Tellin’ Our Story–or Not: Assessment Results on Academic Library Web Sites
Meg Scharf from the University of Central Florida Libraries
- Everything measured gets better… doesn’t it?
- Assessment, program review, annual report, benchmarking, IR, statistical analysis, TQM, etc.
- Who are your most important stakeholders: students, faculty, staff, athletic department, neighbors of the university, public library, etc. Maybe anyone who stumbles on library website…
- We want to know what they’re thinking, but also want them to know we’re interested in what they’re thinking
- Often tied to funding
- Want to replicate our success over time
- Showed an example of publicly visible scorecard. Perfect score in each area for first year in order to get staff buy-in.
- Best way to get the word out: our websites, if not on our website -> maybe it’s a secret.
- Drew a sample of 250 academic libraries from University of Texas 2040 US Universities
- Public & Private, University & Colleges & Other
- Scoring rubric to give score of A (excellent), B (very good), C (okay), F (no access to any pages with measurement or evaluative information)
- If there was old information, gave the site a “C”… is old information better or worse than no information? Used 3 years to define “old.”
- Used Google to find homepage, and on some institution sites had to look pretty hard to find library website.
- Looked for everything: assessment, evaluation, performance, annual report, etc.
- If not, then looked for circulation, ILL, reference, catalog…. there are numbers lurking there somewhere… These numbers tell us about what they’re doing.
- If not that either, looked for Institutional Research that might include library information, University strategic plan, etc.
- 5% got an “A,” 16% “B,” 16% “C,” and 73% got an “F”
- Points out she’s a former reference librarian, talked to people about searching, but couldn’t find it.
- She pointed out we’re not tellin’ our assessment story.
- Best practices:
- Measure/assess/evaluate something
- Get that something from your goals, objectives, plan, mission
- Report on it in context, comparison
- Explain why this is important, or not
- Describe resulting improvements or plans
- Logical location
- Pointed at University of Washington Libraries , University of Southern California, presenter’s home institution.
- Said it’s not best practices to just post results. Must include context to explain what it means to our stakeholders.
- “We must tell the story of what we do and why it is so important…our users can be our best advocates” Mitch Freedman, 2003 Assessment helps our users have the information to tell the story to be our advocates.
Designing Comprehensive Assessment Plans: The Big Pictures Leads to the Small Picture
Rachel Applegate, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
- Pointed out we might not be the people she wants to talk to…we’re the choir.
- We have plans for lots of things, so we can also have assessment plans
- Want the sweet spot between not doing any and doing too much.
- Five perspectives: existing data, strategic plan, dept by dept, advanced (dashboard, balanced scorecard), academic department assessment grid
- First step: library job description: what do you have to evaluate?
- Typical academic library has standard functions, but might have slight differences (special libraries, outsourcing parts, etc)
- Should be really specific (like a good resume)
- Streams of existing data (Academic Libraries Survey bi-annually, college students experiences questionaires, CSEQ, bills from OCLC, consortial, budgeting, etc.
- Look at data you have, add context, track over time, match to what library is/does, add most important elements
- Strategic plan: insert quality or quantity measures, include means of assessment and criteria for success
- It’s not: “we will do something and we did something”/one step solutions
- Each department identifies own key function and a way to evaluate it. This is good, because each department has a strong sense of what they do.
- At the library level: avoid duplication of efforts, organize a schedule, ensure nothing important is neglected
- Advanced 1: Dashboard
- Speedometers (how fast the library is going)
- Odometers (how far library has gone)
- Check-engine lights (are problems detected?)
- Identify person responsible for reporting
- Investigating causes
- Advanced 2: Balanced Scorecard
- Four top-level summative measures: the scorecard
- Balanced around four important perspectives:Fiscal, Efficiency, Customer, and Innovation
- Finance, Future, Process, User (university of virginia articles)
- Academic Department Assessment Grid
- Mission-Goals-Measurement-Results-Use
- Match? Information literacy goals fit well in this matrix.
- Check general education/departmental goals
- Adapt library job description items
- Assessment plan is a plan for action: What you are going to do, when, with who, etc.
- Difference from collecting and deciding what to do with it.
- Doing this will help us understand what the library is doing, prioritize your work, be able to communicate library needs and contributions
- Good for fitting into university culture: publishing, assessment, etc.
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