ACRL announces forthcoming title: “Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester”

CHICAGO – The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is pleased to announce a forthcoming publication, “Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester.” This book provides a view into the groundbreaking application of ethnographic tools and techniques to the understanding of undergraduate students and their use of information.

The publication describes findings of the work at the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries and provides insight into how academic librarians might use these techniques on their own campuses.

Editors Dr. Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons have gathered a set of chapters written by their colleagues covering different aspects of the work done in this project. Foster is research associate of Anthropology at the University of Rochester and lead anthropologist and manager of the Digital Initiatives Unit at the River Campus Libraries. She began working with the University of Rochester Libraries to explore how anthropological methods might be applied to the study of academic library users to enhance the development of library programs and services. Gibbons is the associate dean for Public Services & Collection Development at the University of Rochester, River Campus Libraries.

Ron Dow, The Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester, said of the project, “This book recounts the efforts of librarians at the University of Rochester, working under the tutelage of a professional anthropologist, to describe in detail the process students actually employ when writing research papers. The librarians, as an outcome of this study, developed new methods to engage undergraduates around the writing process so that the students might become more adept as researchers and better capable of meeting their faculty's expectations for a research paper submission.”

The book will be published in September 2007 and will be available in both a soft-cover print edition and an open access downloadable format.

ACRL is a division of the American Library Association, representing 13,500 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. ACRL is the only individual membership organization in North America that develops programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians. Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role that academic libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments.

Publication date: September 2007.

Pre-order Information will be available August 13, 2007 at http://www.acrl.org; select "publications."

ACRL announces forthcoming title: “Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester