Piled Higher and Deeper

If you're interested, here's the current version of my statement of research interests for my PhD application. What do you think? Useful to the profession? Silly? Full of typos?

WDT
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Statement of Research Interests and Career Goals
Whitney E. Davison-Turley
November 2005

How do libraries measure their impact? How do we measure and express our value? This question is becoming more important as libraries of all types face increasing resource competition, and simply reporting statistics like the number of children at story time, total annual circulation, or number of database hits does not at all represent what it is modern libraries do for and mean to the groups we serve.

I want to focus my research on ways in which we can make our impact more clear, drawing on quantitative and qualitative strategies from librarianship and the social sciences as well as business, health care, and education. In my current position at an academic medical center, the question may involve providing mobile information resources for students. Do the students who use the resources get better grades on rotations or do better on their exams? Can we determine long-term if this makes them better doctors? And the next important question: if there is some difference, is the involvement of a librarian at all important? Similar questions can be asked of almost any library service provided at any library. What is the true, endpoint impact of what we do?

I hope through my research to explore assessment and evaluation of this kind of endpoint impact, and to develop processes that librarians of all kinds can use. We experience our value in the smile of a child at story time, as a thank you from a student, or as an acknowledgment in a research article; how can we encode that value into quantifiable statements of “this is how I improved the world today and this is why it is important”?

Completing a PhD will allow me to pursue three career goals: first, it will provide the credential I need for promotion as I eventually hope to become a library director, and a PhD is a requirement for advancement to that level. However, the PhD will also allow me to teach; some of my most rewarding professional experiences have been teaching other librarians, and I want to find a way to integrate teaching into my professional life even as I plan to move up in library management. Finally, pursing a PhD will provide me with the rationale and the support structure to produce research which I sincerely hope will be of value to the profession. I have seen repeated need for this kind of assessment data and evaluation planing across library types, and I have a strong desire to contribute in this area.