ACRL Assessment Discussion Group

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Charge: To provide a forum for assessment librarians – and those with responsibility for, and interest in, library assessment – to discuss methods, training, results, impact, institutional needs and challenges, and seek solutions to common problems faced by the library assessment community.
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  • 1.  Hello from your new co-conveners Susanna and Paul!

    Posted Jul 19, 2022 02:45 PM

    To the ACRL Assessment Discussion Group community,

    Hello from your new co-conveners!

    The library assessment community is both broad and diverse, as are the forms of assessment we practice and our individual roles in relation to library assessment at our institutions.  Some of us are administrators, some of us sit in assessment-dedicated roles, and others in our community practice assessment as a part of our work in information literacy, research support, outreach, collections, access services, and everything else.   

    What brings us together here is an interest in library assessment in its many forms.  With assessment, we tell stories about ourselves and our work in order to better our organizations and document our reach and impact.  

    How we do that, day to day, varies greatly depending on the scope of the questions we're asking.

    We hope to plan some formal events this year, but also to bring the discussion to life here.

    Let's introduce ourselves!  Beyond your name and role, we invite you to briefly (2-3 sentences) share assessment projects you're working on right now, no matter the size.  Our hope is to shine some light on the tremendous range of our work - and to give us all the chance to say: I'm out here doing this!

    To start us off, here's what we're up to this July:

    • Susanna: I'm just winding up an internal study of how our staff perceived the pandemic's effect on their work and their ability to provide service to and collaborate with stakeholders.  I'm also in the "configuration" stage of LibQUAL and am working with a group to choose our optional (custom) questions… (the dilemma of sky's the limit!)
    • Paul: We're looking at data and comments from a user satisfaction survey that we administered during the spring semester that indicated a hospitality gap between our minoritized and white students as well as a number of space issues. We are also working out ways to correlate exposure to library spaces and services with learning outcomes similar to work at UNC-Charlotte as reported in a 2020 paper from Becky Croxton and Anne Moore. 

    We look forward to getting to know the community better over the course of the year.

    Be well,

    Susanna Cowan
    Coordinator for Library Research & Assessment
    University of Connecticut 

    Paul Orkiszewski
    Dean of the Libraries
    Radford University



    ------------------------------
    Susanna Cowan
    Coordinator for Library Research & Assessment
    University of Connecticut
    ------------------------------


  • 2.  RE: Hello from your new co-conveners Susanna and Paul!

    Posted Jul 19, 2022 02:53 PM

     

     

    Carol A. Leibiger, Ph.D., MSLIS

    Past Chair, ALA Library History Round Table

    Associate Professor

    Information Literacy Coordinator

    130B I.D. Weeks Library

    University of South Dakota

    Vermillion, SD 57069

    605-658-3383

     

    "A country is not only what it does but what it tolerates."

    Kurt Tucholsky

     

    Pronouns:  she / her / hers

     






  • 3.  RE: Hello from your new co-conveners Susanna and Paul!

    Posted Jul 19, 2022 02:56 PM

    Hi, I'm Carol Leibiger, IL Coordinator in the University Libraries at the University of South Dakota (Anne Moore is a former dean). A colleague and I developed a hybrid evaluation/assessment instrument that we use in Freshman Writing to gauge student learning and provide the library faculty with data about their teaching.

     

    Carol

    /

    Carol A. Leibiger, Ph.D., MSLIS

    Past Chair, ALA Library History Round Table

    Associate Professor

    Information Literacy Coordinator

    130B I.D. Weeks Library

    University of South Dakota

    Vermillion, SD 57069

    605-658-3383

     

    "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change we seek."
    Barack Obama

     

    Pronouns:  she / her / hers

     






  • 4.  RE: Hello from your new co-conveners Susanna and Paul!

    Posted Jul 20, 2022 09:53 AM

    Thanks for getting things started, Carol! ��  I'm sure there are many folks in our community who have given/will give/are giving thought to gauging student learning.  Thanks for the share.

     

    Keep the introductions coming!

     

    Susanna

    Co-Convener ACRL Assessment DG

     

     

    Susanna M. Cowan PhD MLS

    Coordinator for Library Research & Assessment

    UConn Library
    369 Fairfield Way, Unit 1005 | Storrs, CT 06269-1005
    http://lib.uconn.edu/ Click to follow link.">lib.uconn.edu

    she|her

     






  • 5.  RE: Hello from your new co-conveners Susanna and Paul!

    Posted Jul 20, 2022 08:46 PM
    Hi Everyone, I'm Kat Bell, Head, Assessment and Planning at George Mason University Libraries. I'd like to start by sharing that we finished our SACSCOC Reaffirmation process in May! A big success. Here's what my department and I are working on right now:
    • Annual stats season
    • Fall microassessments focused on space
    • Refining our graduate assistant evaluation process
    • Analyzing data from spring surveys, jamboards, and open feedback sessions assessing the experience of our student workers and planning for fall feedback from supervisors (part of Hampton University's Leading the Charge Grant)


    ------------------------------
    Kathleen Bell
    Head, Assessment and Planning
    George Mason University
    She/Her/Hers
    ------------------------------



  • 6.  RE: Hello from your new co-conveners Susanna and Paul!

    Posted Jul 21, 2022 08:27 AM
    Hi Kat,
    Great to hear all that you are doing. Can you share more about the space "micro-assessments" - what does a micro-assessment look like? Seems like something we all should have in our "tool kit" of assessment practice. Thanks in advance.

    ------------------------------
    [Nancy][Turner]
    [Director for Planning, Strategy and Organizational Development]
    [Temple University Libraries]
    ------------------------------



  • 7.  RE: Hello from your new co-conveners Susanna and Paul!

    Posted Jul 27, 2022 03:46 PM
    Hi, all,

    I'm Megan Hodge, Head of Student Success at Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries and de facto assessment librarian until we hire one later this year (fingers crossed!). VCU Libraries' current assessment projects include:
    • Determining our FY23 assessment objectives for eventual submission to the Provost's Office
    • Finalizing our initial compliance report for SACSCOC reaffirmation (we're a couple years behind you and GMU, Kat!)
    • Digging into disciplinary and user type differences in our spring 2022 LibQUAL data
    Looking forward to learning from you all!

    Megan
    ---
    Megan Hodge (she/her) | pronounce
    Head, Student Success
    VCU Libraries | Virginia Commonwealth University







  • 8.  RE: Hello from your new co-conveners Susanna and Paul!

    Posted Aug 09, 2022 09:58 AM

    Hi, Megan!

     

    Thanks for the hello and taste of what you've been doing at VCU.

     

    Your bullet about the report for SACSCOC reminded me of a similar call for "information literacy" data I got from our research institution's office for our 5-year review (the entity for our region is NECHE).  We'd never submitted it before (the standard was added in 2016), so I had no baseline and "instructions" were non-existent (although NECHE references the ACRL infolit Framework on their website, which clarified their understanding of "information literacy," but not how we should come up with our numbers).

     

    As I tried to come up with a reasonable way to provide data on "sessions embedded in a class," "free-standing sessions" and "online sessions" – although we had never tracked our instruction work in exactly those terms (and I faced many questions, like -- are those categories mutually exclusive?) – I found myself thinking, as I have many times, about the many ways we approach, not only "messy data," but also "messy requests."  Would make for an interesting round-table – or, in the meantime, something to ponder "aloud" here!

     

    Hope wherever you are, it's less sweltering than here (or if sweltering there too, you have some means to escape the heat!).

     

    Best August wishes,

    Susanna

    University of Connecticut

     

    Co-convener ACRL Assessment Discussion Group

     






  • 9.  RE: Hello from your new co-conveners Susanna and Paul!

    Posted Jul 20, 2022 09:50 PM

    Hello.  As Collection Assessment Librarian for The University of North Texas Libraries in Denton, Texas, I'm preparing a DEI collection audit initiative.  I want this to be long-term and continuous, examining different aspects for different parts of the collection.  The first project will probably examine diversity of identities of content-creators of our more recent acquisitions.  We are presuming that the bulk of our collections are not diverse, but we are wanting to see how well we've doing in the last 10 years or so. 

     

    Karen R. Harker, MLS, MPH

    Preferred Pronouns: she, her, hers

    Collection Assessment Librarian

    University of North Texas Libraries

    1155 Union Blvd.

    #305190

    Denton, TX 76203-5017

    940-565-2688

     






  • 10.  RE: Hello from your new co-conveners Susanna and Paul!

    Posted Sep 01, 2022 09:52 AM
    Edited by Alice Pearman Sep 01, 2022 09:52 AM
    Greetings! I am late to the party but happy to be here.
    Our institution has about 4,000 FTE right now, and we have five librarians, including our archivist. I say this because I feel a need to point out that we all wear many hats.

    With that said, I am thrilled to be on sabbatical this semester, which enables me to focus on ONE thing. That one thing is developing a realistic, manageable plan for ongoing assessment of our collections. Largely using Madeline Kelly's The Complete Collections Assessment Manual as a guide, I am determining  our goals for collections assessment, what data will be required, the assessment process, and a proposed schedule for an assessment program, including communicating the results.

    ------------------------------
    Alice Pearman
    Collection Management Librarian
    Plymouth State University, Plymouth, NH
    She/Her/Hers
    ------------------------------