College and Research Libraries


Associations Between 
Faculty Publishing Output 
and Opinions Regarding 

Student Library Skills 
Marcia L. Boosinger 

This is a study of associations between faculty publishing output as measured by citation 
counts for academic departments and faculty instructional practices and their perceptions of 
student needs and abilities related to the library. These associations were measured by faculty 
responses to selected questions from a survey regarding the importance of library skills. Posi-
tive association exists between publishing output and whether or not classes taught require 
library use, the frequency of required library tours, the degree to which library tours contribute 
to student library abilities, and the ranking of graduate student library abilities. These results 
have planning and instructional implications for bibliographic instruction librarians. 

[f
t;t)~· I ibliographic instruction librari-

l ~ . ans have long viewed the coop-
~~ ' eration of instructional faculty 

~~ ........ ~ as a vital factor in student acqui-
sition of library skills. 1 While librarians 
have conducted numerous surveys of fac-
ulty attitudes toward libraries and toward 
student need for library skills instruction, 
resulting studies have been primarily de-
scriptive in nature. 2 Very few studies have 
associated faculty attitudes toward stu-
dent library skills with additional varia-
bles such as academic rank, tenure status, 
teaching experience, discipline, gender, 
age, teaching style, personal library use 
patterns, or average class size.3 

The method of this exploratory study 
goes beyond the presentation of descrip-
tive statistics. The purpose is to test hy-
potheses of association between survey 
responses and one additional variable, de-
partmental publishing output as mea-
sured by number of journal articles pro-
duced. Determining if external variables 
that are related to departmental attitudes 

toward student library skills exist could of-
fer bibliographic instruction librarians a 
better understanding of their teaching col-
leagues. Clearly, knowledge of each fac-
ulty member's personal research interests 
and constraints would be desirable. How-
ever, it may not be possible for BI librari-
ans to be familiar with all faculty members 
and their class needs. Instead a degree of 
familiarity with each department may be 
all that is feasible. For example, are faculty 
from several departments engaged in 
teaching interdisciplinary courses that re-
quire a particular type of library use and 
instruction? Does pressure to publish 
within a particular department influence 
the attitudes of its faculty toward library 
skills acquisition? Do faculty in scientific 
disciplines heavily involved in graduate 
education and relying on journals and 
technical reports have library instruction 
needs different from faculty in book-
oriented disciplines supporting chiefly 
undergraduate programs? Statistically re-
liable answers to these and other ques-

Marcia L. Boosinger is the Bibliographic Instruction Librarian at the Ralph Brown Draughon Library of Au-
burn University, Auburn, AL 36849-5606. The author gratefully acknowledges the invaluable assistance of 
Kevin L. Cook, Microforms and Documents Reference Librarian, Ralph Brown Draughon Library, Auburn Uni-
versity. 

471 



472 College & Research Libraries 

tions regarding faculty instructional prac-
tices and perceptions related to library use 
instruction may help librarians develop ef-
fective strategies and materials for in-
structing various user groups involved in 
particular disciplines. 

BACKGROUND 

The literature concerning faculty prac-
tices and perceptions regarding student li-
brary skills falls into two general catego-
ries: discussions of portions of user 
surveys that measure the practices and 
perceptions of faculty regarding student 
library skills in the context of other issues 
and entire studies that describe such prac-
tices and perceptions as they relate specifi-
cally to library skills. 

An example of the former is a DePauw 
University Libraries self-study that exam-
ined the entire range of library resources 
and services, including library skills in-
struction.4 The second category, studies 
focusing solely on faculty opinion regard-
ing library skills, has as an important 
model the 1973 study by John Lubans and 
others at the University of Colorado as 
part of a Council on Library Resour-
ces-National Endowment for the 
Humanities-sponsored project, ''Program 
to Improve and Increase Student and Fac-
ulty Involvement in Library U s'e. '' Investi-
gators surveyed the history and eco-
nomics faculty and a random sample of 
other teaching faculty concerning under-
graduate library skills. Questions in-
cluded a rating of students' abilities to 
make use of library resources for research 
and term papers, student knowledge of 
appropriate resources to use when writing 
term papers, types of assignments made 
which require student use of library re-
sources, reasons for not making assign-
ments requiring library use, responsibility 
for explaining indexes, bibliographies, 
and other reference sources of a specific 
field, and relative effectiveness of types of 
formal library instruction. Lubans found 
that faculty thought few students have ad-
equate library skills. Faculty believe that 
formal library use instruction of some sort, 
provided by librarians, teaching faculty, 
or both as a team, is a key factor in improv-
ing and increasing students' use of library 
resources. 5 

