17 Interviews with Virginia Tech CALS Faculty: State of Research and How Information Professionals Can Help

In the early months of 2016, Ithaka S+R, a not-for-profit service that helps the academic community navigate economic and technological change, asked various land grant universities to be a part of a national project examining the current state of research and how information professionals can support agricultural researchers. Eighteen institutions and the National Agriculture Library (NAL) chose to participate; Virginia Tech (VT) is one of the participating entities. There were two main aspects of participation, the interview stage and then reporting. Each of the institutions were tasked with identifying appropriate faculty to interview, and then conducting the interviews, transcribing and anonymizing the transcripts, and only then sharing information with Ithaka S+R.

The national report was created by Ithaka S+R staff Danielle Cooper and Roger Schonfeld from 5 anonymized transcripts made available from the interviewing process at every participating campus, resulting in n=95 interviews for the national report . This report herein is created from only the local responses at Virginia Tech (n=17 faculty). The project we report here was designed with this combined nature, therefor some of the variables of the study design accommodate the scope of the national report better. However, analyzing the 17 results from Virginia Tech reveals a vision of what researchers at Virginia are doing as they seek information.