College and Research Libraries JEROLD NELSON Faculty Awareness and Attitudes Toward Academic Library Reference Services: A Measure of Coininunication A survey of the faculties at six colleges was undertaken to measure the degree to which the libraries of those institutions were communi- cating with the faculty concerning the availability of various refer- ences services. The results demonstrated that the average faculty member was aware of barely half the services actually available. V ari- ables of academic rank, length of teaching, and amount of library and reference use were some of the factors shown to affect faculty awareness of Ubrary service. CoMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE FACULTY and the academic librarian seriously af- fects the functioning of academic li- brary service. Without adequate com- munication between these parties, the library's goals of educational service cannot be fully realized, the instruction- al and research needs of the faculty cannot be fully realized, the instruction- dent cannot benefit fully from the re- sources for education and enlighten- ment that the academic library has to offer. Whatever the quality and quantity of services provided by the library for faculty and students, those services will lack effectiveness if their availability is not made known. Communication between librarian and patron, although a critical problem, is not extensively covered by the litera- ture of librarianship. Most literature, dealing with this topic, however, only implies the existence of obstacles to ef- fective communication between the aca- I erold Nelson is an assistant professor at the School of Librarianship, University of Washington, Seattle. 268/ demic librarian and the faculty. For ex- ample, Knapp, in her study of one lib- eral arts college library, found a ccwide- spread lack of understanding or, at least, consensus among faculty and staff about what a library can and should contribute to the college-indeed, about what a library is."1 During her work at Monteith College, she indicated that li- brarians in the program were never freely accepted by the teaching faculty as members in the teaching process, a failure she partially blamed on prob- lems of communication.2 De Hart's ex- periment in providing specialized infor- mation services to the faculty did not succeed because librarians and faculty members were unwilling to discard pre- conceptions; some would not even dis- cuss the subject. 3 Schumacher's analysis of a Small College Information System reported that c'faculty ... appear to be generally unaware of current library holdings and services and of how best to make use of (those) facilities and services."4 Leonard and his associates discovered that faculty members at Col- orado colleges and universities fre- Faculty Awareness and Attitudes I 269 quently thought that libraries should make greater efforts to «publicize ser- vices available to faculty (members) . . . and to explain what these services entail."5 Lawson's study of university reference services reported that the li- brary's failure to publicize the availabil- ity of reference activities resulted in limited demands from the faculty for the activities.s Although these cases suggest problems in communication, there exists a lack of evidence necessary to evaluate the extent of such problems, as well as a method to measure levels of faculty-librarian communication. METHODOLOGY Faculty members were questioned about the availa · · of reference ser- vices at their college library· thei knowledge was assumed to be based on direct or indirect communication with librarians at the college. Six institutions were selected from the California sys- tem of state colleges and universities: all had similar academic objectives, sim- ilar levels of resources and formulas for resource allocation, and a similar range of reference services. One thou- sand sixty-seven faculty members, rep- resenting a 30 percent random sample from the full-time faculties of the col- lege, were sent a questionnaire listing thirteen reference services, eleven of which were offered by each of the li- braries on a regular basis (see Table 1). For each service, the respondents were asked to indicate either ( 1) that the ser- vice was available, ( 2) that it was not available, or ( 3) that they did not know the status of its availability. A negative or ~~don't know" response for the eleven available services or a positive or ~~don't know" response for the two services not offered was taken to show inadequate communication between the library and the faculty. Seventy-three percent of the corrected sample returned the questionnaires. 7 Available descriptive characteristics of the respondent and nonrespondent groups, including discipline, academic rank, and years of service at the institu- tion, were compared and tested by the chi-square method. 