ReferencesResearch and Evaluation for Information Professionals. By Robert M. Losee, Jr. and Karen A. Worley. San Diego: Academic Press, 1993. xi, 239 p. ISBN 0–124–55770–8.
It is appropriate that the co–authors of this volume are a library educator and a library practitioner, since its strengths are in its summaries of tools, definitions, and concepts important for information professionals who manage the design, implementation, and use of information systems. The summary discussions of these concepts can be used to assist managers in designing studies to evaluate these systems with a view to improving as well as assessing them.
The authors define information system broadly, as any system “created to store information and make it available to a given clientele or user group ... [it] may be as large as an institution, or as small as a filing cabinet” (p. 1). They combine the theory and practice of both librarianship and information science in a way that patronizes neither, and which allows the strengths of both disciplines to reinforce each other. This is a refreshing approach in a decade when some academic institutions attempt to separate the “tracks” for the students of either of these disciplines.
This volume will be most useful to managers of collections of information resources, and other practitioners without formal training in the field, who wish for an overview of the theory of information organization and access, transmission, and retrieval. It provides a broad but brief discussion of the concepts involved in defining a research problem, conducting the research, types of research, statistical tools, presentation of results, and ethical issues. For very small libraries and small collections of archives and artifacts with limited budgets and access to few resources, this volume will provide a general overview of a large amount of technical material. For example, embodied in the discussion on communication there is a six–page description of the seven–layer ISO hierarchical interconnection module which illuminates the technology behind the transmission of messages on network systems.
The book has a number of serious weaknesses, however. Most of the material is presented without references to guide the reader to additional materials. The bibliography is inadequate to assist the reader in going beyond the steps in conducting research or incorporating the evaluation principles outlined in the book. Analytical tools, such as “The Ethnograph” and “Nota Bene,” and computer–assisted statistical packages, such as SPSS and SAS, are mentioned without references to assist the user in identifying them. The concept of information is defined in traditional terms only: “information can be understood as a body of knowledge or facts derived from data, which is by nature repetitive and redundant and describes a world that consists largely of processes and events that occur and recur with small changes. Information is a synthesis or extract of data, but it contains no redundancies” (pp. 2–3). Nowhere is there a recognition of the parallel and useful concept of information as something constructed by the user, rather than as a concrete set of facts [1].
Sometimes the succinctness of the text is unhelpful, or seems to miss the point. The authors define construct validity in this way: “Research achieves construct validity when data can be shown to support the relationship between those variables that are related to the concept, as suggested by the theory” (p. 110). Granted that the concepts of validity are not easy to understand, this definition is more obscure than those often found in other texts, e.g., “Construct validity represents the extent to which an instrument measures the concept or construct it is intended to measure ... when selecting a test or instrument to employ in a research study, one must take care to choose one that accurately measures the construct of interest.” [2]
In summary, this volume has its uses as a brief introduction to information representation, organization, and access. It continually holds before the reader the necessity of considering by what means information systems may be evaluated when these systems are designed or as they are managed in day–to–day practice. The last half of the text is devoted to methods by which this evaluation may be accomplished. To take this next step, the reader will be better served by turning to other textbooks that describe basic research techniques.
1. For an explanation of this concept see Brenda Dervin and Michael Nilan, “Information Needs and Uses,” Annual Review of Library Science and Technology 21 (1986): 3–33.
2. Ronald R. Powell, Basic Research Methods for Librarians (Second ed.; Norwood, Ablex, 1991), pp. 40–41.
Maxine H. Reneker is Director, Dudley Knox Library, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. She has an M.A. from the Graduate Library School, University of Chicago, and a D.L.S. from Columbia University. She has been Director of Instructional and Research Services, Stanford University, and Associate Dean of University Libraries for Public Services, Arizona State University. Dr. Reneker is currently chair of the Research Committee, Association of College and Research Libraries. A particular professional interest is in the way information is used in the academic community.
© 1993 Maxine H. Reneker.
Citation
Reneker, Maxine H., “Review of Research and Evaluation for Information Professionals, by Robert M. Losee, Jr. and Karen A. Worley,” Third World Libraries, Volume 4, Number 1 (Fall 1993).