While the basic functionality of the catalog remains the same – researchers will be able to search across the 15 million+ items at Duke and area libraries – we think you’ll enjoy some nice enhancements and updates to the catalog:
more robust Advanced Search with options to search by Publisher and Resource type (e.g., book, video, archival material)
Item pages have been updated and include a sidebar with easy access to Request and Email/Text options.
You might notice some differences in the way the new catalog works. Learn more with this handy new vs. old catalog comparison chart. (Note that we plan to implement some of the features that are not currently available in the new catalog this spring – stay tuned for more info, and let us know if there are aspects of the old catalog that you miss.) And if you run into trouble or have more questions about using the new catalog, check out these library catalog search tips, or contact a librarian for assistance.
While the new catalog is fully functional and boasts a number of enhancements, we know there is still work to be done, and we welcome your input. We invite you to explore the new catalog at https://find.library.duke.edu/ and report problems or provide general feedback through this online form. We’ll continue to conduct user testing this spring and make improvements based on what we learn – look for the “Free Coffee” sign in the Perkins Library lobby, and stop by to tell us what you think.
It’s that item of year where we like to reflect on all we have done in 2018, and your favorite digital collections and curation services team is no exception. This year, Digital Collections and Curation Services have been really focusing on getting collections and data into the Digital Repository and making it accessible to the world!
As you will see from the list below we launched 320 new digital collections, managed substantial additions to 2, and migrated 8. However, these publicly accessible digital collections are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of our work in Digital Collections and Curation Services.
A cover from the Ladyslipper, Inc Retail Catalogs digital collection.
So much more digitization happens behind the scenes than is reflected in the list of new digital collections. Many of our larger projects are years in the making. For example, we continue to digitize Gedney photographs and we hope to make them publicly accessible next year. There is also preservation digitization happening that we cannot make publicly accessible online. This work is essential to our preservation mission, though we cannot share the collections widely in the short term.
We strongly believe in keeping our metadata healthy, so in addition to managing new metadata, we often revisit existing metadata across our repositories in order to ensure its overall quality and functionality.
Our team is also responsible for ingesting not just digital collections, but research data and library collections as well. We preserved 20 datasets produced by the Duke Scholarly Community in the Research Data Repository (https://research.repository.duke.edu/) via the Research Data Curation program https://library.duke.edu/data/data-management.
A selection from the Buffalo Bill papers, digitized as part of the Section A project.
(Thanks to Assessment and User Experience Intern Brenda Yang for this post and for her amazing work on Oasis Perkins!)
What if it was possible to unwind – color, do a jigsaw puzzle, meditate – without leaving the Libraries?
It is at Oasis Perkins! This high-ceilinged refuge is tucked into the fourth floor of Perkins in room 418. It’s a perfect place to escape any finals-related tension palpable in study spaces this time of year.
You’ll find:
Yoga mats and meditation cushions
A jigsaw puzzle table
Coloring books, logic puzzles, and sudoku pages
Origami paper and instruction books
A quiet nook
A white noise machine
Plenty of natural light (during the day)
And more to explore!
Unlike other fourth floor spaces in Perkins and Bostock meant for silent study, feel free to chat and connect with a friend or strangers, or simply sit and reflect quietly.
How did Oasis Perkins come to be?
One major motivation was direct feedback from students. Comments from our 2018 Student Library Satisfaction Survey made clear that while study spaces at the Duke Libraries are a keystone of many students’ academic lives, it can be a stressful place, especially during the exam season: “I love coming to the library during most of the semester… particularly during finals, there is an overwhelming sense of stress that emanates from the other students at the library.” A few students explicitly requested “a room to relax,” a place to have have a “refreshing study break without leaving the library somehow,” or a “stress-relief room.”
We hope that Oasis Perkins can serve as a dedicated place for students to nurture their well-being, fitting into the ecosystem of Oasis West and Oasis East (which are managed by Duke Wellness). However, Oasis Perkins is located, of course, right inside of Perkins Library – and its doors don’t close.
You’ll also find occasional events hosted in Oasis Perkins, from Koru Meditation classes to “Tea-laxation” events. Check out the Oasis Perkins webpage to stay up to date on events, or be in touch if your organization would like to host a relevant get together in this space!
You can find a smaller space on the second floor at the Prayer and Meditation Room in Perkins 220.
