Investigating the participation of business librarians in academic program reviews using corpus-based methods

Abstract

Prior research into the role of business librarians in academic program reviews has relied on surveys and interviews, revealing that librarians perceive that they are marginalized in the review process. Using a collection of program review documentation produced for the reviews of nine graduate programs offered at a Canadian business school, this study employs corpus-based techniques to obtain direct measures of librarian involvement. The findings provide objective confirmation that business librarians are not well integrated into program reviews overall, and that their contribution to the reviews of professional programs is even more limited than their contribution to the reviews of research-oriented programs. Based on best practices and missed opportunities observed as part of this study, seven strategies are suggested for integrating business librarians more fully in the program review process for the benefit of all program stakeholders.

Keywords:

• Academic libraries
• academic program reviews
• business librarians
• corpus-based methods
• cyclical program reviews
• institutional quality assurance process
• librarian–faculty relations
• new program reviews
• professional business programs
• research-oriented business programs

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Mike Scott, developer of the WordSmith Tools corpus analysis software package, for permission to use screenshots. As stated on the WordSmith Tools site, “For non-profit-making academic use: No need to ask. You are hereby granted permission.” (http://lexically.net/publications/copyright_permission_for_screenshots.htm). Thanks are also due to the three University of Ottawa librarians—Mish Boutet, Tony Horava and Lindsey Sikora—who took the time to review and offer valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1 Owing to the very small values for the library discussions, it was difficult to display this information graphically without using a log-based scale, which can be challenging to read. We therefore chose to present the information in tabular format.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Insight Grant 435-2017-0075.