Heather Scalf

Academic Libraries and Learning Analytics

Heather Scalf, MLIS

Director of Assessment

University of Texas at Arlington Libraries

I will be conducting a citation analysis of a selection of HIST3300 papers to determine if there are any clear patterns in primary source usage, specifically the usage of sources from UT Arlington Libraries Special Collections. I am doing this work in conjunction with Dr. Kim Breuer from the department of History. In addition to this, I will also be analyzing the usage of Libraries’ resources by this specific subset of students, as compared to other junior-level history majors.

J. T. Dellinger

Hi Heather, I definitely enjoyed listening to this as someone who works in the field of learning analytics. I am curious about two items for the slide around 14:00: 1) I would be interested to see the number of students that visited the library against the total enrollment in the college (ex: if Engineering was 5% of campus, but had 25% of visits) and 2) comparing residential vs. commuter students (using Engineering again, if 50% of their students are residential vs. 5% in Social Work, would that significantly show different usage?)
Regina Urban

Heather, what a treasure-trove of big data you have access to in your setting! I appreciated your explanation of salting and creating the ID hash in order to protect the privacy of the data. It’s also interesting to me that you can look at both in-person visits (number and time) and use of online resources. I think you are correct in that you must think of ways to control confounding variables so you can look more carefully at resource usage and connect it to course grade, GPA, or other student success variables. Although students can simply meet at a table in the library and work quietly together, it would be interesting if you could track their study room usage as a separate variable. Also for the online students, I am wondering if you can quantify the number of requests for downloads from a website (such as Ovid) versus simply viewing resources or counting the number of times the website was accessed (and what connection this may have to student success variables). Thanks for sharing your information and expertise with us!
Melanie Mason

Hello Heather! I would love to know if you can further breakdown library usage by the student’s major. Our COMM majors don’t often make a concerted effort to “cross the bridge” to access the east part of the campus, (for those unfamiliar with UTA, that is where the Central Library is located), particularly when they reach junior/senior level. I feel like I need to be making a more concentrated effort to include more specific instruction to drive my student’s research to our libraries. I learned so much from your presentation.
Kim Breuer

Very interesting. The fact that half the students in a research course did not physically enter the library is something to track going forward. On the one hand, it speaks to the depth and breadth of our electronic databases and resources, but they are missing out on invaluable assistance from librarians.
Cindy

I do tons of research, but much of it I simply do through the databases online, so I rarely enter the library, even though I use online library resources multiple times a week. But I know many students don’t know how to use the databases when they arrive. I wonder what kind of difference you’d see between a class where the teacher brings them in for a library orientation and one where they don’t.
Peggy Semingson

Interesting analysis! I am wondering what the data suggests for college of education students! We have heavily online populations. I believe about 3/4 of College of Ed students are online!