Leveraging Failure to Inform Practice: How do Students Learn about Library Events and Services?

Abstract

Is it possible for librarians and librarianship to learn from research projects that do not meet expectations or fail outright? This article answers with a resounding “yes” and uses the authors’ experiences developing a “failed” research project to demonstrate how failure can inform practice in valuable ways. The failed project discussed in this article grew out of a desire to understand how students learn about library and university events and services: Are libraries’ attempts to engage with students on the platforms they use effective? To examine this question, the authors used several mechanisms to distribute a survey to students enrolled at the University of Idaho. This effort resulted in a survey response rate of only 0.45 percent of enrolled students. As disheartening as this statistically insignificant response rate was—and recognizing that it is impossible to generalize from such a poor response rate—the authors determined that they could still learn from and leverage the perspectives of a mere 53 student respondents without much risk. This article will share the arc of their research study and detail how they made the best of a failed project by incorporating the new marketing and outreach strategies suggested by students into library social media and outreach practices

Keywords

• Social media
• academic libraries
• students
• events and services
• outreach