September 1990 

A few studies outside these two catego-
ries compare similar survey data with ad-
ditional variables. In 1989, librarians at 
Iowa State University conducted a study 
of faculty practices and perceptions re-
garding a required library skills course. In-
vestigators concluded that faculty realized 
the need for the required library instruc-
tion course. While rank and type of ap-
pointment were not related to responses, 
faculty support for library instruction var-
ied among colleges surveyed with the col-
leges of family and consumer sciences, ed-
ucation, agriculture, and engineering 
showing the strongest support, while the 
colleges of sciences and humanities, busi-
ness, and design exhibited less support. 
Noticeable differences existed between re-
sponses from faculty who required library 
research from students and those who did 
not have such a requirement. Faculty who 
gave research assignments were more 
likely to think that students do not have 
the skills to do library research, less likely 
to think that they themselves needed to 
leach library skills, and more likely to 
think that the required library skills course 
should continue. 6 

Hardesty associated demographic char-
acteristics of classroom instructors such as 
age, tenure status, discipline, academic 
rank, sex, highest degree, and teaching 
experience with responses to a 30-item 
questionnaire. 7 He used the responses 
from over 200 faculty members at four In-
diana colleges to construct a scale de-
signed to measure attitudes of undergrad-
uate classroom instructors toward the 
library's role in undergraduate education. 
He found significant differences between 
the attitudes expressed by faculty at the 
various institutions about the role of the li-
brary in undergraduate education and 
concluded that the ''educational atmo-
sphere" of an institution can shape in-
structor attitudes toward this role. 

A survey at California State University, 
Long Beach, in 1984 measured many of 
the same perceptions and practices as Lu-
bans' initial Colorado survey. 8 Three hun-
dred and one faculty members responded 
to questions concerning what types of li-
brary instruction they employed, why 
they did not avail themselves of the in-
struction offered in the library (if they did 



not), how they believed their students 
learned to use the library, and what their 
opinions of students' abilities to do library 
research were. The study associated re-
sponses to questions regarding practices 
and perceptions of library use instruction 
with demographic characteristics of fac-
ulty (rank, tenure, full- versus part-time 
status, sex, and satisfaction with the li-
brary), and with "professional factors" 
(the faculty member's own method of 
learning to use the library, frequency of li-
brary use, length of service at that univer-
sity, and faculty opinion of student re-
search abilities). Most important to the 
present study, the Cal State Long Beach 
study compared faculty responses regard-
ing student library use to their publishing 
histories. Of the faculty requiring their 
students to attend library use instruction, 
70% had published within the last year 
compared with 57% of all respondents. 
Thirty-eight percent of those who last 
published five or more years ago required 
no library use instruction; this was true of 
only 29% of all respondents. The authors 
concluded that ''a current publishing his-
tory often characterized the faculty mem-
bers who requested student attendance at 
library-initiated lectures. " 9 

METHODOLOGY 

This study was conducted at Auburn 
University, a state institution with an en-
rollment of approximately 21,000 students 
and 1,100 full-time faculty members orga-
nized administratively into thirteen col-
leges or schools and sixty-four depart-
ments. While maintaining the traditional 
land-grant emphasis on agriculture and 
engineering, Auburn grants baccalaureate 
degrees in 138 fields, master's degrees in 
sixty fields, and doctoral degrees in thirty-
eight areas.

10 

Auburn University Libraries consist of 
the main library, branch libraries at the 
School of Architecture and the College of 
Veterinary Medicine, and a small reading 
room in a classroom building. The li-
braries have a faculty of fifty-one librari-
ans, a staff of three archivists, two auto-
mation professionals, and ninety-six 
support persons and paraprofessionals, 
and holdings of over 1.6 million volumes. 
A bibliographic instruction librarian coor-

Associations 473 

dinates instructional activities that are 
shared among seven public service de-
partments. The twenty-three librarians in 
these departments instructed 7,057 users 
in 369 sessions during fiscal year 1988-89. 

Two methodological considerations ex-
isted at the beginning of this study: mea-
suring faculty publishing output and mea-
suring faculty practices and perceptions 
regarding student library skills. The litera-
ture surrounding both publishing output 
and student library skills suggested 
courses of action regarding these consid-
erations. 

