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.
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Alice Pearman
Collection Management Librarian
Plymouth State University, Plymouth, NH
She/Her/Hers
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Original Message:
Sent: Jul 19, 2022 02:44 PM
From: Susanna Cowan
Subject: Hello from your new co-conveners Susanna and Paul!
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
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Susanna Cowan
Coordinator for Library Research & Assessment
University of Connecticut
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