After a competitive application and review process, OhioLINK is pleased to announce the grant recipients of OhioLINK’s first research awards. The two grant recipient groups are Wright State University’s Shu Schiller, Ph.D., and Bowling Green State University’s Andrea Boehme and Katie Mihaly.
The OhioLINK research awards support research projects by members to answer questions or investigate topics of direct interest to OhioLINK and its members.
“I am extremely excited and thankful for the OhioLINK Research Award,” Schiller said. “The grant will enable us to develop a training plan to develop student workers and optimize resource allocations for virtual reference services. We are confident that our findings will also help the other 119 OhioLINK consortium members improve their reference services offered in digital channels.”
The results of Schiller’s research, “Ask a Librarian” Live Chat Service: A Mixed Methods Research on the Service Styles of Professional Librarians and Student Workers, can serve as a model for the improvement, development, and planning of library live chat services or similar digital reference services.
Boehme and Mihaly’s study, Fine Efficacy: An Experimental Study of the Effect of Daily Fines on Borrower Return Habits, can give OhioLINK practitioners evidence to use in policy making, as there are currently no studies on administering fines in an academic consortia group. The findings of both projects will be disseminated to other OhioLINK member institutions as a condition of the grant.
“Collecting fines is costly in both staff time and patron goodwill, so we are thrilled to receive funding for our study. We hope to provide evidence either way that academic libraries throughout Ohio can use,” Mihaly said.
Established in 1992, the Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) is Ohio’s statewide academic library consortium and serves more than 600,000 end users. A member of the Ohio Technology Consortium of the Ohio Department of Higher Education, OhioLINK provides a competitive advantage for Ohio’s higher education community by cooperatively and cost-effectively acquiring, providing access to and preserving an expanding array of print and digital resources, and by centrally hosting digital content. Together, OhioLINK and its member libraries provide users access to nearly 50 million books and other library materials, more than 100 electronic research databases, more than 81,000 e-books, thousands of images and videos, and millions of electronic journal articles.
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