Sarah L. Shreeves
Co-Coordinator, Scholarly Commons
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Since the publication of “Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities,” universities and colleges have worked to develop and strengthen inquiry-based curricula for undergraduates that is aligned with faculty members’ scholarly and creative efforts. Offices for undergraduate research and coordinators for such efforts are appearing on campuses nationwide. While many academic libraries do support such formal undergraduate research programs, there has been no systematic study of the types of support provided and how those administering such programs perceive that support.
In 2012, a successful, targeted survey (n=775, 37% response rate) was conducted to establish a benchmark of current library practices in relation to formal undergraduate research programs. In 2013, following this survey, the administrators of undergraduate research programs were surveyed (n=764, 40% response rate) in order to gauge how they perceived and valued library support for such programs. This briefing will present the major findings from this study and speculate (with attendees) how libraries might better support formal undergraduate research programs.
This research was conducted by Sarah Shreeves and Merinda Hensley at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Stephanie Davis-Kahl at Illinois Wesleyan.
A preprint of an article describing the first phase of research:
http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2013/02/06/crl13-458.full.pdf+html