"Of the faculty requiring their stu-
dents to attend library use instruc-
tion, 70 percent had published 
within the last year compared with 57 
percent of all respondents.'' . 

Researchers in the social sciences and 
sciences and academic administrators 
have used publication counts to assess fac-
ulty publishing output for many years, 
with the belief that it is possible to evalu-
ate faculty performance at least partially in 
terms of numbers of publications. 11 They 
have used variou~ methods of obtaining 
publication counts, including the use of 
interviews; vitae; self-reported data, often 
from surveys; and counts from indexes 
and databases such as Chemical Abstracts, 
ERIC, and the Institute for Scientific Infor-
mation (lSI) products. 12 Researchers have 
found it relatively simple to obtain 
"straight counts" of faculty publications 
using the Source and Corporate Indexes 
of these lSI citation indexes. 13 

In this study, the operational definition 
of publishing output is the total count of 
journal articles attributed to an Auburn 
University department in Arts and Human-
ities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation 
Index, and Science Citation Index. The inves-
tigator recorded publication counts for 
any faculty member from instructor to full 
professor, excluding adjunct and emeritus 
appointments, from the Corporate In-
dexes Geographic Sections, of the three 
lSI citation indexes for 1985, 1986, 1987, 
and the first eight months of 1988. Verifi-



474 College & Research Libraries 

cation of individual faculty names in the 
1985 through 1988 issues of the Auburn 
University Bulletin or the campus tele-
phone directory was necessary because 
the citation indexes often combined publi-
cations of Auburn University authors and 
those of the separate but related Auburn 
University at Montgomery campus. Fi-
nally, the investigator counted and total-
led publications for individual faculty 
members by department across the three 
citation indexes for the three years and 
eight months examined. 

• 
11ln all, the survey reached 1,599 fac-
ulty members and graduate teaching 
assistants, and 551 surveys, or 34.5 
percent were returned.'' 

This study used an instrument devel-
oped by the User Education Committee of 
the General Libraries at the University of 
Texas at Austin. The Committee adminis-
tered the "Survey of Faculty Opinion Re-
garding the Importance of Student Li-
brary Skills" to the UT -Austin faculty in 
1975 in order to gauge faculty attitudes re-
garding library skills instruction and to de-
termine departmental interest in biblio-
graphic instruction. 14 Since that time, the 
Policy and Planning Committee of the Bib-
liographic Instruction Section of ACRL 
has cited this instrument as an excellent 
examP.le of a BI needs assessment instru-
ment.15 Furthermore, Virginia Tiefel has 
recognized the UT-Austin study and its 
associated surveys as models of the delin-
eation of the necessary steps and pro-
cesses involved in developing a compre-
hensive BI program. 16 Universities such as 
Texas Tech have used the study, particu-
larly the faculty survey portion, to survey 
faculty and establish or change their BI 
programs. 17 Jane I. Thesing has recom-
mended the study as a tool for developing 
a ''market audit'' that will facilitate the de-
velopment of a marketing approach to an 
academic library BI program. 18 

Taking these recommendations into 
consideration, Auburn University Li-
braries obtained permission to use the fac-

September 1990 

ulty survey portion of the 1975 UT -Austin 
instrument for purposes of gathering in-
formation regarding faculty opinions re-
lated to library skills acquisition. The in-
vestigator sent the UT -Austin survey to 
all full-time and part-time teaching fac-
ulty, including instructors and graduate 
teaching assistants in January 1988, using 
a mailing list prepared by the university's 
Office of Institutional Analysis. In all, the 
survey reached 1,599 faculty members 
and graduate teaching assistants, and 551 
surveys, or 34.5%, were returned. There-
turns represented responses from 40.7% 
of the full professors, 41.1% of the associ-
ate professors, 40.2% of the assistant pro-
fessors, 51.4% of the instructors, and 
19.4% of the graduate teaching assistants. 
Though the survey response rate was not 
exceptionally high, comparison of faculty 
publishing output at the departmental 
level and survey responses should reduce 
the effect of the lower-than-expected re-
sponse rate. The investigator tabulated re-
sponses to survey questions using Lotus 
1-2-3. 

