What do LIS students in the United States know about liaison duties?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze job advertisements in United States academic libraries in order to determine the prevalence of jobs that contain a liaison component. It also aims to report on a survey of current library science graduate students to assess their level of understanding of what liaison work entails and what type of preparation they have had for such work in their LIS program. Design/methodology/approach The study includes an analysis of 313 academic library job advertisements. It also uses a 12 question survey, which was distributed to 52 library school listservs throughout the USA. The survey announcements resulted in 516 responses from library school students nationwide. Findings Of the jobs surveyed more than a quarter specifically mentioned liaison activities. The survey showed that few respondents have been exposed to a discussion of liaison work in their classrooms. Those who have demonstrated greater awareness of what constitutes liaison work demonstrate greater self‐confidence in their ability to become successful liaisons. Research limitations/implications The anonymous survey did not require participants to indicate what school they attended, possibly resulting in a geographically biased sample. The survey also did not ask respondents at what point they were in their program, so that some respondents may have been very new to their library school studies and may not have had the opportunity to take many classes at the time of the survey. Practical implications This study suggests that library schools should find ways to incorporate a discussion of liaison work into some part of their curriculum, especially for students interested in academic librarianship. Originality/value No other studies have analyzed job descriptions in terms of liaison work, nor have any studies surveyed students to determine their knowledge of, and preparation for, this type of work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".