How Graduate Students Work on Their Dissertations

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How Graduate Students Work on Their Dissertations

• Susan Gibbons
• Nancy Fried Foster
• River Campus Libraries
• University of Rochester

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Outline

• Background Past Studies
• Methodologies
• Initial Findings
• Outcomes

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Studying Users

• Xerox PARC roots
• Discover real, rather than perceived, needs of
  our users
• Hired an anthropologist
• 3 Phases of study

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Phase I Faculty

• 1-year IMLS-funded grant
• Faculty work practices
• Digital tools
• Alignment of institutional repository
• D-Lib Magazine, Jan 2005

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Phase II Undergraduate Students

• 2-year library-funded study
• Holistic view of student life
• Writing papers
• Align services, facilities web presence
• ACRL book- Studying Students The Undergraduate
  Research Project at the University of Rochester

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Phase III Graduate Students

• 2-year IMLS-funded grant
• Builds on first IMLS study
• Holistic view of dissertation research
  authoring
• Align services Build document management system
• In progress

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INTERVIEWS IN THE WORKPLACE
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Things Graduate Students Are Doing

• getting help from peers via IM and email
• converting docs from Word to PDF
• saving their old stuff and going back and using
  it
• using technology to stay connected
• thinking about future career in terms of
  preparing portfolio
• valuing their peers opinions
• keeping track of multiple versions to publish in
  different places
• using databases
• saving their references
• printing for free at school
• working in teams
• obsessively using Facebook and MySpace
• keeping track of more than one work in progress
• using sources in research to work backward
• using metadata without using the word metadata
• working from home
• Plus 110 others!

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Things Graduate Students Might Wave a Magic Wand
to Do

• not worry about losing things
• have more time for all the interesting stuff
• super easy citation tracking stuff
• learn new software instantaneously
• search for a word in everything email, many
  computers, print
• save everything on my thumb just touch the
  computer screen and its there
• have technology that never breaks and never goes
  out of date
• to be able to be a student forever
• to know when youre going to finish
• to have everything youve written in paper to
  become magically digitized
• Plus 90 others!

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Preliminary Findings

• Need document management system 
• Lots of co-authoring with faculty supervisors
• Overloaded with pdfs, paper articles, citations
• Struggling to learn literature in their fields

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Outcomes

• Document Management System Institutional
  Repository
• Version control
• Co-authoring
• Citation management
• Publishing
• Web-based
• Shifting role of the library

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Outcomes

• Changes to library services
• Graduate student orientation
• Better marketing of existing resources
• RefWorks
• Librarian expertise
• Alert systems RSS feeds

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More Information

• Studying Students
• Order http//www.alastore.ala.org/SiteSolution.ta
  f?_sncatalog2_pnproduct_detail_op2434
• Download http//www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/dow
  nloadables/downloads.cfm
• Graduate Student Project
• http//docushare.lib.rochester.edu/docushare/dsweb
  /View/Collection-3700

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• Susan Gibbons
• Associate Dean
• Nancy Fried Foster
• Lead Anthropologist
• River Campus Libraries
• University of Rochester