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Developing Research 
Training Services at 
Asbury Seminary
Wesley D. Custer 
Director of Instructional Services  
Asbury Theological Seminary

ABSTR ACT Research training services at Asbury Seminary have been 
under development for many years and have been provided by several 
different librarians through those years. This presentation covered 
who our patrons are in terms of demographics and degree programs. 
The discussion then turned to their needs for information literacy and 
research training in both information access and methodologies for 
research. Finally, we discussed new strategies for engaging patrons, 
including faculty engagement and curriculum assessment standards 
that push the issue of information literacy and research training into the 
curriculum.

INTRODUCTION 

Thinking about this topic has been a focus of my reflection for the past 
year and a half. I have come to some conclusions about how I think 
research training can be implemented within the seminary. Before 
we get there, I want to describe our patrons. Then I will discuss the 
needs of our patrons—both felt and real needs. We will then talk about 
what Asbury Seminary has been doing for the past several years about 
research training. Finally, I will look at what the dream is and how we 
move forward from here. 



148  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

DEFINING OUR PATRONS 

Figure 1: All images come from the Asbury Seminary Fact Sheet 
https://asburyseminary.edu/wp-content/uploads/quick-facts.pdf1

Who are our patrons? Asbury Theological Seminary has 1710 students 
spread between MDiv, MA and then ThM, DMin, and PhD programs. We 
also have many who are certificate-seeking students, both graduate 
certificates and lay-level certificates (see Figure 1). Due to the varied 
educational goals of our students, their needs are equally varied. 
Geographically, our students come from forty-one countries around 
the world while at the same time, 51% of our student body are clas-
sified as local students proximate to Wilmore (see Figure 2). Even 
that statistic can be misleading because our local housing is just far 
enough away that our students engage with the library online more 
than they do in person. This number also includes students who are 
primarily hybrid students commuting in to campus for most of their 
courses. 

https://asburyseminary.edu/wp-content/uploads/quick-facts.pdf


Listen and Learn  149

Figure 2: 

Our students are fairly diverse. In addition to the forty-one countries 
represented, Eighty-four denominations are represented among the 
student body. Thirty-seven-point-four percent of students are female 
and 44.2% self-identify as other than white/Caucasian. The ages of 
our students are fairly evenly spread from 20s to 60s. (See Figure 3 
for these numbers.)

Figure 3:



150  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

As you can see in Figure 4, the faculty is predominantly white, Cauca-
sian, and male. The 147 adjunct instructors show more diversity of 
origin and perspective, representing seven different countries. 

Figure 4: 

Most of our students are seeking education for engagement in parish 
ministry. They are all more likely to engage online even though they 
cannot finish a degree online alone. They may fulfill these non-online 
requirements at one of our extension locations or through short inten-
sive instruction sessions on site. 

When a student engages with the library they normally need basic 
information literacy. Instruction in this area is largely merely engag-
ing with the library catalog and the online databases. They do not 
understand the difference between natural and controlled vocabu-
lary nor do they understand the concept of indexing. Those issues 
are usually as far as our research instruction is able to go. Students 
seem to be confident in their own ability to conduct their research 
once they understand how to locate the information they think they 
are looking for. Occasionally, I am able to spend some time help-
ing the student hone their topic and their research question. Those 
opportunities are too rare, and we rarely make it to the finer points of 
research methodology. 

We do have a writing center, which is a likely resource for help-
ing them with the finer points of writing up their research report or 



Listen and Learn  151

simply honing their grammar and expression. I feel like this is a bit 
of a luxury and if we did not have this resource, I would be working on 
that too or referring our students to outside consultants. 

BASIC STUDENT ASSUMPTIONS: 

I am certain that we have seen all of these: 1) They assume that 
research is just finding resources and that is all. 2) They assume that 
finding resources is just like Google. 3) They also assume that a good 
topic is “I want to research St. Augustine.” 4) They also assume that 
the library is there to simply give them information and not teach 
them anything. “Give me what I want when I want it and I’ll move on” 
is the mentality. 5) They also assume that they know what the research 
process is. 

As Seneca the Younger is often paraphrased, ”If you don’t know to 
which harbor you are sailing, no wind is favorable.” If the student does 
not know how to frame their topic or if they don’t know the research 
method and/or their methodology that they are following, nothing that 
we give them is truly a favorable “wind.” I might suggest that infor-
mation is more like the water through which one sails rather than the 
wind that drives the boat forward. 

Students need to know what they are looking for, why it is the right 
information, and how to find it, not just how to find information. The 
skill of finding information seems to be the main focus of my and my 
predecessors’ instruction, and that is sad. 

In many cases the basic need is framing a good research question. 
Then the student needs to answer the question: What kind of data is 
needed to answer this research question? Being able to delimit their 
data set and their research method and methodologies is the missing 
link in library instruction. 