Using the frequency procedure avail-
able with SAS software for the personal 
computer to analyze data, the investigator 
compared these survey responses with 
departmental publishing output deter-
mined from citation index publication 
counts, and examined two measures of as-
sociation: Kendall's tau-b to measure as-
sociation between the ordinal-level varia-
bles, and the chi-square test of association 
to measure association found in one yes-
or-no question. In this question, collapsed 
departmental publishing output data 
were grouped into categories of high, me-
dium, or low publication frequency in re-
lation to the number of publications of the 
most productive department. Figure 1 
shows these frequencies and categories. 
Because each institution and library sys-
tem is unique, the investigator made little 
attempt to generalize conclusions to other 
institutions. 

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 

Questions from the UT-Austin instru-
ment used in the Auburn survey and con-
sidered in this paper form two categories: 
faculty instructional practices as they re-



Departmental 
Citation Count Department Name 

Low Publishing Output 

Associations 475 

0 Architecture, Building Science, Geography, Industrial Design, Mu-
sic, Nursing, Theatre; Vocational and Adult Education 

1 Art, Veterinary Medicine Administration 
2 Radiology, Textile Engineering 
3 Aerospace Engineering; Marketing and Transportation 
4 Computer Science and Engineering 
5 Communication Disorders, Consumer Affairs, Pharmacy Care Sys-

tems 
7 Communication, Religion 
8 Clinical Pharmacy, Counseling Psychology, Journalism 
9 Curriculum and Teaching; Family and Child Development 

11 Counselor Education 
12 Math (Foundations and Topology) 
13 Educational Foundations, Leadership, and Technology; Pharmacy 
15 Accounting; Anatomy and Histology 
16 Rehabilitation and Special Education 
17 Geology, Management, Mechanical Engineering; Nutrition and 

Foods 
18 Sociology 
19 Electrical Engineering; Physical Education and Recreation 
21 Large Animal Surgery and Medicine; Philosophy 
22 Industrial Engineering 
26 Agricultural Engineering, Fisheries 
27 Poultry Science 

Medium Publishing Output 

29 Political Science 
31 Civil Engineering 
33 Agronomy and Soils; Chemical Engineering 
34 Scott-Ritchey Foundation 
35 Physics; Physiology and Pharmacology; Small Animal Surgery and 

Medicine 
36 Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology; Forestry, Pharmacal 

Science 
38 Animal and Dairy Science 
39 Zoology 
41 Math (Algebra and Combinatorics) 
44 Horticulture 
48 History 
50 Foreign Languages 
52 Economics 

High Publishing Output 

65 Botany and Microbiology; Plant Pathology 
73 Chemistry 
74 Psychology 
79 English 
81 Pathobiology 

FIGURE 1 
Departmental Publishing Output 



476 College & Research Libraries 

late to the library, and faculty perceptions 
of student library skills and needs. Survey 
questions concerning instructional prac-
tices asked whether faculty teach courses 
requiring library use, the frequency of re-
quired library tours, how frequently they 
require library tours, and how frequently 
they discuss indexes and bibliographies in 
class. Questions concerning perceptions 
of student library skills and needs dealt 
with faculty beliefs about the contribution 
of library tours to student library use abili-
ties, as well as with overall undergraduate 
and graduate student abilities to use the li-
brary for research. A copy of the survey 
questions considered in this study is avail-
able from the investigator. 

The two research problems follow. The 
comparison of departmental publishing 
output with specific survey questions 
form the six related hypotheses. 

Research Problem 1 

Is there association between depart-
mental publishing output and faculty 
members' instructional practices related 
to the library? 

H 1 : There is an association between de-
partmental publishing output and 
whether faculty often teach courses that 
require student use of the library. 

H 2 : There is an association between de-
partmental publishing output and the fre-
quency with which faculty require their 
students to take a library tour. 

H 3 : There is an association between de-
partmental publishing output and the fre-
quency with which faculty members ex-
plain to their classes the indexes and 
bibliographies in their fields. 

Each of these three hypotheses is ac-
cepted. (See figure 2.) Faculty in produc-
tive departments more often teach courses 
that require student use of the library 
(X2 =32.234, d£=2, p < .05) and more often 
require their students to take a library tour 
(t = .124, p = < .01), than do their col-
leagues from less productive depart-
ments. However, they less frequently ex-
plain indexes and bibliographies to their 
students than do their colleagues from de-
partments with lesser publishing outputs 
(t=- .083, p < .01). 

