Higher education librarians are comfortable and confident with their teaching responsibilities and pedagogical knowledge

Abstract

Objective - The primary objective of this study was to gather quantitative information on the need, development, acquisition, and application of pedagogical knowledge by academic librarians with teaching responsibilities. Design - Online survey questionnaire. Setting - Higher-education (HE) institutions (i.e., post-secondary institutions such as colleges and universities) in the United Kingdom. Subjects - Subject librarieans from 82 HE libraries (One from each). Methods - Of the 191 HE institutions in the United Kingdom (determined via a now-unavailable directory), 137 supplied an online staff directory with contact information. One subject librarian from each HE institution was contacted; librarians were selected from the online directory by taking a name systematically from a different point in each listing (i.e., first, second, third, etc). Each librarian was sent an email that contained an introductory message as well as a link to the questionnaire. The online questionnaire was created using Survey Monkey and piloted before and after input. It employed mostly multiple-choice tick boxes as well as open-ended questions and comment boxes. The 35-question survey questionnaire was developed in part through email interviews with two leading researchers in the field (identified via the literature). Responses were received from 82 librarians (60%). The answers were analyzed and cross-tabulated using SPSS. Komogorov-Smirnov tests were done to determine the significance of some results. Open-ended questions and comment boxes were placed into categories using Microsoft Excel to identify patters and themes. Main Results - The 82 librarians who responded to the survey came from a wide variety of backgrounds: the majority were subject librarians from Arts & Humanities (31%), had spent more than ten years in their position (38%), worked full-time (71%), were members of pre-1992 HE institutions (59%), and went by the job title of Subject Librarian (30%) (or a slight variation thereof).