Arts & Humanities Council Meeting of May 7, 2020 Via Zoom

10:00-11:30am

Facilitator: J. OttMinutes: V. Shih

Attending: Jan Carter, Lynn Cunningham, Manuel Erviti, David Faulds, Frank Ferko, Ruth Haber, Mohamed Hamed, Jianye He, Chan Li (guest speaker), Adnan Malik, Toshie Marra, Steve Mendoza, Jeremy Ott (facilitator), Scott Peterson, Claude Potts, Stacy Reardon, Abby Scheel, John Shepard, Virginia Shih (recorder), and Susan Xue.

Announcements

Jeremy Ott announced that Yasemin Agis, cataloger from The Bancroft Library has decided to join the Arts and Humanities Council as a new member.

Scott Peterson announced that Madison Nelson was selected as the recipient of the 2020 Art Practice & Library Printmaking award. This award is given by the Art Practice Department and the Library to one or two undergraduate students each year who have distinguished themselves in the art of printmaking.

Mohamed Hamed announced that there will be two workshops hosted by the LAUC-B Committee on Diversity: Microaggression in the third week of May 2020, and Implicit Bias in the first week of June 2020. Workshop details will be announced later.

Conversation about the Ithaka survey results in relation to Arts and Humanities, and International and Area Studies (Chan Li, M. Hamed, A. Malik, J. Ott, L. Pendse, C. Potts)

Mohamed started with an outline of the presentations by members of the Arts and Humanities Assessment (AHA) Group: Discovery and Access (Mohamed), Research Dissemination and Publication (Jeremy), Research Practices and Format Preferences (Adnan and Liladhar), Role of the Library (Mohamed), and Teaching and Learning (Claude).

The AHA Group studied the survey last year and what it meant to arts and humanities and area studies compared to social sciences and the overall UC Berkeley faculty survey. The Group looked for any surprising data for Arts and Humanities and analyzed the findings.

Chan Li was invited as a guest speaker to offer an overview of the Ithaka survey. In October 2018, the UC Berkeley Library sent out the Ithaka survey to 2,748 faculty members across all disciplines (including professors, associate professors, assistant professors, lecturers, and instructors). Only 811 faculty (30% of the total) responded to the survey. The survey results formed the library analysis and findings were further analyzed by discipline, job group, rank, and years of experience in the field. The response rate for Arts and Humanities was 51% which is the highest among other subject disciplines of the survey findings; overall, in fact, the survey results may be said to be dominated by responses from Arts and Humanities faculty. Further analyses were conducted on Tableau's analytics platform to understand the survey data visually.

Chan Li reported that the Library discussed the survey findings at the Library Roundtable and the next phase of the post-survey action plan. On 14 November 2019, the Library organized a staff open forum led by the Associate University Librarians and program leads to discuss the survey questions grouped under six topics: Discovery and Access, Research Data Management, Research Practices and Format Preferences, Publishing, Teaching and Learning, and the Role of the Library. The Library staff open forum provided a survey framework that aimed at identifying three areas of possible actions: actions to communicate, actions to adapt, and actions to assess. Library staff offered questions and brainstormed ideas that were recorded in a spreadsheet by topic for the Library to discuss them at the Library Roundtable. The Library will focus on priority items of the survey framework and follow up on them in the near future. Many great ideas are put on hold in the parking lot at the moment with no further action due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Chan Li mentioned that the graduate student survey was administered by the Graduate Division in February and March 2020. The survey was sent to 2,710 graduate students and 1,196 students responded. The survey includes four library related questions (service, space, eBooks and discovery). The Library will share the findings after the analyses are completed. The same set of library related questions are also included in the UC Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES), which is in progress now.

The AHA Group presented the following findings by topic based on the Ithaka survey questions:

Discovery and Access (Mohamed)

In this section, faculty were asked a couple of questions related to how they discover and access resources. From their answers, AH faculty rely on specific databases as well as the library catalog more than faculty in other disciplines. Google scholar was not popular for AH faculty as it is for Social sciences or faculty university-wide.

To keep current with research in the field, AH faculty match the top selections for faculty university-wide. Most of them read materials suggested by other scholars in the field, follow the work of key scholars in the field, and attend conferences or workshops. However, AH faculty value other tactics to keep current of research in the field such as skimming new issues of key journals, and reading book reviews. These later tactics were less valued in other disciplines, especially reading book reviews.

For materials that they are routinely using, AH faculty match the university wide faculty in the value of the Library collections, then materials that are freely available. After that, AH faculty value their personal collections, then collections available in other institutions. Other faculty, university wide, less value these later venues.

When access to specific materials is not immediately available, AH faculty rely on freely available materials, then to use interlibrary loan. 61% of AH faculty respondents rely on inter-library loan vs. 38% faculty, university-wide. Also AH faculty purchase their own materials more than other faculty, university-wide do. In addition, it is interesting to see that a very low percentage of AH faculty give up if they do not have immediate access to resources they need.

Research Dissemination and Publication (Jeremy)

AH faculty publish heavily in both peer-reviewed journals and scholarly monographs, and in the case of the latter publish far more frequently (often: 70% of respondents) than any other division. Like other divisions, wide circulation and high impact factor are the two most important factors when considering a journal for article publication. Interestingly, "no cost to publish" is considered much more important (strong feeling: 71% of respondents) than for other divisions and may reflect limited sources of funding for publication in AH, and also relatively low or non-existent costs to publish already in place for many AH journals.