8 There were no sig- nificant differences and the response was accordingly accepted as a fair represen- tation of the entire sample. Since the distribution of awareness data approxi- mated a normal curve, the mean was se- lected as an appropriate measure of cen- tral tendency. FINDINGS Tabulation of survey data (Table 2) provided the following information. ( 1) The sample's overall mean aware- ness score ( M.A.S.) of 6.2 significantly represented less than half of the thir- teen services listed. 9 ( 2) Faculty from the humanities and from education had a higher level of awareness than faculty from other teaching areas, but their superiority is statistically significant only in compari- son to the science group, which rated lowest. ( 3) According to the data, level of awareness is directly related to faculty rank, although the difference in M.A.S. between full and associate professors was not statistically significant. ( 4) Faculty who indicated at least weekly use of the library's reference services had a higher M.A.S. than those who used the services less frequently. Even a moderate use of reference ser- vices ( 1-2 times per month) produce a greater than average awareness of their availability. The small group with a high level of reference use had a mean awareness that was much higher than any subgroup in the study ( M.A.S. = 7.8). ( 5) The M.A.S. of faculty who had served on at least one committee dealing with library affairs was higher than the M.A.S. of those who had not served. ( 6) Faculty who had been teaching 270 I College & Research Libraries • September 1973 TABLE 1 SuMMARY OF RESPONSES BY FACULTY TO QUESTIONNAIRE ON REFERENCE SERVICES (N = 694) Classification Don't No of Service Reference Service Provided Yes No Know Response % % % % Education- Advice and Assistance in Use of the Library 95 1 4 1 General Library Bulletins and Handbooks 74 10 14 2 Education- Library Instruction for Classes 65 3 31 1 Special Lists of Reference Sources for Specific Classes 17 14 68 1 Bibliographies for General Distribution 38 26 34 2 Information- Vertical Files 40 7 52 1 Materials Interlibrary Borrowing 85 2 13 1 Information- Answer to a Factual Question 61 6 32 1 Questions Answer to a Factual Question-Phone 36 8 55 1 Answer Requiring a Search 22 14 62 1 Answer Requiring Information from Outside the Library 40 9 51 1 Information- Demand Bibliographies (not regularly available) 7 22 70 1 Special Literature Search (not regularly available) 5 21 73 1 TABLE 2 FACULTY MEAN AwARENEss ScoREs (scALE= 0-13) Standard Standard Category Mean Deviation No. Category Mean Deviation No. OVERALL 6.2 BY TEACHING AREA Humanities 6.5 Education 6.5 Applied Arts & Sciences 6.3 Social Sciences 6.1 Sciences 5.6 BY FACULTY RANK Professor 6.9 Associate Professor 6.6 Assistant Professor & Instructor 5.4 BY REFERENCE USE More Than Weekly 7.8 3-4 Times per Month 7.1 1-2 Times per Month 6.7 Rarely or Never 5.3 2.4 2.4 2.5 2.4 2.3 2.7 2.2 2.6 2.2 2.3 2.3 2.3 2.2 663 BY LIBRARY USE More Than Weekly 7.1 2.4 163 3-4 Times per Month 6.4 2.1 108 1-2 Times per Month 5.6 2.3 Rarely or Never 4.2 2.3 134 BY COMMITTEE MEMBERSHIP 161 Members 6.9 2.4 97 Nonmembers 5.9 2.4 BY LENGTH OF SERVICE 209 10 Years or More 7.2 2.1 191 4-9 Years 6.2 2.4 1-3 Years 5.2 2.4 263 BY COLLEGE College A 6.8 2.4 61 College B 6.3 2.4 104 College C 6.2 2.4 207 College D 6.0 2.4 283 College E 5.9 2.4 College F 5.8 2.6 212 206 185 55 237 423 198 293 168 114 172 139 104 76 58 at the college for at least ten years had a higher M.A.S. than those who had taught for a lesser period; level of awareness varied directly with length of service at the college. els. Some libraries in the sample seem to be more effective in communicating the availability of services to their fac- ulty clients. One college, designated here as College A, had a M.A.S. substantially higher than any of the other colleges. Differences in M.A.S. among the other colleges were not statistically significant. ( 7) The data indicated that the six colleges, all similar in function and all under a highly centralized state system, demonstrated a range of awareness lev- In general, the most widely recognized ~ l 1 J J I Faculty Awareness and Attitudes I 271 educational service of the library was the providing of advice and assistance in the use of the library. Ninety-five percent of the respondents were aware that this service was available (see Fig- ure 1). The most widely recognized in- formational service was the interlibrary borrowing activity, with an awareness response of 85 percent. The least widely recognized of the available services was the educational service of providing reference source lists tailored to specific class requirements ( 17 percent) and the informational service of answering questions that require a search for the answer ( 22 percent). Other services ranged widely between the extremes. One variable which accounted for some of the observed variation seems to be level of faculty need. Many faculty feel a more intimate need for the ser- vice of interlibrary borrowing than for lists of reference sources tailored to specific classes for student use, and they inform themselves accordingly. Uni- versality of demand for a service and the ease with which it can be provided also seem to affect awareness. Advice and assistance in the use of the library rates high on both counts. Moreover, a combination of poor communication with a low level of ref- ence activity seems to lower awareness of some services. Self-evident services (see Table 3) -advice and assistance in library use, interlibrary borrowing, and the distribution of library handbooks and bulletins-maintain a higher M.A.S. than do services which require some deliberate act of communication, either as a request for information by the faculty or as an announcement of availability by the library. Although lev- el of need, universality of demand, and ease of provision, complicate the effect of this distinction by communication, the evidence furnishes at least minimal support for the inference that as an act of communication becomes more of a requirement, knowledge of the avail- ability of a service tends to diminish. That inference, in turn, supports the basic premise of the investigation, that communication is less than adequate be- tween the faculty and librarians in aca- demic institutions. The findings also revealed the relative degree to which the various colleges suc- ceeded in communicating the availabil- ity of the services they claimed to offer: each library had special success in com- municating certain services. Table 4 in- dicates that College A, with the highest M.A.S., ranked from first to fourth among the colleges with respect to awareness of individual services. Col- lege F, with the lowest M.A.S., in one case achieved a tie for a highest aware- ness ranking, and it ranked second in awareness for another service. College B, with the second highest M.A.S., ranked sixth in four of the eleven cate- gories. This information seems to sug- gest that the libraries tended to empha- size various categories of service. Facul- ty members at College A were particu- larly aware of all the services that fell into the category of providing informa- tion. Its library and reference staff seem to have been active in promoting what Rothstein has called a maximum level of reference service.10 The survey also furnished informa- tion about faculty attitudes toward the. utility of the services listed. Respon- dents were asked to indicate the degree to which they considered each service to be desirable, whether they thought the service was currently available or not. A majority of respondents expressed a favorable attitude toward each of the available services (see Table 5). Faculty members were least likely to react favor- ably to the specialized information ser- vices not currently being offered by the libraries on a regular basis, and toward the provision of lists of reference sources for their classes. Marginal com- ments appended to some questionnaires further explained the nature of facul- 272 I College & Research Libraries • September 1973 I I I I I I l I I I Advice and Assistance in Library Use I Handbooks and Bulletins I Specialized Instruction in Use of the Library I Reference I Sources Bibliographies for Distribution Answer to Factual Question I Answer to Factual Question J -Phone Answer Requiring! a Search Search Outside the Library Vertical Files Interlibrary Borrowing I 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Fig. 1 Overall Faculty Awareness of Eleven Available Services ( N = 694) TABLE 3 CLASSIFICATION OF REFERENCE SERviCES BY MoDE OF CoMMUNICATION Classification of Service SELF -EVIDENT SERVICES Basic Services Services Made Self-Evident by Distribution at Library Service Points SERVICES WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT BE SELF-EVIDENT SERVICES WHICH REQUIRE AN ACT OF COMMUNICATION TO ANNOUNCE THEIR AVAILABILITY Category of Service Level of Awareness % Advice and Assistance in the Use of the Library 95 Interlibrary Borrowing Service 85 Library Bulletins and Handbooks 7 4 Bibliographies for General Distribution 38 Maintenance of Pamphlet and Other Vertical Files 40 Library Instruction for Classes 65 Answer to a Factual Question 61 Answer Requiring Information from Outside the Library 40 Answer to a Factual Question-Phone 36 Answer Requiring a Search 22 Lists of Reference Sources for Specific Classes 17 ty objections to certain services. The ob- jections centered around two points. ( 1) Several respondents considered the ques- tion of the cost versus the potential ben- efit of specialized services. c'I could agree on all the above cshoulds' if the budget were no problem." c'If I were to complete this questionnaire to reflect my