Research: Trials and Tribulations

Content Analysis of Online Comments to Articles

about Libraries

Lee Adams Digital Services Librarian, Public Health Library

LAUC-B Committee on Affiliated Libraries Affairs

Fall Assembly, December 6, 2016

Finding the idea

• Conversation with a colleague uncovered a mutual interest

• Led to “how can we apply this to librarianship?”

• The result: Let’s analyze comments to articles about libraries in Chronicle of Higher Ed and Inside Higher Ed!

Our initial research question

What are academics writing in online higher education forums about libraries and librarians

• We expected to find: • How libraries and librarians are/aren’t valued on campus • Thoughts on library budgets (too big or too small)

Finding the methods

• Easy Part: What publications and articles to include – Determine criteria for what publications to include – Determine criteria and search algorithm to identify

articles • More Challenging Part: Framework for analysis

– Identify a content analysis framework – Create a coding schema for articles – Create a coding schema for comments

What we found

• Surprising results – but that’s ok – still interesting! Challenges of the Findings: • Many articles resulted in comments that veered off topic • Wished we could identify roles of commenters to

contextualize comments • Reading harsh and/or ignorant comments

What we did with the project

• Presented a paper at CARL 2014 (see our paper in the CARL conference proceedings)

• Moved forward to analyze articles comments from national newspapers

• Presented poster at CLA 2014 • Published article in In the Library with the Lead Pipe 2015

What’s Next

• Many ideas!

• Brought on another research partner • Automate the article metadata & comment collection with

screen scraping tools • Analyze more content by using text analysis tools • Possibly expand the content analysis to other platforms –

tweets, blogs…

Stay tuned!!

Thanks!! Questions??