Andrew Asher is the Assessment Librarian at Indiana University Bloomington, where he leads the libraries’ qualitative and quantitative assessment programs and conducts research on the information practices of students and faculty. Asher’s most recent projects have examined how “discovery” search tools influence undergraduates’ research processes, and how university researchers manage, utilize, and preserve their research data.
Prior to joining Indiana University, Asher was the Digital Initiatives Coordinator and Scholarly Communications Officer at Bucknell University, where he managed the library’s open access and scholarly communication initiatives, including the passage of an institutional open access mandate.
From 2008-2010, Asher was the Lead Research Anthropologist for the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL)project, a two-year study of student research processes at five Illinois universities and the largest ethnographic study of libraries undertaken to date.
An ethnographer and anthropologist by vocation,Asher holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has written and presented widely on using ethnography in academic libraries, including the co-edited volume, College Libraries and Student Cultures (ALA Editions, 2012).
In addition to his work in academic libraries, Asher conducts research on the meanings and practices of citizenship in Poland, Germany and the European Union.