desires rather than my realistic assess- ment of the current library and budget- I .. Faculty Awareness and Attitudes I 273 TABLE 4 AwARENESS OF INDIVIDUAL SERVICES-BY COLLEGE By Rank By Percentage Over- Service A B c D E F A B c D E F all % % % % % % % Advice and Assistance ., 2 1 5 3 6 95 96 97 93 95 90 95 0 Bulletins and Handbooks 4 3 1 5 6 1 64 82 85 63 59 85 74 Library Instruction for Classes 1 5 3 6 2 4 74 59 70 58 71 60 65 Lists of Reference Sources for Classes 4 5 2 3 1 5 16 13 20 18 21 13 17 Bibliographies for Distribution 3 1 6 5 4 2 31 60 25 27 28 53 38 Answer to a Factual Question 1 6 3 2 4 4 76 53 58 68 55 55 61 Answer to a Factual Question-Phone 1 6 5 4 2 3 48 28 34 36 39 37 36 Answer Requiring a Search 1 6 3 5 2 4 37 16 21 19 24 20 22 Answer Requiring Information from Outside the Library 1 6 2 3 5 4 60 33 38 37 34 35 40 Vertical Files 1 2 3 3 5 6 48 46 41 41 26 25· 40 Interlibrary Borrowing 1 2 5 3 3 6 96 87 80 83 83 75 85 TABLE 5 SuMMARY OF ATTITUDE REsPONSES TO INDIVIDUAL SERVICES ( N = 668) Favorable Unfavorable No Classification Service Attitude Attitude Response % % % Education-General Advice and Assistance 89 1 10 Bulletins and Handbooks 87 5 8 Education-Special Library Instruction for Classes 81 10 9 Lists of Reference Sources for Classes 54 38 8 Bibliographies for Distribution 66 26 8 Information-Materials Vertical Files 70 20 10 Interlibrary Borrowing 89 2 9 Information-Questions Answer to a Factual Question 81 11 8 Answer to a Factual Question-Phone 71 21 8 . Answer Requiring a Search 60 31 9 Answer Requiring Information from 77 14 9 Outside the Library Information-Special Demand Bibliographies (not regularly 45 48 7 available) Literature Search (not regularly available) 43 50 7 ary situation . . ." "I would like to have these services, but when it comes to money to pay for them, I would rather put the money into other things. . . ." ( 2) Others questioned the capability of the librarian to satisfy their serious in- formation needs. "I feel only the user can discriminate and select.'' "The re- searcher should be (looking up specific questions) for he has the judgment to interpret the information." "I work conducted by library reference people as being complete ... .'' would not trust any bibliographic . . . Despite these kinds of reservations, however, the number of people who ap- proved of a service was larger than the number who had known the service was already available for every service ex- cept the basic activity of providing as- sistance in the use of the library. The minimal inference to be drawn from this is that for nearly every service, there were individuals who desired the 274 I College & Research Libraries • September 1973 service without knowing that it was al- ready being offered. SuMMARY AND CoNCLUSION This study demonstrates that the aver- age faculty member who responded to the questionnaire was aware of only 50 percent of the reference services avail- able to him from his college library. Variables of academic rank, length of service at the college, service on commit- tees dealing with library affairs, and amount of library and reference use were all related directly to degree of awareness. Slll'Drisipg~sts showed a relatively low level of aware- ness. n tive estimates of potential friends for the library among members of the faculty have usually rated social scientists highly.11 Follow-up interviews with a small sample of respondents did suggest that social scientists tended to be more critical of librarians' perform- ance than were faculty members from the humanities; it was not clear, how- ever, whether their dissatisfaction re- sulted from a higher level of informa- tion need and expectation or whether librarians actually performed less com- petently in the area of the social sci- ences. Although academic libraries which are closely related in mission and in re- source allocation might tend to define and to execute their responsibilities in similar fashion, an exceptional institu- tion, with the same resources and con- straints, may demonstrate the capacity to discharge its defined responsibilities with greater effectiveness. In this case, the library of College A indicated a spe- cial capacity for successful communica- tion with the faculty, a capacity that cannot be explained simply in terms of greater resources. The analysis of aware- ness of individual services (Table 4) in- dicated that the library of College A was also more successful than others in promoting information services requir- ing maximum level of reference ser- vice. Furthermore, it was more success- ful in bringing to the attention of the faculty those services requiring commu- nication to be announced. Follow-up in- terviews indicated that College A librar- ians were the most active of the group in book selection and collection develop- ment, and both librarians and faculty interviewees agreed that