Other Wellness Resources at Duke
For other tips and events to help you end the semester strong, check out the Duke Libraries End of Semester Survival Guide. There are also a number of resources right on Duke’s campus to support your mental health, which include:
Duke Wellness Center – There are a lot of wonderful activities that happen with the Wellness Center each week to help support and de-stress students!
Duke’s Center for Multicultural Affairs – Learn more about how the CMA aims to empower students and their organizations to create a vibrant and inclusive community on campus!
Academic Resource Center – The ARC is here to help you be the best (and least stressed) student you can be. Free learning consultations and academic support provided.
Oasis Perkins has existed in its current form for only one short semester! Is there something that could change about the Oasis Perkins that would help you re-charge? Our team at the Libraries would love to make it better for you. Fill out a feedback from in the suggestion box in Oasis Perkins, or reach out to brenda.yang@duke.edu with your comments or suggestions.
About four and a half years ago I wrote a blog post here on Bitstreams titled: “Digitization Details: Before We Push the “Scan” Button” in which I wrote about how we use color calibration, device profiling and modified viewing environments to produce “consistent results of a measurable quality” in our digital images. About two and a half years ago, I wrote a blog post adjacent to that subject titled “The FADGI Still Image standard: It isn’t just about file specs” about the details of the FADGI standard and how its guidelines go beyond ppi and bit depth to include information about UV light, vacuum tables, translucent material, oversized material and more. I’m surprised that I have never shared the actual process of digitizing a collection because that is what we do in the Digital Production Center.
Building digital collections is a complex endeavor that requires a cross-departmental team that analyzes project proposals, performs feasibility assessments, gathers project requirements, develops project plans, and documents workflows and guidelines in order to produce a consistent and scalable outcome in an efficient manner. We call our cross-departmental team the Digital Collections Implementation Team (DCIT) which includes representatives from the Conservation staff, Technical Services, Digital Production, Metadata Architects and Digital Collections UI developers, among others. By having representatives from each department participate, we are able to consider all perspectives including the sticking points, technical limitations and time constraints of each department. Over time, our understanding of each other’s workflows and sticking points has enabled us to refine our approach to efficiently hand off a project between departments.
Conservation
Technical Services
Development
I will not be going into the details of all the work other departments contribute to building digital collections (you can read just about any post on the blog for that). I will just dip my toe into what goes on in the Digital Production Center to digitize a collection.
Digitization
Once the specifics of a project are nailed down, the scope of the project has been finalized, the material has been organized by Technical Services, Conservation has prepared the material for digitization, the material has been transferred to the Digital Production Center and an Assessment Checklist is filled out describing the type, condition, size and number of items in a collection, we are ready to begin the digitization process.
Digitization Guide
A starter digitization guide is created using output from ArchivesSpace and the DPC adds 16-20 fields to capture technical metadata during the digitization process. The digitization guide is an itemized list representing each item in a collection and is centrally stored for ease of access.
Setup
Cameras and monitors are calibrated with a spectrometer. A color profile is built for each capture device along with job settings in the capture software. This will produce consistent results from each capture device and produce an accurate representation of any items captured which in turn removes subjective evaluation from the scanning process.
Training
Instructions are developed describing the scanning, quality control, and handling procedures for the project and students are trained.
Scanning
Following instructions developed for each collection, the scanner operator will use the appropriate equipment, settings and digitization guide to digitize the collection. Benchmark tests are performed and evaluated periodically during the project. During the capture process the images are monitored for color fidelity and file naming errors. The images are saved in a structured way on the local drive and the digitization guide is updated to reflect the completion of an item. At the end of each shift the files are moved to a production server.
Quality Control 1
The Quality Control process is different depending on the device with which an item was captured and the nature of the material. All images are inspected for: correct file name, skew, clipping, banding, blocking, color fidelity, uniform crop, and color profile. The digitization guide is updated to reflect the completion of an item.
Quality Control 2
Images are cropped (leaving no background) and saved as JPEGs for online display. During the second pass of quality control each image is inspected for: image consistency from operator to operator and image to image, skew and other anomalies.
Finalize
During this phase we compare the digitization guide against the item and file counts of the archival and derivative images on our production server. Discrepancies such as missing files, misnamed files and missing line items in the digitization guide and are resolved.
Create Checksums and dark storage
We then create a SHA1 checksum for each image file in the collection and push the collection into a staging area for ingest into the repository.
Sometimes this process is referred to simply as “scanning”.
