Research, research, and more research.

I've been doing a bit of research for work lately. Although much of it has been doing research about how to do research. In addition to taking a few classes, I have been reading the book: Research Methods in Information, 2nd ed. by Alison Jane Pickard (2013). I need to know how to do research for readers, of course. But in order to contribute to my field, I will need to understand proper research methods. (I have done a bit of this already at university for both my bachelors and masters, but nothing quite as in depth as what I will need to do as a librarian.)

The most common questions that come up for the training librarian where I work involve doing literature reviews and systematic reviews, the former being a lot easier to do than the latter. I have recently taken a crack at doing my own literature review both to understand what this involves for the readers and to do some research for our library.

One of my main focuses now is on ebook collection development and promotion. Although I had already come up with a list of popular titles to search for in EBSCO, I was uncertain whether this was what readers would find useful. Without any knowledge of what our readers liked or did not like about ebooks, I had to do some reading about what other libraries had discovered through doing their own research.

In general I found that there was not a great deal of research done on health libraries and ebook use, most of it came from academic libraries. There would be some correlations between the two and quite a bit of differences. For example, in academic libraries, students and faculty tend not to like ebooks and often need to be forced to use them. In health libraries, on the other hand, readers tend to take information wherever they can get it. The highest ebook use tends to be for science books and reference--which thankfully most medical books tend to be.

From this reading, I knew that I needed to focus generally on reference books. It might also be advantageous to purchase books that we do not have in physical form in the library in order to force readers to choose the ebook. In this case, I ended up simply getting the latest editions rather that a long list of new titles. My reading also gave me an idea of what features people tend to find the most useful in ebooks, so now I will be looking into whether EBSCO provides any of these features.

Of course, I am not the only person working on this project, so I wrote up my findings with a detailed bibliography of sources and emailed it to my colleagues. One of them praised my write-up as being succinct and to-the-point--Yay!

We also had a meeting to discuss what I found and what we will need to do for ebook promotion. (I did some research into that too.)

So what will happen with all this in the future? I suppose that remains to be seen, but for my part I would like to do a research project to find out whether or not our ebook program has been successful and what our readers think about ebooks in general. With all of the literature I have amassed, there are quite a few methods that are outlined for this kind of study. I think it would be useful to the profession to provide more knowledge about this topic in the Health library sector.