Work in Progress: Promoting the Use of Standards by Faculty through Improved Access

Technical standards can provide an effective instructional scaffold for undergraduate engineering coursework, and exposing engineering students to appropriate technical standards is one of the requirements for program accreditation by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET). However, library access to technical standards can be challenging due to their expense and the restrictions on borrowing these material from other libraries. My research in progress attempts to better understand the use of technical standards by faculty in their teaching and research, with the aim of improving access to the most-needed standards. I am uniquely positioned for this research due to my background in both engineering practice and information science. In preparation for this research, I compiled Interlibrary Loan (ILL) requests for technical standards over the 7-year period 2014-2021 at my Carnegie R2 institution and characterized the data in terms of requestor level (faculty, graduate student, undergraduate student, staff) and publisher to gain insight into faculty needs for technical standards. Based on the ILL study, an online survey has been created to explore faculty users and usages of technical standards at my institution; institutional review of the research proposal is complete; and distribution of the survey to faculty in selected academic units is expected in Fall 2021. After analysis of the results of the study, I expect to draw conclusions about faculty needs and usages for technical standards at my academic institution, and I will consider broadening the study to gain insights into a) the use of technical standards in other US academic institutions, and b) the implications for ABET accreditation and library collection management in US academic libraries.