Not only is this process in active motion for multiple projects at the same time, the Digital Production Center also participates in remediation of legacy projects for ingest into the Duke Digital Repository, multispectral imaging, audio digitization and video digitization for, preservation, patron and staff requests… it is quite a juggling act with lots of little details but we love our work!
Time to get back to it so I can get to a comfortable stopping point before the Thanksgiving break!
2018 has featured several monumental changes in the library’s technology platforms. One of the most impactful shifts this year was revitalizing DukeSpace, our DSpace-based institutional repository (IR) software, home to over 16,000 open-access articles, theses, and dissertations from Duke scholars.
Back in March, we celebrated a successful multi-version upgrade for DSpace, and along with it, a major upgrade to the integral Symplectic Elements Research Information Management platform. On the heels of that project, we decided to capitalize on the project team’s momentum and invest two more months of focused attention (four “sprints” in developer-speak).
The goals for that period? First, tie up the loose ends from the upgrade. Then, seize some clear opportunities to build upon our freshly-rearchitected metadata, creating innovative features in the UI to benefit scholars. By scholars, we mean — in part — the global audience of researchers openly discovering and using the articles in DukeSpace. But we especially mean the scholars at Duke who created them in the first place.
We are excited to share the results of our work with the Duke community and beyond. Here are the noteworthy additions:
Scholars@Duke Author Profiles
Item pages now display a brief embedded profile for each Duke author, featuring their preferred name, a photo, position title, and brief description of their research interests. This information comes from the scholars themselves, who manage their profiles via Scholars@Duke (powered by the open-source VIVO platform).
A brief author profile in a DukeSpace item leads to the full profile in Scholars@Duke.
Scholars@Duke provides a handy SEO-friendly profile page (example) for each scholar. It aggregates their full list of publications, courses taught, news articles in which they’re mentioned, and much more. It also has useful APIs for building widgets to dynamically repurpose the data for display elsewhere. Departments throughout Duke (example) use these APIs to display current faculty information on their web sites without requiring anyone to manually duplicate or update it. And now, the library does, too.
Scholars’ own descriptions of their research interests entice a visitor to learn more about their work.
Featuring researchers in this manner adds several other benefits, including:
Uses a scholar’s own preferred current version of their name and title; that may not be identical to what is stored in the item’s author metadata.
Puts users one click away from the author’s full profile at Scholars@Duke, where one can discover the entirety of the author’s publications, open-access or not.
Helps search engines make stronger semantic connections between an author’s profile information and their works available online.
Introduces a unique value-add feature for our open-access copy of an article that’s unlikely to ever be possible to replicate for the published version on the academic journal’s website.
Makes the DukeSpace item pages look better, warmer, and more inviting.
Profiles for multi-author articles
With this feature, we are truly pushing beyond the boundaries of what an institutional repository traditionally does. And likewise, we feel we’re raising the bar for how academic research libraries can showcase the members of their communities alongside their collected works.
Other New Features
Beyond these new author profiles, we managed to fit in a few more enhancements around citations, the homepage, and site navigation. Here’s a quick rundown:
Citations
We now present an easily copyable citation, composed from the various metadata available for each item. This includes the item’s permalink.
DukeSpace citation for a dissertation
In cases when there’s a published version of an article available, we direct users to review and use that citation instead.
DukeSpace article with a DOI for a published version.
Item pages also now display a “Citation Stats” badge in the sidebar, powered by Digital Science’s Dimensions tool. Click it to explore other scholarly work that has cited the current item.
Homepage
Finally, we topped off this project phase by redesigning DukeSpace’s homepage. Notable among the changes: a clearer indication of the number of items (broken down by type), a dynamic list of trending items, and streamlined menu navigation in the sidebar.
Final Thoughts
Duke Libraries’ current strategic plan emphasizes the mission-critical importance of our open-access publishing and repository efforts, and also demands that we “highlight and promote the scholarly activities of our faculty, students, and staff.” This two-month DukeSpace enhancements project was a great opportunity for us to think outside the box about our technology platforms, and consider how those goals relate.
Many thanks to several people whose work enabled these features to come to life, especially Maggie Dickson, Hugh Cayless, Paolo Mangiafico, and the Scholars@Duke team.
In anticipation of next Tuesday’s midterm elections, here is a photo gallery of voting-related images from Duke Digital Collections. Click on a photo to view more images from our collections dealing with political movements, voting rights, propaganda, activism, and more!
