QQML 2013

Last week I was in Rome attending the 2013 International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries (QQML), where 288 papers from all over the world were presented, covering a wide variety of topics in LIS. I had a great time talking to librarians, educators and researchers from different countries and learning about their research. Two of my old friends from Chapel Hill were also there – it’s been six years since I last saw them, and it was just wonderful to see them again.

The papers that interested me most were the ones about library assessment and valuation. Recently I have been thinking about developing a course entirely on library assessment. This topic has been a component in many courses in our program, but I think it is important enough to spend a full course on it. More and more libraries, especially academic libraries are facing increasing pressures to establish their relevance and value, and assessment is critical in this process.

Here are a few papers about library assessment that I enjoyed:

•  A survey study to examine students’ use of an academic library, its resources and spaces, and their engagement and persistence at UT Austin (by Meredith Taylor).
•  A project using the Understanding Library Impacts (ULI) protocol to assess library contributions to undergraduate  student learning at Barnard College (by Derek Rodriguez and Lisa Norberg).
•  A study using the MISO survey to assess the quality and effectiveness of library services (by David Consiglio, Katherine Furlong and Gentry Holbert).
• The single or joint use of qualitative and quantitative metrics to support library accreditation efforts, funding requests and assess user needs and expectations ( by Michael Maciel).
• The best practices of data visualization and examples of how some of them have been applied in libraries (by Rachel Besara).

There are also a couple of papers about health information access that caught my attention. This is an area that I wish to further explore. I just learned this morning, my first paper in this area, “Preparing Public Librarians for Consumer Health Information Service: A Nationwide Study”, co-authored with Dr. Van Ta Park, has been accepted to publish in Library and Information Science Research. Van and I will also discuss ideas of developing grant proposals together to fund our collaborative research pursuit down the path of health information.

Overall, I had a great time at QQML 2013. Now with all the ideas and inspirations grained from the conference, I’m going to have a very busy summer.