While faculty in productive depart-
ments apparently see the importance of an 

September 1990 

introduction to, and use of, the library for 
their courses, they do not become actively 
involved in introducing library resources, 
for example, by presenting sources in 
class or by participating with a librarian 
during a library instruction session. The 
fact that they more frequently teach 
courses that require student use of the li-
brary may be related to the requirements 
of the specific courses taught, as much as 
to any strong feeling the faculty or produc-
tive department may have about the use of 
the library. While such faculty also are 
more likely to require a library tour for 
their students, they may be taking a pas-
sive role in the library instruction process. 
Most faculty who request instructional 
sessions at Auburn University Libraries 
rely almost exclusively on those devel-
oped and presented by librarians. Evi-
dence of faculty passivity exists in the sub-
stantial number of faculty members 
contacted by librarians in order to initiate 
instructional sessions. 

The negative association between de-
partmental publishing output and H 3, ex-
planation of reference sources by faculty 
to classes, demonstrates even more explic-
itly the passiveness of productive faculty 
involvement with library instruction. 
While faculty from productive depart-
ments are quite willing to require library 
use and tours, they are less likely than fac-
ulty from less productive departments to 
explain sources in their fields to students. 

Reasons for this apparent passivity may 
be many. Productive faculty may be 
aware, from contact with librarians in the 
course of their own research, that biblio-
graphic instruction is available from librar-
ians who are knowledgeable and willing 
to teach their students how to use the li-
brary for research. They may view library 
skills instruction as out of their purview as 
faculty members, or they may not view it 
as important enough to merit use of class 
time. Perhaps their teaching, research, 
and publishing loads are too great to con-
sider the addition of yet another task that 
might be better left to librarians or even to 
students' independent investigation. Rea-
sons for such passivity bear further study. 

Research Problem 2 

Is there association between depart-



Hypothesis 
H1 There is an association between 

Associations 477 

Results 

X2 = 32.234 
publishing output and whether faculty often 
teach courses that require student 
use of the library. 

df = 2 
p<.05 

N = 551 

H2 There is an association between publishing output 
and the frequency with which faCulty require 
their students to take a library tour. 

t = .124 
p<.01 

N = 535 

H3 There is an association between publishing output 
and the frequency with which faculty expfain 
to their classes the indexes and bibliographies in their fields. 

t = -.083 
p<.01 

N = 357 

FIGURE2 
Association between Faculty Publishing Output and Faculty 

Members' Instructional Practices Refated to the Library 

mental publishing output and faculty per-
ceptions of the students regarding library 
skills and needs? 

H4 : There is an association between de-
partmental publishing output and the de-
gree to which faculty members believe li-
brary tours contribute to students' ability 
to use the library for term papers, re-
search, etc. 

H5:There is an association between de-
partmental publishing, output and faculty 
ranking of undergraduate students' abil-
ity to use the library resources for term pa-
pers and research. 

H6 : There is an association between de-
partmental publishing output and faculty 
ranking of undergraduate students' abil-
ity to use the library resources for term pa-
pers and research. 

Two of these three hypotheses, H4 and 
H 6, are accepted at levels of p < . 01 and 
p < .05, while one, H5, is rejected (t= .036, 
p > .1). (See figure 3.) 

Faculty in productive departments are 
more likely than faculty from less produc-
tive departments to believe that library 
tours contribute to a student's ability to 
use the library for term papers and re-
search (t= .104, p< .01). They are less 
likely than their peers associated with less 
productive departments to rank highly 
graduate students' ability to use library re-
sources for term papers and research 
(t=- .088, p < .05). However, there is no 
statistically significant difference between 

. the opinions of faculty from more produc-
tive or less productive departments re-
garding the ranking of undergraduate stu-

dents' ability to use library resources for 
term papers and research (t= .036, p> .1). 

Because faculty from productive depart~ 
ments are more likely to require library 
tours of their students,· as seen in H 2, pre-
sumably they might be more likely than 
faculty from less productive departments 
to believe that such tours contribute to the 
students' ability to use the library. 
Whether the practice of requiring such 
tours preceded the perception of their suc-
cess is impossible to determine, but a 
cause-and-effect relationship between the 
requirement and perception may exist. 