This image is part of a series of photographs taken by James Karales on assignment for Look Magazine during the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in March 1965.Propaganda poster of the Italian Socialist Party. It reads: “Workers, vote for socialism means voting for women’s rights and labor.”Image is part of “Thirteen-Month Crop: One Year in the Life of a Piedmont Virginia Tobacco Farm,” which documents the Moore family farm in Pittsylvania County, Virginia.Poster with depiction of large PCI flag with the Italian flag behind it.Leaflet created by the League of Women Voters of North Carolina.Socialist Party literature, explaining their views.
If you haven’t already taken advantage of early voting, we at Bitstreams encourage you to exercise your right on November 6!
One of the pleasures of working in an academic library is the opportunity it presents for engagement with communities in our field of work. One such community that Duke University Libraries has been a member for some time now is Samvera, which is an open-source community for software development that supports digital repositories. I, along with my colleagues Jim Coble, Moira Downey, and Ayse Durmaz, recently attended the Samvera Connect conference in Salt Lake City, and this post is a report on our experience there.
It was my first time attending Samvera Connect, and so it was a chance for me to put faces with names that I had come to know from discussions on Slack and elsewhere. Moira and I participated in a panel with some of our colleagues from the University of Michigan and Indiana University, and it was great to have the opportunity to meet them in person and talk about our work on digital repositories. We spoke on the theme of using the Hyrax platform for research data; you can see our slides here. Moira and I also had a poster on the same theme.
I attended the meetup of the Samvera Interest Group for Advising the Hyrax Roadmap, or SIGAHR, as it is known. There was some introspection in the group about the suitability of the acronym, though it produced no resolution one way or another. Much of the conversation in that meeting focused on support and developer resources for the Hyrax platform. It’s one of the central questions for an open source community like Samvera, and one we’re giving some consideration at Duke after returning from the meeting.
Otherwise, there were several interesting presentations that I attended and would highlight. First, the team from the WGBH Media Library did a presentation titled “Building on Hyrax and Avalon for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting” that I enjoyed a lot. That team has great energy and has developed some interesting solutions for a complex and compelling project.
I also learned much at the workshop titled “Managing Samvera-based Projects & Services,” which was conducted by Hannah Frost, Nabeela Jaffer, and Steve Van Tuyl. Thinking in terms of an extended community requires a different mindset from they way we work locally and on our campuses.
Finally, one of the most interesting presentations came from Hannah Frost and Christina Harlow from Stanford Libraries, outlining the new architecture they have developed for the next iteration of the Stanford Digital Library. It was titled “Making TACOs for Hydras,” and the slides are not available, but much of what they covered is included in the github documentation here.
I’ll conclude there, and share the following sections were authored by two of my colleagues at Duke.
Valkyrie and Hyrax (contributed by Jim Coble)
A focus of attention at this year’s Samvera Connect was Valkyrie, a project which enables the use of multiple backends for storing files and metadata in Samvera applications. Historically, Hydra/Samvera applications have had only one option for file and metadata storage; namely, a Fedora repository. Recent versions of Fedora have experienced performance problems in certain circumstances, leading the community to look for different options for storing files and metadata where performance is a key requirement. Valkyrie allows a project to pick and choose among multiple backends depending on the needs of the project. Projects can still use a Fedora repository for storage if that is desired but also have the option of using a Postgres database or Solr for metadata storage and/or a disk filesystem for file storage. Other metadata and file storage adapters are under development to provide Valkyrie with even more options.
Discussions at the conference favored moving forward to convert Hyrax (a key Samvera project) to use Valkyrie and we’ll likely see work happening on that soon. Our Research Data Repository is based on Hyrax, so the eventual Valkyrization of Hyrax would provide us with additional storage options for the files and metadata in that repository (which currently uses Fedora 4). Valkyrie may also be a component in a future migration of the legacy Duke Digital Repository, enabling us to move it off the no-longer-supported Fedora 3 version.
