El rol del maestro EIB en la administración y gestión de la escuela

Serendipity is an area of great interest when it comes to research regarding academic libraries, whether they are physical or digital. However, as the literature in this field shows, there has been no attempt at comparing the experience that users feel in both types of these libraries (Warwick, Terras, Galina, Huntington, & Pappa, 2008), and no specific study which has historians as the participants (Anderson, 2010). This article addresses these research gaps, and provides a starting point for librarians and LIS scholars to recognize the importance of serendipity when thinking about one group of their primary users – historians.

1.3.1

Literature Review

Much has been made of the serendipitous experience since digitization of texts has become widespread and keyword search has been integrated into online systems. Early on, Weintraub (1980) questioned how digitization would change the research process of humanists, noting their love of texts and need for primary documents might make this transition difficult. Weintraub (1980) writes:

“From a humanist's point of view, the transition made in the fourth century A.D. from the text scroll to the codex form of the book was momentous and intensely desirable. One wonders whether a twentieth-century transition from the codex to the electronic text would be as welcome” (p. 26).

Thirty-five years later, his question remains largely unanswered.

Toms and O’Brien (2008) note that the humanist’s search for texts, particularly for secondary sources, is now primarily done online, either through a general search engine

or via a library website. In order to improve the virtual library experience for these scholars, it is first necessary to understand what it is about the physical library that makes it so ideal a setting for serendipity and whether past and current digital libraries are meeting the same expectations. Elaine Toms (1999, 2000) has been investigating the concept of serendipity in libraries for well over a decade.

Investigating a digital environment, Toms' (2000) study consisted of 47 readers looking at a digital newspaper. She gave some of the participants instructions to browse, and others a specific goal of locating information. The screen that the participants were presented with had three areas: one main reading screen with the articles (one by one), one screen which offered a search bar, and one which presented a list of suggestions similar to the article being read. Many of the participants, who were from all walks of life, stated that the various encounters with information were rewarding: those with the browsing task generally seemed to take a less predictable path than those given an

objective. Toms (2000) concludes that digital libraries would benefit from the stimulation of curiosity and the encouragement of exploration. They would also benefit from more user friendly, easily understood links. Toms suggests further research and encourages the implementation of information systems that take a 'fuzzy' approach to problem solving (providing links to further information, rather than a single, direct answer).

Toms and McCay-Peet (2009) conducted another user-focused study of serendipity. Keeping in mind previous studies by Erdelez (2000, 2004), the authors set out to discover how a suggestion system works in the context of browsing for pre-defined answers to tasks. In order to simply observe the task, and exert less control over their participants, the authors studied individuals that were part of a larger research project. Using

WikiSearch, Toms and McCay-Peet (2009) created a Suggested Pages Tool based on a search on the first paragraph of the page that the user was on, minus the top entry (which would obviously be that same page). Each of the 96 participants was asked to perform 12 tasks, in a lab, followed by a post-task questionnaire. The quantitative data were taken from the log files of the tool, while the data from the closed questions were analyzed using SPSS, and the open-ended answers were manually coded and analyzed. Toms and McCay-Peet (2009) found that 40% of the participants used the Suggested Pages tool,

though not all of the users found the tool helpful. The pages did serve to ‘trigger’ the users’ focus away from the task at hand, but participants did not always see this as a value. The authors suggest that the loss of control that the participants felt when moving away from their set task might have created the negative feeling of distraction. These negative feelings linked to distraction might very well have been more positive if the participants were asked to browse for information rather than given a set task. In their discussion, Toms and McCay-Peet note that more research needs to be done on which individuals would intentionally follow links to suggested pages, and how to facilitate this in information systems. Two questions are left for future research: What makes for the best triggering device in search systems? And, what is the best time to introduce these triggers?

Another study that looks at the role of serendipity in the library focuses on the resource discovery tools that are already available in academic libraries. Race (2012) introduces the notion of serendipity, an "accident that creates an opportunity", and its importance to scholars at different phases of their research. In this chapter, Race sets out to test four resource discovery tools (OCLC WorldCat local, Summon, ExLibris, and EBSCO) for different factors (derived from a lengthy literature review) that supports serendipitous search. Race notes the importance of personalizing the search process, and spends some time showing that interactivity between the user and the computer system is likely to help users better realize interconnections. The main strength in Race's (2012) article lies in her summary of web-scale discovery tool features that support serendipity. Here Race

manages to break down the various tenets of serendipity (browsability, hypertext links, visualization of results, etc) and determine whether each of the aforementioned tools supports these features.

Race (2012) concludes that the four tools she examined all support serendipitous search to some extent, but that the 'single search box' offered by these tools might be working against them. A redesign of this feature (which, for Race, may resemble a short answer test) might provide a better starting point for those at the beginning of their academic careers. Finally, Race notes the need for visualization, which three of the four tools she investigates are lacking; to help users more readily establish connections between

materials. The criteria used by Race for understanding and evaluating these discovery systems are useful, and need to be kept in mind for future studies of library serendipity. McCay-Peet’s (2013) doctoral thesis found that serendipitous environments are those that are: 1) trigger-rich, 2) enable connections, and 3) lead to the unexpected. The type of digital environment (e.g., database, social media site) may also influence how frequently users perceive they experience serendipity in that environment. These findings are necessary to keep in mind when investigating historian’s understandings of serendipity, in order to see if these subsections of scholars and professionals studied by McCay-Peet have varying expectations of their research environments. Several articles that have originated from McCay-Peet’s (2013) doctoral work will be discussed at later points in the present thesis.

1.3.2

Research Questions

1) How do historians describe serendipitous experiences?

2) Does the physical environment of the library facilitate the serendipitous encounter?

3) What digital, heuristic forms of serendipity are being used or encouraged by historians?

1.3.3

Methodology

Data for this study were gathered through a series of interviews lasting about 30 to 60 minutes and conducted with 10 professors and 10 graduate students in the history departments of institutions of higher education in Southwestern Ontario from October 2010 to April 2013. Keeping the time frame of data collection in mind is important because every year e-books relevant to history are becoming more readily available, so the findings document the state of affairs at a specific time in the adoption of this technology. Respondents participated in semi-structured interviews, recorded on digital recording devices and later transcribed for coding. As these interviews were an extension of an earlier study (see Martin & Quan-Haase, 2013), the original ethics protocol was extended and posters sent out to history departments as well as emails to department chairs for distribution to faculty email lists.

The first 10 interviews were analyzed and coded using grounded theory and two major themes emerged: 1) descriptions of serendipitous experiences, and 2) a concern on the part of the participants that serendipity was no longer a part of the search process. Once the concept of serendipity emerged, questions were added to the interview guide in order to stimulate discussion on this topic, and to explore the phenomenon of serendipity in more detail. The interview questions were intentionally left open-ended so that

participants could describe their research experiences in their own terms. The interviews remained semi-structured so that the researchers were able to probe further into answers that opened unexpected avenues for discussion (Berg, 2007). Interviews were structured as a conversation and the guide was followed only loosely to guarantee that all topics of relevance were covered. These interviews were then transcribed and coded using the same set of serendipity codes as the first 10 interviews. At the preliminary stage, two phases of coding were completed: the first is “an initial phase involving naming each word, line, or segment of data” and the second is “a focused, selective phase that uses the most significant or frequent initial codes to sort, synthesize, integrate and organize large amounts of data” (Charmaz, 2006, p. 46). Saturation was reached after analyzing the 20 interviews. Saturation in qualitative research is reached when no additional insights are gained from further analysis of the data (Corbin & Strauss, 2008).

1.4

Article Two: “You Don’t Notice What You Aren’t