Inquiring Informationists: A Qualitative Exploration of Our Role
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study is to explore the impact of an informationist program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Library and to provide a basis for further program assessment. In 2001 the NIH Library began its informationist program, where librarians with training in both biomedicine and information science work alongside researchers. The goal of the program is to facilitate researchers' access to and usage of information resources. METHODS: The researchers used qualitative interviews with key informants to characterize the current informationist services of user groups. Subjects were selected to capture a variety of activities that would show patterns of how the program assists the researchers of various NIH groups. Following the interviews, the authors extracted recurring and significant themes from the subjects' comments. RESULTS: Interview subjects provided their views on the informationists' skills, impact, and team participation. Research results documented that informationists helped find resources, provided instruction, and worked as part of the research team. The NIH groups currently using this service value their informationists' knowledge of library resources and their ability to access information needs quickly. The informationists' skills in finding information save the researchers time, increase the efficiency of the research team, and complement the contributions of other team members. Training by informationists was found useful. Informationist services led to increased self-reported library use, albeit in some cases this use was entirely via the informationist. CONCLUSIONS: Informationists saved researchers time by obtaining requested information, finding esoteric or unfamiliar resources, and providing related training. These activities appeared to be facilitated by the acceptance of the informationist as part of the research team. This exploratory study provides background that should be useful in future, more extensive evaluations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.357 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it