Discoverability of Research Data (contributed by Moira Downey)
In addition to the back-end infrastructure, another growing area of interest around our Hyrax-based Research Data Repository has been increased visibility and discoverability of the content that we publish and preserve through our software applications. New services like Google’s Dataset Search are making it easier for scholars and researchers to find the data they need to support their scholarly endeavors. As institutions responsible for the publication of these data, we want to ensure that the scholarship our repositories are hosting is indexed by these services, heightening its visibility, and hopefully, its usability. Over a lunchtime breakout session, the Repository Management Interest Group compiled a list of services similar to Google Dataset Search in nature (Google Scholar, Unpaywall.org, Crossref, Datacite, and SHARE, among others) that we intend to investigate further, with a particular eye toward how our existing repositories are integrated with these services and where we might improve. The group also intends to consider what local practices we might implement to optimize the discoverability of our content, and what changes to the code base should be advocate for in order to connect our content to the web at large.
In my first six weeks at DUL (Duke University Libraries), I’m deciphering acronyms, even beyond those I absorbed at IBM, Toshiba, and LexisNexis, which is to say, a whole new lexicon.
Within the DST (Digital Strategies and Technology) organization, my ITS (Information Technology Services) team consists of three departments, located in the PBR complex (Perkins Bostock Rubenstein, not Pabst Blue Ribbon).
Core Services supports > 100 tools and platforms, deploys and maintains > 600 systems and workstations, and sets up all the specialized equipment you see throughout the libraries
LSIS (Library Systems & Integration Support) is preparing for the evolution to a new LSP (Library Services Platform) called FOLIO in collaboration with OLF (Open Library Foundation), Index Data, and EBSCO (Elton B. Stephens Co.)
We work in conjunction with Duke’s OIT (Office of Information Technology), and with many external organizations, such as SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), OLE (Open Library Environment), OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), ABCDEFG (no, I’m getting carried away…).
Unlike the commercial sector, we’re intent on collaboration rather than competition. I’m excited to be a part of TRLN (Triangle Research Library Network), and the Ivy Plus Libraries partnership of 13 leading academic libraries who sponsor the BorrowDirect initiative.
This is such a fun place to work! We have a staff yoga class given by Lindsey Crawford of Global Breath Studio, and I figured out how to use the meescan app , to check out an actual book, from which I learned from Smitten Kitchen that chaat masala is great on popcorn. Last night I was thrilled to attend the Durham Literacy Center’s event sponsored by DUL, with author Therese Anne Fowler.
Now if I could catch the PR1; bus which traverses the full mile between my office and parking….
When Duke professor and botanist Henry J. Oosting agreed to take part in an expedition to Greenland in the summer of 1937 his mission was to collect botanical samples and document the region’s native flora. The expedition, organized and led by noted polar explorer Louise Arner Boyd, included several other accomplished scientists of the day and its principal achievement was the discovery and charting of a submarine ridge off of Greenland’s eastern coast.
Oosting’s sketch of a Narwhal
In a diary he kept during his trip titled “To Greenland in 105 Days, or Why did I ever leave home,” Oosting focuses little on the expedition’s scientific exploits. Instead, he offers a more intimate look into the mundane and, at times, amusing aspects of early polar exploration. Supplementing the diary in the recently published Henry J. Oosting papers digital collection are a handful of digitized nitrate negatives that add visual interest to his arctic (mis)adventures.
Oosting’s journey got off to an inauspicious start when he wrote in his opening entry on June 9, 1937: “Frankly, I’m not particularly anxious to go now that the time has come–adventure of any sort has never been my line–and the thought of the rolling sea gives me no great cheer.” What follows over the next 200 pages or so, by his own account, are the “inane mental ramblings of a simple-minded botanist,” complete with dozens of equally inane marginal doodles.
Oosting sketch of Musk Ox steak
The Veslekari, the ship chartered by Louise Boyd for the expedition, first encountered sea ice on July 12 just off the east coast of Greenland. As the ship slowed to a crawl and boredom set in among the crew the following day, Oosting wrote in his diary that “Miss Boyd’s story of the polar bear is worth recording.” He then relayed a joke Boyd told the crew: “If you keep a private school and I keep a private school then why does a polar bear sit on a cake of ice…? To keep its privates cool, of course.” For clarification, Oosting added: “She says she has been trying for a long time to get just the right picture to illustrate the story but it’s either the wrong kind of bear or it won’t hold its position.”
Crew hoisting a polar bear on board the Veslekari
When the expedition finally reached the Greenland coast at the end of July, Oosting spent several days exploring the Tyrolerfjord glacier, gathering plant specimens and drying them on racks in the ship’s engine room. On the glacier, Oosting observed an arctic hare, an ermine, and noted that “my plants are accumulating in such quantity.”
