RIO Faculty/Librarian Collaboration Survey Results: Collection Development

Survey

What are we doing well?

• Encourage faculty to order materials -- close to 90% of faculty respondents initiate requests for resources.
• Solicit faculty orders by sending information about items of potential interest out to faculty -- over 60% of faculty respondents respond to titles suggestions sent from their library liaison.
• Encourage faculty to discuss their resource needs with their library liaisons -- approximately 90% of faculty respondents meet with their respective liaisons to discuss collection development..
• Librarians do contact faculty about collection development -- most faculty respondents have been contacted by a librarian regarding collection development very few faculty have never been contacted by a librarian regarding collection development.
• Obtain faculty orders -- only a few (5-7%) of responding faculty have never requested materials

What can we do better?

• Librarians need to encourage all faculty to participate in collection development (about 8% of faculty respondents have never requested library materials).
• Librarians need to involve more faculty in the de-selection process.
• Librarians should creatively find ways to involve more faculty in actively weeding in the stacks
• Librarians should solicit feedback regarding database trials from a greater number of faculty -- more faculty respondents reported not having an opportunity to provide feedback to resource trials than those whoindicated that the librarians are good about reaching out to them about trials.
• Librarians should encourage faculty to work with them in the development of LibGuides, especially course LibGuides (but also more general guides).

What surprises us?

• Over half of respondents are not involved with their libraries’ de-selection process.
• The number of faculty who have reported that librarians reach out to them about new database trials (approx. 37%) is nearly equal to the number of respondents who indicated they had never had the opportunity to provide feedback about database trials (approx. 41%).
• Some librarians actually demo database trials to their faculty (in a meeting?!) and conduct a follow-up collection of feedback.
• Some faculty respondents (approx..5-6%) are involved with a trial of new databases outside of the library.
• 8% of faculty respondents do not know that they may collaborate on a LibGuide with their library liaison and nearly half of the faculty respondents indicated that they do not collaborate with librarians in the creation of LibGuides.