Although nearly one third of responding AH faculty who publish books state that they have uploaded them to eScholarship, and half of AH faculty who publish journal articles claim to have done so, they are more interested in reaching their peers in academia, and to a lesser degree non-academic professionals related to their research interests, than the public at large, and rank lowest amongst divisions in strongly believing that 1. enabling the broadest possible readership is important 2. societal impact should be a key measure of research performance and 3. an open access publication system should replace the traditional subscription based model. On the other hand, there is moderate interest within AH for making publications accessible to developing nations, although this varies widely from one department to another all the way from 0 to 100% of responding faculty. AH responses to many other questions within the "Research Dissemination and Publication" section of the survey likewise display major variability by department, and extreme care should therefore be taken in interpreting the survey's general results in regard to the interests and needs of specific departments.�

Research Practices and Format Preferences (Adnan, Liladhar)

Please note that 51% (232) of A and H faculty (total A and H faculty surveyed= 459) responded (figure 2 p.9). This number represents 8.4% of the total university faculty to whom the survey was sent out.

� 84 % of A and H respondents feel strongly that print versions of scholarly monographs play a significant role in their research and teaching. AH faculty think it is easier to read in-depth a book cover to cover in print. However, 47% of the respondents regularly read e-books, and 35% do so occasionally, with some faculty using e-books more often. 76% of faculty strongly agree with access to a broader range of scholarly e-books would be valuable to them.

� Print pros: more usable, ease of comparison of multiple sources, higher quality image reproduction, lack of digital availability in some fields, importance of maintaining a physical record of scholarship. Digital pros: ease of searching, the importance of online journals, and portability of digitized source material.

� For e-books, AH faculty respondents want enhanced functionality (navigation within and between monographs, highlighting, annotation, computational analysis, etc.).

� 80% of the AH faculty respondents deem digitized primary sources to be very important for research and teaching. Films and images are most important to AH faculty.

� 94% of AH faculty respondents view peer-reviewed journals as necessary, and 95% of respondents (the highest among all divisions) also see as critical scholarly monographs and edited volumes published by academic publishers.

� 59% of AH faculty respondents find published conference proceedings to be most important.

Role of the Library (Mohamed)

Librarians are very important to more than three quarters of AH faculty. The librarians' category ranks number four after faculty, teaching assistants, and peers. In addition, AH faculty highly value all the Library functions, and in most of the cases, AH faculty respondents gave higher values to the Library functions compared to faculty university-wide. Related to that, most of AH faculty (92%) agreed that the university should direct more funds to the Library to meet the price increase of resources.

Teaching and Learning (Claude)

The final report summarized that more than half of faculty who teach undergraduate courses in the Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences feel that their students lack good skills related to locating and evaluating scholarly information. However, faculty in A&H are much more likely to view librarians as significantly contributing to the success of their students in finding information and helping them to develop their research skills compared to the other fields. In teaching and research primary source materials such as archival materials, historical newspapers, manuscripts, or images, particularly in physical form, remain a much more vital source of information for all A&H disciplines. Percentage-wise but not in the number of responses, there has been slightly less uptake in the creation of open educational resources or use of learning analytic tools for courses than the other three divisions.

Questions and Comments

Why did arts and humanities faculty purchase personal collections or subscriptions? The faculty personal collecting could be situational depending on their department, discipline or individual interest.

A few area studies members shared some of their work experience with their faculty:

Faculty enjoy 24/7 access to personal collections at home or in office and convenient access to their academic department library for ready reference or language teaching needs.
Faculty prefer to have personal copies at hand when working on translation projects.
Faculty prefer to make personal annotations in their home and office collection. There are special areas of collecting interest that they cannot rely on the library for collecting.
Faculty purchase their own copies since some library holdings are library use only.
Senior faculty prefer to read print books cover to cover.
47 % of arts and humanities faculty read e-books regularly but they share their concerns about the usability of eBooks platform which is not user-friendly.
Only 22% of Arts and Humanities faculty received external funding for research. This could be a factor that they need to build their personal collections.
There are not many eBooks available in arts and humanities as an option compared to other disciplines.
There are not enough library copies of high demand items to meet our users' needs.
It is time-consuming for the Library to order foreign language materials overseas and process them promptly for users' access.
Ongoing library backlog delays timely discovery and delivery of foreign language materials.

Would the Library assess e-resources trends to see how the usage for certain publishers and certain platforms varies when access to physical collections are unavailable especially during the Library closure?

Chan Li responded that the Library is looking at e-publisher packages offered by Elsevier, Springer, Taylor and Francis, and Project Muse. The report will include up-to-date monthly data analysis on a subject by subject basis and call number range. Selectors are welcome to contact her if they wish to include more e-packages or e-platforms that they know of in the library analysis report.

Please note that Mohamed postponed his presentation on "Area Studies Faculty at Berkeley: An Analysis for Selected Questions from Ithaka Survey" to the next meeting in order to save some time for questions and discussions about the survey presentations.

The following reports will be postponed to the next meeting of the Council due to lack of time.

Function Council reports

Cataloging & Metadata Council (A. Malik)
Collection Development Leadership Group (A. Scheel)
Collection Services Council (M. Hamed and S. Reardon)
Public Services Council (S. Mendoza)
Roundtable Update (A. Scheel)
Web Advisory Group (M. Erviti)
Assessment Advisory Group (M. Hamed)