Measuring the Research Readiness of Academic and Research Librarians: A Project Report of the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship

The Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL) is a continuing education program designed to help academic and research librarians improve their research skills and increase their research output. Funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the centerpiece of the project is a nine-day workshop on research design each summer for three years, 2014–2016. Twenty-one participants each year will leave the IRDL with increased knowledge of research skills and with a viable research proposal to be conducted during the following academic year. Project assessment is carried out each of the three years with input from an internal assessment team, the co-investigators, and an external reviewer. The four-part assessment plan includes scoring each research proposal pre- and post-IRDL workshop; social network analysis; mastery of curriculum content; and research confidence, measured by a confidence scale administered immediately before the workshop and at the end. The confidence scale is a revised and expanded version of a scale used with respondents to a survey conducted by two of the researchers in 2010.