1. The Process
The process of collecting data to enter into STARS was quite daunting for my team. Nicole and I struggled off the bat to find sources of information regarding UNE’s research on sustainability. We tried contacting Karen Houseknecht initially but did not have much luck getting through to anyone in her office. Finally, we gave them a due date for our project and we got a response that was not immensely helpful by any means. I want to thank Alethea for being so persistent at this point in the process especially, as Nicole and I started to fall behind the other groups and still had no data entered into STARS. We got a bit discouraged but Alethea kept throwing out new ideas so that we could complete at least a small portion of the Research section of STARS.
I think that the biggest takeaway from this was the realization that having no one to turn to is the biggest problem that UNE is facing in terms of research devoted to sustainability. There is no main hub of information or main person that keeps track of and houses sustainability research. Ultimately, it became confusing because there were just so few people to turn to. Thankfully, Bethany Kenyan, a Digital Access Librarian, was extremely helpful in answering many of the library service related questions that we pulled straight from the STARS report.
Looking back on it, Nicole and I should have probably performed an analysis on how many faculty at UNE are conducting sustainability research (or really any research that ties into sustainability). Going forward we have realized that this would be a useful figure to have so that we can track the amount of research that is being done on sustainability, as well as who is doing the research, how old the research is, etc. Primarily, this would be useful in terms of filling out the STARS report in a more direct and straightforward way.
Overall the process was a difficult one, and one that required a lot of patience. However, I think that we learned a lot from it in terms of realizing how little we do know about research devoted to sustainability. From this we took away that learning what you don’t know can be just as useful as learning something new.
2. A Sad Surprise
The biggest surprise for me when attempting to collect data for the research portion of the STARS report was the lack of data available. Nicole and I just could not get off on a good foot in terms of initiating the data collection process. It became very apparent that this is an issue that UNE has in regard to data organization and collection, and although we are such a renowned research school, this is something we could tremendously improve.
When sifting through the data that we did collect from Bethany, there is not a whole lot that jumped out at me or I found crazy interesting because there was such a minimal amount of information that we were able to collect. I wish I had information that I could dig deeper into but we basically collected a high-level overview of what UNE has in terms of research capabilities from the library side of operations. I think that the research program needs to be more expansive and really be facilitated by the whole campus, rather than a few subunits that seem to have some information on research that might be going on.
I am a huge fan of organization so I think that this is partly why this issue was so troubling to me. In addition, I just think that sustainability research is so important which is why I wish that more people on campus knew about it and knew what was going on. Strengthening this part of the STARS report would be a huge improvement for UNE.
