Doreen Bradley

This fall semester has provided opportunities for me and others in our lab to reconnect with students from our Winter 2018 lab to write an article.  In June 2019, we presented a poster on our work from Winter 2018 at the Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Conference (EBLIP). Several of the conference organizers encouraged us to write an article and submit it to the EBLIP Journal for consideration in a future issue,  The deadline would be September 1, a quick turnaround time after the June conference. After consulting with my fellow lab participants, we decided to give it our best effort. We divvied up sections of the manuscript among all 5 of us and set to work. Despite the natural interruptions that summer brings with vacations and differing work schedules at each of our institutions, we submitted the manuscript on time by September 1.  Now we wait. In early November, we finally heard back from the editor of the EBLIP Journal. Feedback was very positive from our two reviewers about the value of our research and contributions it would make to the profession. The editor had recommendations on restructuring parts of our article. Again, the turnaround time was tight – only one month. We each addressed comments and suggestions in the sections that we wrote. With everyone’s commitment and dedication, we made the new submission date of December 4.  Fingers crossed for final acceptance and a spring publication date!

This entire process has given the librarians and faculty in the Library Assessment in Student Learning lab an excellent experience to see amazing growth in our former Fellows.  Since this article is about research done in Winter 2018 on student learning during research consultations, our Fellows involved in the research have since moved on to new professional roles.  One Fellow is now an instruction librarian at an east coast university and the other is a data scientist at a midwestern university. Writing this article has given all of us the opportunity to reconnect as professionals and, now with some distance since the project, given us time to look back and reflect on the good research that we conducted.  It is exciting to see our former fellows creating paths forward in their new careers and to be able to continue our research collaboration. We are all looking forward to publishing in the professional literature on research that resulted from our IMLS lab work. An unexpected benefit of our grant work is creating a new network of colleagues who we hope to cross paths with many more times in the years to come. 


Doreen Bradley obtained a B.A. in French Literature, Linguistics, and Translation from the University of Toronto and a Master of Information and Library Studies (M.I.L.S) from the University of Michigan. She has over 17 years experience as a health sciences librarian, and for the past 10 years has focused on information literacy particularly for undergraduate students. She is the Director of Learning Programs and Initiatives unit in the U-M Library.