There is no significant difference be-
tween faculty in productive and those in 
less productive departments in their per-
ception of undergraduate ability to use the 
library for term papers and research. 
However, with the acceptance of H 6, it ap-
pears that faculty from more productive 
departments believe graduate students 
are less likely tq be able to use library re-
sources for research. This may stem in 
part from the probable close contact with 
large numbers of graduate students asso-
ciated with productive programs in pro-
ductive departments. It is this familiarity 
that may provide the reason for low rank-
ings of graduate student library abilities. 
Faculty from less productive departments 
may attract fewer graduate students and 
may have less well-formed opinions about 
graduate student library skills because of 
less contact with the group as a whole. 

These results show that this study adds 
a dimension to previous user studies or 
bibliographic instruction needs assess-



478 College & Research Libraries September 1990 

Hypothesis 

H 4 There is an association between publishing output 
and the degree to which faculty members believe 
library tours contribute to a student's ability 
to use the library for term papers, research, etc. 

Results 

t = .104 
p<.01 

N = 536 

H5 There is an association between publishing output 
and faculty ranking of undergraduate students 
ability to use the library resources for 
term papers, research, etc. 

t = .036 
p>.1 

N = 344 

H 6 There is an association between publishing output 
and faculty ranking of graduate students' ability 
to use the library resources for term papers, 
research, etc. • 

t = -.088 
p<.05 

N = 310 

FIGURE 3 
Association between Faculty Publishing Output and Faculty 
Perceptions of Students Related to Library Skills and Needs 

ments by introducing an additional varia-
ble, departmental publishing output, to 
be compared with faculty practices and 
perceptions regarding student library 
skills. Departmental publishing output is 
positively associated with four survey 
questions dealing with faculty instruc-
tional practices and perceptions of student 
abilities related to the library: (1) whether 
faculty teach courses that require student 
library use; (2) the frequency with which 
they require students to take a library 
tour; (3) the degree to which faculty be-
lieve library tours contribute to a student's 
ability to use library resources; and (4) the 
faculty ranking of graduate students' abil-
ity to use library resources. Departmental 
publishing output is negatively associated 
with only one survey question, concern-
ing the frequency with which faculty in 
productive departments explain indexes 
and bibliographies to their classes. Only 
one of the questions considered, that deal-
ing with faculty ranking of undergraduate 
abilities to use library resources for term 
papers and research, failed to show asso-
ciation with departmental publishing out-
put. 

From these associations, BI librarians 

''It may be necessary for BI librarians 
to promote instruction tailored to the 
needs of a p.articular class or assign-
ment." 

can begin to list considerations regarding 
the instructional needs of faculty from 
productive departments. Because produc-
tive faculty are more likely to teach 
courses that .require student use of the li-
brary, BI librarians will want to be aware 
of faculty assignments that would lend 
themselves to course-related instruction. 
Productive faculty members already hold 
lower opinions about the abilities of grad-
uate students to do library research; there-
fore, BI librarians may have little difficulty 
convincing such faculty of the need for in-
depth library instruction on the graduate 
level. However, while productive faculty 
are likely to reqvire tours of the library, 
possibly because they are also more likely 
to believe that such tours contribute to stu-
dents' ability to use the library for re-
search, it may be necessary for BI librari-
ans to promote the idea that instruction 
tailored to the needs of a particular class or 
assignment, rather than simply a tour, 
might prove to be more satisfactory to the 
faculty members involved because it could 
be more beneficial to their students. Be-
cause productive faculty are less likely to 
explain indexes and bibliographies to their 
classes, BI librarians may find it necessary 
to gear their instruction to the class's mea-
ger knowledge of library research tools. 

SUGGESTIONS FOR 
FURTHER RESEARCH 

Beyond the traditional classroom setting 
are new challenges for BI librarians. These 
include diverse faculty members united 



by innovative teaching techniques, 
uniquely structured subject material, and 
shared teaching responsibilities in inter-
disciplinary studies as well as examples of 
team teaching between departments 
within colleges or schools. To begin to 
study these new constituencies, investiga-
tors should develop a list of additional var-
iables related to faculty practices and per-
ceptions that bear further research on the 
departmental level. Variables to be ana-
lyzed might be taken from previous stud-
ies, such as Hardesty's study of the four 
Indiana colleges as well as the studies at 
Iowa State and Cal State Long Beach, 
where some descriptive statistical evi-
dence of relationships between variables 
exhibited by faculty members and their 
practices and perceptions regarding stu-
dent library skills already has been deter-
mined. Institution, college, discipline, 
library-related course requirements, and 
personal library use patterns are a few of 
the previously studied variables that 
might form an initial list of items for con-
sideration. 

