Margo Gustina is a PhD candidate at the University of New Mexico Department of Economics and a Bowden Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin iSchool. Their research includes studying the influence of public libraries on the well being of rural communities and the value of libraries in community systems. In this Q&A, Gustina answers questions about their library research and the value of the Open Science Framework (OSF) as a research tool.
Q. What initially sparked your interest in exploring the impact of libraries on social well-being?
A. When I was the deputy director of a five-county rural library system in New York with 44 member libraries, I encountered a push from more urban areas to mandate Master's degrees for all library directors, regardless of community size. Some argued that if a community couldn't afford to hire a director with the MLS qualification, they didn't deserve a library. Eighty percent of my library system’s directors lacked master's degrees in library science.
A colleague from an even smaller, rural system countered this claim about degrees, asserting that every community benefits from having a library. Intrigued by this, we decided to investigate whether libraries truly improved communities. With limited research experience, we relied on online resources and developed a research design focused on rural areas where libraries might have a more significant impact due to fewer competing institutions.
Q. How did you approach the research for your study?
A. To complement quantitative data, we delved deep into community narratives through interviews. These firsthand accounts provided invaluable context for understanding the quantitative findings. Elk River, Idaho, a remote community, is a good example of this approach. Quantitatively, Elk River is an older, poorer community with a high rate of vacant homes and many residents relying on fixed incomes. Given these factors, we expected lower life expectancy rates. However, CDC WONDER data showed the opposite: Residents had a higher-than-average life expectancy. Our data showed that people living there felt they lived in their ideal community.
Our interviews revealed a strong sense of community and mutual support in Elk River. Residents described a vibrant social network that contributed to their overall well-being, despite limited resources. They expressed a strong desire to live in Elk River and many seasonal residents had long-term plans to do so. This raised the question: What factors contribute to the higher life expectancy in a community with such apparent disadvantages?
Residents in Elk River have deep-rooted connections and readily assist each other in times of need. For instance, a community-wide effort extinguished a chimney fire during my visit there. The town also maintains a fund for memorial services, ensuring that no resident is denied a proper send-off. The library serves as a central hub for social interaction and community news. It even provides satellite internet access, which is subsidized for residents through tourist fees. These seemingly small acts of collective support contribute significantly to the community's overall well-being, as evidenced by higher-than-expected life expectancy rates.
Q. What did your research show about the impact of libraries on communities and the need for a master’s degree for library directors?
A. We interviewed more than 200 people in eight rural communities around the country and the majority said they were living in their ideal community. We found that rural public libraries can generate well being in their communities by facilitating community and connection.
Using propensity score matching, our analysis revealed that rural school districts with public libraries within their boundaries had higher graduation rates than those without (treatment effect interval 1.07% - 2.52%). While we found no significant difference in service provision or use between libraries with and without directors holding an MLS degree (once funding differences were accounted for), this was not a focus of our research. The requirement for the MLS was shelved in New York, but due to advocacy, our research couldn't begin until after that decision was made. However, our experiences from developing this research design influenced the cooperative library system’s adoption of a collective decision-making model, including transparent budgeting.
Q. Why did you use the Open Science Framework (OSF) for this project?
A. I'm a librarian by training, and how a thing is accessed or how a thing is organized for access is part of how I think. OSF provided ample storage space for the Rural Libraries & Social Wellbeing project and allowed us to link external files, such as our large audio recordings, on Dropbox. We had a core team of three and a large volunteer group, and we could assign DOIs and provide citations, which was particularly important for graduate student volunteers. OSF's ability to credit individual contributions on large projects was a significant advantage. I tend to work on these huge national projects with lots of different hands on them, and OSF lets me give credits in very explicit ways to the people who are doing the work on each of those components. This worked so well that I continue to use it in my in-progress Libraries in Community Systems project.
Q. What do you think is the most valuable feature of OSF?
A. OSF's hierarchical structure is invaluable for managing complex, multifaceted projects. It allows me to organize various components into a clear and navigable framework. This organization is crucial for large-scale projects with multiple interconnected elements.
My current research project involved a nationwide survey of 300 respondents, followed by quantitative analysis, including exploratory factor analysis and data cleaning. OSF's ability to organize project components into a hierarchical structure has been invaluable. OSF allows me to clearly delineate different aspects of the research, such as surveys, data analysis, and publications. For instance, a researcher interested in educational effectiveness can easily navigate to relevant data, analyses, and related studies. This multi-layered approach and ability to connect project elements make OSF a useful tool for me.
I think the power is our ability to find each other's work and really engage the tools that OSF offers — which is sharing our code, our full data sets, our thinking, and why we've constructed a thing in the way that we've constructed it. If we do this, we could learn much faster and produce policy and community-relevant results more quickly by sharing our thinking, not just our results.
Q. Why is open science so important to you?
A. Do you know how annoying it is to make something and then find out somebody else made it? Primarily, I don’t like wasted labor. None of us have endless time. My best work is cumulative on someone else's work. I would like to get rid of the notion of scooping forever, and I'd like to get rid of opaque protectionism forever. Also, I mainly work with practitioners unaffiliated with an academic institution, and it's wildly frustrating for them to try to access work and be unable to.
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