Many instruction resources focus on collecting and analyzing data 
as well as evaluation of the data source to determine its quality. This is 
necessary and important, but it is useless without well-defined meth-
ods and research goals. Then the student must write their research 
report! This poses its own difficulties and there are unique skills 
involved in meeting these needs. Developing a good thesis statement 
after researching or finding information is the first step. 

Students regularly only turn to librarians when they need to polish 



152  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

their bibliography, but a bibliography is such a small (yet important) 
part of the writing process.

What tools have we been using? Well, we have the usual suspects—
LibGuides and appointments both in the library and online. The 
LibGuides are good. They were written by those who came before 
me and they are fine. I find them lacking, however, the guidance and 
instruction needed to move students forward in their scholarship. 
Appointments are good, and they allow us to develop relationships 
with students. However, it is not scalable to provide one-on-one 
instruction to 1700+ students. 

For example, when a DMin student is working on their literature 
review they suddenly learn that they do not know how to find infor-
mation, and regularly they do not know what information they need 
to look for. 

Something relatively recent in the tool box is being able to meet 
with faculty to discuss the tools they had available to them at an 
extension site. One faculty member included in his online course 
and his short face-to-face interactions with the class encouragement 
for them to have an appointment with me. 

We have the luxury of a writing center to assist students with their 
writing. We also have an online ticket system combined with Infor-
mation Technology support to allow us to handle all requests in a 
unified system. 

Our departments merged in January of 2019 to become Library, 
Information, and Technology Services. This combination of services 
has resulted in a new kind of synergy in our services. Library person-
nel are working hard to learn how to answer even more tier one 
support services. 

DREAMING OF THE FUTURE

One strategy that we have discovered includes integrating LibGuides 
into our learning management system, Canvas. It can integrate a 
LibGuide into courses and it allows you to map every course to its 
own LibGuide if you choose. However, there are too many courses to 
make it possible to build individual LibGuides for each course. It is 
more feasible to build them for each discipline, but that still requires 
more specialized expertise than might be practical. So our strategy 



Listen and Learn  153

has become to build a single LibGuide that links to major resources. 
In the end, at least it embeds resources into Canvas. 

Meeting with faculty is, perhaps, the best marketing. A faculty 
member teaching a course in Tulsa came and met with me, concerned 
that sufficient resources were available to his students there. We were 
able to establish that there were indeed enough resources for his 
students online and that they could set up a meeting with me to coach 
them through using the resources if they needed it. This proved very 
useful to some of the students and minorly useful to others. Regard-
less, this was the best engagement of a single class that I have seen 
in several years. 

Collaborative resources written with the writing center would be 
very helpful. Our research guide is not bad, but it is really built for a 
university and was based on that level of material. So, it is perhaps 
adequate but for graduate work we need to go deeper. This is where 
working with our writing center would be most helpful. They are 
uniquely equipped to build resources to help students succeed in 
their writing. 

Perhaps faculty could embed library needs or information liter-
acy needs into their assignments or courses. This strategy starts to 
influence curriculum and instruction, which can prove difficult or 
impossible for many libraries. However, the end result would greatly 
outweigh the effort. We need faculty to encourage and require their 
students to actually use information in their work and this needs to 
be information outside of their required texts and lectures. The skills 
involved in doing so are the kind of general skills that will serve our 
graduates greatly the rest of their lives!

CURRICULUM ENGAGEMENT

Until the curriculum is assessed based on student learning in informa-
tion literacy and research skills the academy is going to fail students 
in these areas. I am convinced that assessment standards have to 
be in place to force the issue of information literacy and research 
throughout the curriculum. There is a common saying that people 
do what is counted, right? If we have to report or have accountability 
for something, there is a natural human tendency to work to report 
positively in those areas. 



154  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

This will require influence in curriculum-level decisions that build 
assessment standards in our institutions. This may prove to be an 
uphill battle, so to speak, but I think it is worth it. Perhaps this would be 
a good starting point for an assessment goal or learning outcome: The 
student will be able to determine an appropriate research method, 
determine what information is needed for the research question and 
method being used, access the desired information effectively and 
efficiently, evaluate the information critically, use the information 
effectively, and understand the legal and ethical implications in the 
use of said information.

No, that is not the perfect way to express this, but it is a start. How 
could this be assessed? Well, there are several possibilities. One would 
be building a series of assessment rubrics into your learning manage-
ment system and mapping them to this goal. Another would be devel-
oping a juried assessment of a capstone project to determine how well 
students are integrating these skills into their learning and academic 
work. There are other ways to do this, but these are a good start. 

I encourage all of you to start these conversations, keep pushing for 
better information literacy and research skill development through-
out the curriculum, and never give up hope that change can occur!

ENDNOTES

1 Asbury Theological Seminary, “Quick Facts: Seminary at a 
Glance, 2018-2019,” Asbury Seminary website, 2019, https://
asburyseminary.edu/wp-content/uploads/quick-facts.pdf.