this was an im- portant common concern. Both faculty members and librarians from College A spoke enthusiastically of a tradition of public service that had been promot- ed by the library administration from the time the college had been founded. Finally, librarians from College A seemed to display a higher degree of personal initiative than did other librar- ians in establishing and in maintaining contact with faculty members. Although College A did appear to be most effective in promoting awareness for the low visibility services, certain services were still not well known at any of the colleges, particularly those ser- vices surpassing the superficial and the commonplace. This low level of aware- ness has partially been a product of a low level of library activity in providing specific services energetically on a day- to-day basis. Also, low awareness has probably been the result of a low level of faculty confidence in the competence of librarians. With emphasis on the low awareness services, it seems that librar- ians have not realized the potential available to them for communication and for consistent and confident per- formance. Given the range of responsibilities of many academic reference librarians, such realization is no easy task. The problem is complicated by those aca- demic library administrators who have assigned low priority to questions of communication, and even to questions of public service, in their genuine (and justified) concern for the acquisition and organization of the masses of in- formation that are currently threaten- J '~ I , j .j 1 .. Faculty Awareness and Attitudes I 275 ing to overwhelm us. The result seems to be that some academic libraries are slighting a share of their responsibility to the individual client who is the ulti- mate rationale for most of the library's activities. In this study, the faculty has indicat- ed that it desires a full range of ser- vices. If the library is to maintain and enlarge services, librarians must be pre- pared and encouraged to exercise initia- tive in using more library resources to promote available services as well as to provide them consistently, competently, and vigorously. A first step should be to establish channels to communicate the availability of services to the faculty. The principal burden of responsibility for that communication resides with the academic library and its corps of librari- ans. REFERENCES 1. Patricia B. Knapp, College Teaching and the College Library (Chicago: American Library Association, 1959), p.93 ( ACRL Monograph No. 23). 2. --, The Monteith CoUege Library Ex- periment (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1966)' p.30-32. 3. Florence De Hart, "The Application of Special Library Services and Techniques to the College Library," CRL 27:152 (March 1966). 4. Anne W. Schumacher, A Small College In- formation System: An Analysis and Rec- ommendations (St. Paul: Hamline Univer- sity, 1968), p.III-2. 5. Lawrence E. Leonard, et al., Centralized Book Processing: A Feasibility Study Based on Colorado Academic Libraries (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1969), p.220. 6. A. Venable Lawson, Reference Service in University Libraries: Two Case Studies (Dissertation, Columbia University, 1969), p.293. 7. The original sample of 112 faculty mem- bers no longer qualified as part of the sur- vey population, usually because they had left the college during the preceding year. 8. All tests of statistical significance were car- ried out at an alpha level of .05. 9. This finding is less conclusive than it might have been because of complications intro- duced by the two services on the list not regularly offered by the libraries. It is like- ly that some respondents did receive those services on an individual basis and were therefore justified in providing an affirma- tive answer with respect to them. A retabu- lation excluding responses to the two ser- vices in question produced an overall M.A.S. or just over 50 percent ( M.A.S. = 5.8 on a scale of 0-11 ). 10. Rothstein, "Reference Service: The New Dimension in Librarianship," in Reference Services ( Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1964), p.40. 11. See, for example, Knapp's recent suggestion that social scientists might be singled out as being particularly sympathetic toward working with librarians to provide educa- tion in the use of the library for students. She suggests that many social sciences rely heavily on the library as a source for data and they also do not often have indepen- dent programs for developing library com- petence for their students. Knapp, "The Li- brary, the Undergraduate and the Teaching Faculty," a paper presented at an Institute on Training for Service in Undergraduate Libraries, sponsored by the University Li- brary, University of California, San Diego, August 17-21, 1970. Available from ERIC (Ed 042 475).