Oosting sketch of foot
As the expedition wore on Oosting grew increasingly frustrated with the daily tedium and with Boyd’s unfailing enthusiasm for the enterprise. “In spite of everything…we are stopping at more or less regular intervals to see what B thinks is interesting,” Oosting wrote on August 19. “I didn’t go ashore this A.M. for a 15 min. stop even after she suggested it–have heard about it 10 times since…I’ll be obliged to go in every time now regardless or there will be no living with this woman. I am thankful, sincerely thankful, there are only 5 more days before we sail for I am thoroughly fed-up with this whole business.”
Arctic Hare
By late August, the Veslekari and crew headed back east towards Bergen, Norway and eventually Newcastle, England, where Oosting boarded a train for London on September 12. “This sleeping car is the silliest arrangement imaginable,” Oosting wrote, “my opinion of the English has gone down–at least my opinion of their ideas of comfort.” After a brief stint sightseeing around London, Oosting boarded another ship in Southampton headed for New York and eventually home to Durham. “It will be heaven to get back to the peace and quiet of Durham,” Oosting pined on September 14, “I’m developing a soft spot for the lousy old town.”
Veslekari, the vessel chartered by Louise Boyd for the 1937 Greenland expedition
Oosting arrived home on September 21, where his diary ends. Despite his curmudgeonly tone throughout and his obsession with recording every inconvenience and impediment encountered along the way, it’s clear from other sources that Oosting’s work on the voyage made important contributions to our understanding of arctic plant life.
In The Coast of Northeast Greenland (1948), edited by Louise Boyd and published by the American Geographic Society, Oosting authored a chapter titled “Ecological Notes on the Flora,” in which he meticulously documented the specimens he collected in the arctic. The onset of World War II and concerns over national security delayed publication of Oosting’s findings, but when released, they provided valuable new information about plant communities in the region. While Oosting’s diary reveals a man with little appetite for adventure, his work endures. As the forward to Boyd’s 1948 volume attests: “When travelers can include significant contributions to science, then adventure becomes a notable achievement.”
How can the Duke Libraries support the needs of first-generation (1G) college students at Duke?
A team of library staff became interested in this question after noticing that 1G students’ responses to a survey question about the Libraries were different from those of continuing-generation students. While many 1G students are successful in and out of Duke classrooms, we wondered how their experiences might differ from those of continuing-generation students.
To begin our project, we read existing research on academic libraries’ support of 1G students and spoke with offices on campus that support 1G students, such as the Duke Office of Access & Outreach. Then, we conducted six focus groups with 1G students, in addition to analyzing responses from the Libraries’ 2018 user survey (which included 2,381 student responses) for 1G and continuing generation students. Our full report discusses this process and our findings in more detail, including concrete recommendations for improving library services.
While the experiences of 1G students are not monolithic, we identified nine core findings, which speak to challenges students experience and suggest specific points for intervention and support. One important overall finding is that 1G challenges are student challenges: support or expansions of campus and library services targeted toward 1G students will help all students succeed.
Finding 1. 1G students perceive a dearth of academic and social information capital.
We asked all focus group participants the following, “Have you ever felt like other people around you know things about college that you don’t know about?” Each time, the response from the group was an overwhelming expression of, “Yes, of course, all the time.” One student captured the experience of her continuing-generation:
“Who told you that? Have you been told your whole life you have to do this? Was there an info session I missed?”
Students repeatedly referred to Duke’s demanding academic environment and the abrupt transition from their high school habits to the expectations of Duke classrooms. At times Duke staff may also take for granted how much knowledge incoming students have.
Information capital is not limited to classrooms; it is also used in social contexts and in navigating college life. 1G experiences are diverse: while some students reported feelings of isolation, others described feeling supported through orientation programs and a lively community on Duke’s East Campus, where many undergraduates live.
While 1G students perceive that continuing generation students are able to rely on family to guide them through the myriad of informational and financial challenges encountered in college, 1G students do not have access to this information from their parents. In addition, they sometimes feel unable to share the stress of college with their parents.
“You have the pressure of pretending ‘I’m okay.’ My parents are so proud of me that I can’t tell them what’s really going on.”
Finding 2. Finances are stressful, and an early source of feeling unwelcome.
Our past research suggested that feeling that one doesn’t belong is a global concern for first-years adjusting to life on a college campus, and one particularly poignant for 1G students. Duke is no exception. Several focus group participants shared comments they received from their peers after revealing that they were the first in their families to attend college:
“Oh you’re smart for a first-generation student. I never would have known!”
