Tag: library valuation

A course on library assessment/valuation

The spring semester is just getting started, and yet I’m already thinking about my plans for the summer. I’m not teaching any summer courses, and instead, I plan to use the time to develop a couple of new courses. After getting tenure, I feel like I can finally take my foot off the gas pedal of research for a little bit and contribute more to curricular development. As mentioned in a previous post, one of the courses I’m developing is a methods course on survey research. The other course I have in mind is about library assessment.

Assessment is key to understanding the value of libraries. Professional organizations are already actively engaged in exploring ways to build effective, sustainable, practical assessment. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has been organizing the biennial Library Assessment Conference since 2006, and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has created a national portal containing a wide range of resources and discussions about assessing the value of libraries. Personally, I have learned from many librarians that assessment has become one of the top priorities in their organizations. Thus, given the importance of library assessment in library practice, it is important for our students to have a well-rounded mastery of this topic.

Right now I’m looking for a textbook for this potential course on library assessment, and I have my eyes on a former colleague’s work “Library Assessment in Higher Education by Joe Matthews”. I’m also thinking about drawing ideas from librarians on how to best approach such a course – if you are a practitioner who happen to be reading this post and would like to share some of your thoughts/experience on library assessment, please don’t hesitate to drop me a note!

QQML 2013

image

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.