Reflection Log 4

OK, so I'm a week late on this one. Sorry... Comps and other life stress stuff. I won't bore you with the details.

Anyway, last week's readings were about experimental and qualitative/evaluation research. I liked Sharon Baker's article about experimental research. It's interesting to learn what can and can't be trusted in library experiments. The reference question experiment is one I've heard of before but the others were pretty interesting. I think it's especially interesting how males and females differ in their interpretation of others' behavior, well at least in the reference experiment example. I also found the notion of internal and external validity in library experiments very interesting. It would seem to me that both would be very hard to establish in library experiments, although external would definitely be more difficult, if not impossible.

The other article was about evaluating items and services for inclusion or exclusion in a library collection. I never had to take Collection Development, even though my specialization is academic libraries (I know!), so I thought this article might be a useful one for me to hang on to in case I need to know about these things for my job someday. Anyway, it seems like a good idea to know what questions to ask and how to keep all the other factors in mind that might influence decision making. A lot of the information in this article reminded me of stuff I learned in management class - planning, evaluation, mission, goals, that type of thing.