As my own research has nothing to do with formal experiments, I decided to grab on to something interesting I saw a couple years back and put it to the test.
The
question: Do ‘placeholder books’ on shelves make a difference in the
information retrieval process of academic library users?
For
those who haven’t encountered them, placeholder books are something that used
to be common in reference collections at libraries, and in some places they are
still in use today. What are they? Simple. They’re a block of wood cut to the
width of a book to hold and indicate its place on the shelf when the actual
book is in use. They
still have a few on the shelves of the Law Library at the University of New Brunswick
Now
on to the experiment!
The
independent variable: The placement of place-holder books on shelves to
indicate absent volumes.
The
dependent variable: The information retrieval patterns of patrons.
Testing
placeholder books in information retrieval tasks:
Group
A: O1 x O2
Group
B: x O1 p O2
Where
p is the absence of placeholder books, and x is the addition of
placeholder books, with various points of observation through task completion. This is a bit of
a combination of Knight’s models for testing two different treatments (Which would
have looked something like this: O1 x O2 p O3)
and his model for a basic experiment with placebo (Knight, 2002, p. 73-74). The
idea here would be to have participants in group A complete a retrieval task,
then add the placeholder books, then complete a retrieval task again. With
group B, the placeholder books would be added before the first task, and then
removed before the completion of a second task.
This
is because I would like to see not only the effects on information retrieval of
the addition of these placeholders compared to retrieval without, but also if
there are any carry-over effects. With group A, does completing a task first
put a participant in a particular mind-set which makes the treatment seem more
influential than it actually is? For group B, having used placeholders first,
would a group familiar with an academic library revert easily back to
retrieving without?
The
controlled variables and controls in general:
- In the task: The task would vary in subject for O1 and O2, but would consist of the same general activity. Participants would be given a topic, along with guiding call numbers. For some of those numbers, the specific book would be absent from the shelf but other books of related subjects would be present. The participant would be asked to retrieve two book for each topic based on the information given. The controls of the task include: two topics of research, three call numbers for each, two of which are absent from the shelf.
- In the setting: While this research would be carried out in an uncontrolled setting (an actual academic library), the methods of the experiment are ones which may be later applied to different academic libraries, or even different rows of shelves, in order to control for other environmental factors and to ensure replicability and through that, validity (Davidson and Leyder, 1994, p. 154).
- General controls: To control for learning during the experiment, participants will be selected from academic users already familiar with basic academic library use and some understanding of the LOC call numbers and system currently in use in most academic libraries.
- In terms of measurement, specific identifiers would be used to track retrieval patterns, potentially including time spent locating books, browsing patterns, and other time-able events.
While
I haven’t fleshed out all the elements of this experiment, specifically, how to
measure the impact of placeholders, I think the starting point is there. Did
you catch any areas for control that I may have missed?
Sources:
Davidson, Julia
O'Connell, and Derek Layder. (1994). Methods, Sex, and Madness. New
York: Routledge.
Knight, P.T.
(2002). Small-Scale Research: Pragmatic Inquiry in Social Science and the
Caring Professions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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