''Many more aspects of faculty in-
structional practices and perceptions 
of student ability related to the li-
brary could be studied with a survey 
instrument designed specifically to 
obtain this information.'' 

Many more aspects of faculty instruc-
tional practices and perceptions of student 
ability related to the library could be stud-
ied with a survey instrument designed 
specifically to obtain this information. 
This instrument, the second step in the 
course of further research, would ask 
more precise questions, require more de-
tailed answers, and provide more ranked 
responses to scaled questions regarding 
faculty practices and perceptions. The in-
vestigator could determine more accurate 
and precise measures of practice and per-
ception, and the data could be analyzed at 
least at the ordinal level. Such an instru-
ment should contain more questions di-
rectly applicable to faculty instructional 
practices and perceptions related to the li-

Associations 479 

brary than this investigator asked using 
the UT-Austin study. The list of addi-
tional questions about faculty instruc-
tional practices and perceptions must be 
greatly expanded within such an instru-
ment in order to determine faculty opin-
ion about a broader range of library-skills 
instruction issues as they relate to varia-
bles being studied. Exactly what types of 
class sessions do the responding faculty 
who exhibit a certain characteristic require 
of their students-those solicited by fac-
ulty members and prepared by librarian 
subject specialists expressly for the library 
resource needs of an individual class, or 
general orientation tours without actual 
instruction? What specific perceptions do 
such faculty members have about the con-
tributions of library instructional sessions 
to student ability to use the library? Are 
students making use of a variety of 
sources and are those sources appropriate 
and pertinent to the assignment? 

A possibility for further research com-
bining the variables of publishing output 
and faculty instructional practices and 
perceptions regarding student library 
needs would be the developing of an ordi-
nal scale to measure active versus passive 
participation in the library skills acquisi-
tion process of faculty from both more 
productive and less productive depart-
ments, and the impact of levels of such 
participation on faculty perceptions of stu-
dent performance of assignments requir-
ing use of the library. The scale could in-
clude items measuring faculty attendance 
at library instruction classes, faculty par-
ticipation during such classes, faculty re-
inforcement of library instruction in class 
discussion, assignments geared to use of 
library resources utilizing a defined re-
search process or search strategy, and ac-
tual student performance on such assign-
ments. 

''Investigators need to develop an in-
strument to determine the relative 
weights of seemingly unrelated fac-
ulty characteristics that impact prac-
tices and perceptions regarding stu-
dent library skills.'' 



480 College & Research Libraries 

Finally, investigators will need to de-
velop an appropriate instrument to con-
duct an additional study of such variables 
in combination in order to determine the 
relative weights of seemingly unrelated 
faculty characteristics that impact on fac-
ulty instructional practices and percep-

September 1990 

tions regarding student library skills. 
Only after such a study has been com-
pleted can bibliographic instruction librar-
ians have a clearer picture of the variables 
that affect faculty opinions of library skills 
instruction. 

REFERENCES AND NOTES 

1. Patricia B. Knapp, The Monteith College Experiment (New York: Scarecrow, 1966), p.280. 
2. University of Texas at Austin General Libraries, A Comprehensive Program of User Education for the 

General Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin (Austin, Tex.: Univ. of Texas at Austin, 1977). 
3. The few studies include Larry L. Hardesty, "The Influence of Selected Variables on Attitudes of 

Classroom Instructors Toward the Undergraduate Educational Role of the Academic Library," 
Academic Libraries: Myths and Realities, ed. Suzanne C. Dodson and Gary L. Menges (Chicago: As-
sociation of College and Research Libraries, 1984); Rae Haws, Lorna Peterson, and Diane 
Shonrock, "Survey of Faculty Attitudes Towards a Basic Library Skills Course," College & Research 
Libraries News 50:201-3 (March 1989); and Joy Thomas and Pat Ensor, "The University Faculty and 
Library Instruction," RQ 24:431-37 (Summer 1984). 

4. Larry L. Hardesty and others, DePauw University Libraries Self-Study Report (ERIC Document Re-
production Service, ED 217 862, 1982), p.158-66. 

5. John Lubans, Jr. and others, Program to Improve and Increase Student and Faculty Involvement in Li-
brary Use (ERIC Document Reproduction Service, ED 114 097, 1975), p.8-16, 20-24. 

6. Haws, Paterson, and Shonrock, "Survey of Faculty Attitudes," p.202. 
7. Hardesty, "The Influence of Selected Variables," p.371-77. 
8. Thomas and Ensor, "The University Faculty and Library Instruction," p.432. 
9. Ibid. 