First-year focus group participants quoted other early encounters with roommates or colleagues that continued to sting. Many of these comments reflect the fact that financial security is one of the starkest differentiators between many 1G students and their peers at Duke.
“There’s definitely a mentality that exists at Duke that middle class is poor and lower class is even worse. Not that everybody is like that, but it certainly exists.”
When 1G students reveal aspects of their own financial circumstances to their peers, they receive blowback in several ways. For example, a few students shared that their financial aid was stigmatized, with other students suggesting that those who receive aid are very “lucky” to pay so little, or stating explicitly their own significant costs of attendance, possibly to engender shame or guilt. These experiences are formative, alienating, and angering.
Finding 3. An ecosystem of supportive offices and people on campus is critical, but knowledge of and willingness to access resources takes time.
The landscape described above is important to understand because it is the one 1G students step into when they arrive at Duke. However, peer attitudes and financial impediments are difficult intervention points. In contrast, faculty, older peers, and staff are better positioned to be support systems native to the institution:
“When you go to Duke resources, people are more than happy to help you. Adults at Duke are much more receptive and much more understanding of our issues as first-generation students.”
In general, students spoke warmly of the many services, programs, and offices offered on campus. This included the Office of A&O, resident assistants (RAs), peer advisors, a close community on East Campus as freshmen, pre-orientation, the Women’s Center, the Financial Aid office, Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS), Duke Reach, and cultural student groups.
Word cloud of campus spaces that 1G focus group respondents identified as safe and welcoming
The staff in the Office of A&O were mentioned frequently. Students praised staff members, citing their open door policy, knowledge, and willingness to offer genuine and consistent support.
Unfortunately, some students reported feeling stigmatized by others when they were known to have used campus resources such as CAPS, the Academic Resource Center (ARC), the Women’s Center, and identity centers.
Finding 4. The cost of textbooks is a special pain point.
In most focus groups, students shared the challenge, stress, and fear of purchasing expensive textbooks. This anxiety about textbooks rests on top of an ongoing concern about finances. Students described extensive efforts to find affordable copies, taking great pains to maintain their workbooks so they could re-sell them at the end of the semester, and to locate upper-level textbooks that were not available through Textbook on Reserve.
“[Laughter] I’ve never researched so hard as when I’m looking for a digital version of a textbook!”
Students who knew about and utilized the Libraries Textbooks on Reserve made special note of its impact and importance in alleviating some financial burden.
“The textbook rental program has been really important and impactful for me… To get them here and be able to rent them out for 3 hours has been perfect. It’s really important to have that.”
Results from the Libraries biennial student survey also support the idea that the Textbooks on Reserve program is particularly important for 1G students.
Finding 5. 1G challenges are challenges common to many Duke students.
Broadly speaking, 1G students’ responses to our 2018 survey did not differ from those of continuing-generation students. Both groups are generally confident in their ability to use library resources and report that they have successfully used the library and/or the library website to find research articles and books for class assignments. They find the website easy to use, believe that the library is welcoming, that library staff are helpful, and that the library is an important part of their experience at Duke.
1G students were more likely to report that expansion of the Textbooks on Reserve program and the device-lending program (for borrowing equipment such as laptops or cameras) would improve their library experience a great deal.
Overall, the four areas in which more than 50% of all undergraduates responded that expanded services would improve their library experience “a lot” include:
More spaces for quiet/individual study
More textbooks to check out for my classes
Additional specialized spaces for honors researchers, graduate students, or other student populations
More spaces for collaborative study
Survey data indicated a few differences between the services that 1G and continuing generation students believe to be important to their academics. The chart below shows services that 1G students more frequently listed as “important” than continuing generation students.
Survey responses of services that are important to students. Items shown are those that reflect a greater than 10%-pt difference between 1G and continuing generation students
Finding 6. It is sometimes hard to find existing resources at the Libraries.
When asked about services they wish they had known about earlier, our 1G focus group participants mentioned the Textbooks on Reserve program, library workshops (e.g., Matlab workshops), subject librarians, lockers available for short-term use, and the ability to reserve study rooms. Students described numerous library resources they have discovered seemingly by chance or long after their first semester at Duke. At multiple points during the focus groups students expressed that important services are not adequately marketed or shared with all 1G students. First-year 1G students reiterated the feeling of “unknown unknowns”: of understanding that many resources are available, but often finding it difficult to locate specific points of access.
