tools by number of responses.
When asked what level of support they would need to effectively use the tool, 75% selected that they would need either no or limited support from the library. Limited support was defined as creating a webpage with contact info for the vendor and FAQs answered by the vendor. Twenty-two percent selected significant support from the library, which was defined as working with someone from the library (rather than the vendor) for all product-related questions. The remaining 3% selected ‘Other’.
When asked directly what resources the respondents would like to consider adding, the free text responses most frequently mentioned ‘none/good job’ (39% of responses). Origin (17%) was the next most common request, followed by single mentions for a variety of tools including Scopus, Prism/GraphPad, and a few tools that the library already provides access to (Covidence, Web of Science). Two service requests surfaced in this question: 1) coding and data analysis techniques and 2) library space for researchers to attend meetings and/or study.
Contact Preferences
When asked how they would like to learn about library events, services, and new resources, most respondents selected email newsletters (44%) followed by visiting the library website (28%), the University/College Events Calendar (16%), and social media (11%). Fifty-five respondents indicated that they prefer multiple methods of contact.
When asked how often they would like to hear from us, the majority selected monthly (39%) followed by a tie between a few times per year (27%) and whenever there’s a new event or resource related to their discipline (27%). Two percent selected annually and 5% selected never.
Free Text Final Question
In our final question, we asked if there was anything else respondents would like to share with us. Here, we received several specific requests that were helpful for us in identifying actionable steps to take to address this population’s needs. Of the eleven responses, seven were positive or suggested they learned something from the survey. Two responses specifically requested a change in book loan time for postdocs, and the remaining two responses were space related, either requesting the ability for a postdoc to request a single study room or a request to keep the library spaces usable for members of the community.
Discussion
The results from the survey largely reinforced our understanding of the needs of researchers working in the health sciences, science, and engineering fields, illustrating that in many ways faculty and student needs are not so different from the needs of research support staff.
The interest in greater support for statistical analyses was in line with what we expected, as statistical support has been a known gap at our institution for years. Hearing this call for enhanced statistical support from another population helps give us further rationale to encourage the University to address and respond to this need, whether that service is provided by the library or by another group.
We were also unsurprised to find that the survey responses suggested that the library consider providing services and tools that we already provide. This was particularly evident in respondents’ requests to acquire databases and tools that we do subscribe to, such as Web of Science, Covidence, and Overleaf. It’s an ongoing challenge at our University to communicate information about the resources we provide to the people who most need to know about them, which has no doubt been exacerbated in the resource support staff population by the difficulty we’ve had in connecting with them via our usual outreach methods. In a newsletter we have since launched for this population, we highlighted our access to several of these resources.
Our survey results did yield unexpected surprises. The biggest surprise for us was the 36% of respondents who had entered the library building in the past year. We tend to think of this population as spending much of their time on campus working in their research labs and clinics rather than venturing out to the library, especially given that much of our library collections are in e-format. Some visited to accomplish a particular task, such as printing a document or getting technology help, but most said they entered the building to use library spaces, with one respondent stating that they “value library spaces for aesthetic reasons.” While there is considerable demand for space at our main campus, not least library spaces, this has us questioning whether dedicated library space for staff researchers would be a useful service.
The survey responses about the level of library support expected for tools, while not necessarily surprising, came as somewhat of a relief, with most respondents (75%) indicating they would need very limited support from the library. This gives us more confidence that we can add tools needed by researchers without the expectation that library staff will always need to devote considerable time to learning and supporting those tools. This is a tactic we’re already taking with resources like protocols.io, as demand for new resources outstrips staff capacity to fully support them. As a result of this information, we plan to continue heavily vetting new vendors’ customer support models to ensure that any tools we might add have robust documentation and services in place.
Finally, we had not thought of the survey itself as a method of outreach and a way to surface support and resources that the library provides, but it did seem to have that effect for some respondents. As one research support staff member stated, “there are some services named here that I was not aware...were available.” The survey has also given us an opportunity to continue engaging further with this population as described in the following section.
Actions Taken and Next Steps
We are using survey responses to increase our engagement with research support staff in ways tailored to their needs. Our survey asked research support staff about their preferred method and frequency for library communications. As a result, we have launched a new research support staff newsletter sent 3 times per year, featuring a maximum of just 3 items per newsletter. Our first version of the newsletter went out about 6 months after the survey ended and opened by thanking staff for their survey responses and highlighting some changes we had already made based on their feedback. For example, we were able to advocate with library colleagues for a ‘quick win’ based on two survey respondents’ requests that the library extend loan periods for postdoctoral associates. At our institution, postdocs are classified as staff members and have loan periods shorter than those of graduate students. This was a more complicated request than we initially realized, but we were able to extend the loan period thanks to our colleagues in our access services department.
Research support staff newsletters have also highlighted resources (both newly acquired and existing) that were mentioned frequently in survey responses.
Figure 3: Sample newsletter sent to research support staff.
We also collaborated on a new Research Expo event bringing together service offerings from IT, the Library, Research Administration, and more. Responses from our research support staff survey helped inform the content that we emphasized at the Expo and gave us a new population of research-focused colleagues to share event information with. The Research Expo was well attended, and positive feedback from attendees has encouraged us to make the Expo a recurring event.
Finally, the survey responses drove home the idea that library support of research activity is not just concentrated among liaisons and specialists, but rather, pervasive throughout library functions and departments. This insight informed our planning for a new Funded Research Community of Practice: an internal library group focused on learning about funded research across Northeastern and discussing the ways the library supports it. The core membership of this group, who are expected to attend every meeting, consists of an associate dean and several department heads who are organizationally able to enact large scale change. The group and the meetings themselves are primarily driven by participation of all library staff. They provide the bulk of interactions, contact, and support, and it is through them that the core membership of the group will seek to make adjustments to our service offerings. For example, it’s clear from our survey that research support staff are heavy users of interlibrary loan services, and we suspect that our ILL staff have interesting insights into the needs and interests of this population. By creating an enthusiastically inclusive atmosphere, the core membership hopes to learn beyond our own experiences and assumptions.
Conclusion
By identifying this population of research support staff we had not previously consistently reached, we hoped to learn more about existing user behaviors, preferences, and support patterns directly related to funded research.
The most notable results were:
Considerable interest from this population in using/being in the building itself
Interests of this population were not particularly different from our understanding of the interests of principal investigators or faculty
Lack of agreement from respondents on what potential services would be most helpful
Because of what we’ve learned, we’ve changed our thinking about the library’s support for research in a few key areas.
First, we have broadened participation across library staff when planning for and launching our funded research community of practice. This was driven home by the breadth of interest by survey respondents in library services, from collections to facilities to support. While there was some acknowledgement of this interest before, there’s now concrete proof to show how we all support funded research at Northeastern.
Second, we feel confident that 'low touch' support for research tools is acceptable to this population, which influences what and how we can consider licensing additional tools.
Third, launching our newsletter helped illustrate how much this population turns over. We regularly see many email bounces and need to make new additions to the list. This, as well as the respondents who said they learned about existing services from our survey and those who requested resources we already had access to, creates a case for reusing newsletter content as well as promoting high value resources and services multiple times.
As a result of this survey, we have taken significant steps forward in improving outreach, considering/addressing the needs of research in a more holistic way, and continuing to promote our services and resources.
References
Link Cilfone, Alissa, and Jen Ferguson. 2024. "De-identified Survey Response Data: Investigating and Addressing the Needs of Research Support Staff." Northeastern University Digital Repository Service. https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20752529.