10. Auburn University, Auburn University Bulletin (Auburn University, Ala.: Auburn University, 
1989), p.11. 

11. Loretta P. Hicks," Abundance or Richness in Output," Community and Junior College Journal50:11 
(Dec./Jan. 1978-79). 

12. For representative studies using the various methods of obtaining publication counts, see Diane 
Crane, "Scientists at Major and Minor Universities: A Study of Productivity and Recognition," 
American Sociological Review 32:700 (Oct. 1965); Jonathan R. Cole and Stephen Cole, Social Stratifica-
tion in Science (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1973), p.33; Paul D. Allison and John A. Stewart, 
"Productivity Differences Among Scientists," American Sociological Review 39:599 (Aug. 1974); 
Barbara F. Reskin, "Scientific Productivity, Sex, and Location in the Institution of Science," Amer-
ican Journal of Sociology 83:1235 (Mar. 1978); Robert T. Blackburn, Charles E. Behymer, and David 
E. Hall, "Research Notes: Correlates of Faculty Publications," Sociology of Education 51:133 (Apr. 
1978); J. Scott Long, ''Productivity and Academic Position in the Scientific Career,'' American Soci-
ological Review 43:892 (Dec. 1978); HelenS. Astin, "Factors Affecting Women's Scholarly Produc-
tivity," The Higher Education of Women: Essays in Honor of Rosemary Park, ed. Helen S. Astin and 
Werner Z. Hirsch (New York: Praeger, 1978), p .138; Eugene Garfield, Citation Indexing-Its Theory 
and Application in Science, Technology, and Humanities (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), p.16; 
Karin D. Knorr and others, "Individual Publication Productivity as a Social Position Effect in Aca-
demic and Industrial Research Units," Scientific Productivity: The Effectiveness of Research Groups in 
Six Countries, ed. Frank M. Andrews (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1979), p.60; Susan W. 
Cameron and Robert T. Blackburn, "Sponsorship and Academic Career Success," Journal of 
Higher Education 52:371 Guly/Aug. 1981); and Richard A. Wanner, Lionel S. Lewis, and David I. 
Gregorio, "Research Productivity in Academia: A Comparative Study of the Sciences, Social Sci-
ences, and Humanities," Sociology of Education 54:242 (Oct. 1981). 

13. Stephen Cole, "Age and Scientific Performance," American Journal of Sociology 84:%1 Gan. 1979); 
Duncan Lindsey, "Production and Citation Measures in the Sociology of Science: The Problem of 
Multiple Authorship," Social Studies of Science 10:146 (May 1980); and Robert M. Hayes, "Citation 
Statistics as a Measure of Faculty Research Productivity,'' Journal of Education for Librarianship 
23:153 (Winter 1983), discuss the use of such counts obtained through the citation indexes. How-
ever, publication counts may be too crude a measure of productivity for evaluation of an individ-



Associations 481 

ual faculty member, as found by Richard J. Kroc, "Using Citation Analysis to Assess Scholarly 
Productivity," Educational Researcher 13:18 Gune/July1984). Other problems found in the more so-
phisticated techniques of citation counts or citation analysis are discussed by Cole and Cole, p.25; 
Garfield, p.245; Lindsey, p.145; and Hayes, p.153. However, Kroc (p.21) concluded that data 
gathered from indexes and aggregated at the department, school, or college level may eliminate or 
ameliorate most of these problems. 

14. University of Texas at Austin General Libraries, A Comprehensive Program of User Education, p.1. 
15. Association of College and Research Libraries, Bibliographic Instruction Section, Policy and Plan-

ning Committee, Bibliographic Instruction Handbook (Chicago: American Library Association, 1979), 
p .13. 

16. Virginia Tiefel, "Creating a Comprehensive Library User Education Plan," Academic Libraries: 
Myths and Realities, ed. Suzanne C. Dodson and Gary L. Menges (Chicago: Association of College 
and Research Libraries, 1984), p.239. 

17. Texas Tech University Library, Report of the Ad Hoc User Instruction Committee (ERIC Document 
Reproduction Service, ED 254 234, 1984), p.56. 

18. Jane I. Thesing, "Market Academic Library Bibliographic Instruction Programs: Case and Com-
mentary," Research Strategies 3:34 (Winter 1985). 

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