Finding 7. Getting help from experts at the Libraries is important, but difficult.
1G students indicated that reaching out to library staff can be intimidating or even frightening. They described an initial barrier to asking for help, even while knowing it is likely the best way to receive assistance. Students noted feeling that their questions are “silly,” and they believe they have “gaps” in their knowledge. Students also reflected that it would be helpful for the person providing guidance to understand students’ lack of familiarity with library resources and services.
“We have a librarian for an English department, and for the Linguistics department… but it would be awesome to have a 1G librarian. Just someone who already knows that we don’t know anything, and it’s okay.”
Finding 8. Checking out books using call numbers is daunting.
Focus group participants frequently noted difficulty finding and checking out books using call numbers. 1G students did not pin this difficulty on library staff, but rather on their own lack of knowledge.
“The assumption is that we’ve been in libraries before. They [library staff] were helpful after I admitted I didn’t know my way around.”
The stacks are an understandably daunting environment, especially for those unfamiliar with academic libraries. Students reported feeling supported once they made their confusion clear. Previous assessments have shown that the difficulty of understanding call numbers and finding materials in the Libraries is one experienced by many students, regardless of 1G status.
Finding 9. While students generally view the Libraries as a safe space, 1G students feel less strongly that this is true.
Some of the most striking differences in responses between 1G and continuing-generation students relate to the survey question asking the extent to which both Duke Campus and the Libraries feel like a safe space. For the purposes of the user survey, a “safe space” was defined as a place in which people can feel safe from discrimination, harassment, and any other emotional or physical harm.
Only 20% of 1G students “strongly agree” that Duke Campus is a safe space for them, compared to 36% of continuing-generation students. While it is a small percent, four times as many 1G students (4% compared to 1%) “strongly disagree” that campus is a safe space for them. Duke University has some work to do before all students, and especially 1G students, feel that it is a safe space.
Both 1G and continuing generation students feel strongly that the Libraries are more of a safe space than Duke University. This is encouraging, as a major goal of the Libraries is to provide a welcoming space for all. Differences in feelings about the Libraries as a safe space between 1G and non-1G are less stark but still present: 52% of 1G students “strongly agree” that the Libraries are a safe space compared to 61% of continuing-generation students.
Summary
First-generation students are resilient and successful members of the Duke community. The early years on campus, which involve finding the right communities for support and learning new academic skills, can be a difficult transition for some. While all students experience challenges in college, 1G students may not have access to certain sources of information capital and can have significant financial stressors that are difficult for many peers to understand. The Duke University Libraries are well poised to support the success of 1G students on campus. Library staff can help reduce the burdens associated with transitioning from high school to college by making academic and research support known to students early and often, providing access to cost-prohibitive textbooks, and continuing to make the Duke Libraries a welcoming space for all students.
What’s next?
These findings became the basis of the 19 recommendations outlined in the research team’s full report. For example, one important recommendation was to expand the Textbooks on Reserve program. Though the library already had a pilot program, it became clear that all students would benefit from expanding the program to include more textbooks and increasing marketing of the program. This fall the program expanded to include textbooks from the 100 largest courses on campus, and the Libraries has already seen an increase in student use of these books. There was also a recommendation that a librarian be designated as a 1G Student Success Librarian as a way to build the ecosystem of supportive offices and people described in focus groups. Arianne Hartsell-Gundy is currently serving in this role as a way to coordinate the libraries’ efforts, make connections with other programs and departments providing support, and serve as a point of contact for 1G students.
Additionally, The Libraries formed a 1G Study Recommendations Implementation Team (headed by the 1G Student Success Librarian) to prioritize recommendations and work across the Libraries to improve services, library instruction, and marketing/outreach to 1G students. One of the team’s first projects was to increase the library presence during the Rubenstein Scholars summer program. In addition to providing a library instruction session and one-on-one appointments with the students in this program, librarians attended a poster session and a mixer as a way to increase their presence. Also, the team is engaging with the staff dedicated to working on our service desks to find ways to help students feel more comfortable asking questions and navigating our book stacks. The team is pleased with their progress thus far and looks forward to finding new ways to connect with and support 1G students.
By: Joyce Chapman, Brenda Yang, Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Emily Daly
Notes from the Duke University Libraries Digital Projects Team
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