The ALA Midwinter meeting came early this year – seems like we’d just returned from winter break when it was time to prepare for Boston.
Data, data visualization, and assessment have become popular topics of discussion and ALA sponsored more meetings than I could attend without the help of a horse to transport me from place to place. Here are some highlights:
Assessment Findings Repository
We kicked off an important initiative for assessment at a visioning and planning meeting for a potential Library Assessment Repository. The Repository project is just in its planning stages, spear-headed by Jessame Ferguson (McDaniel) with two sections of LLAMA (Library Leadership & Management Association): MAES (Measurement, Assessment and Evaluation) and LOMS (Library Organization and Management).
The impetus for a repository is the value of centralizing across libraries assessment data and findings, as well as samples of instruments and methodologies. Currently this kind of resource is silo-ed on library websites and intranets. We lose expertise, research already conducted, and potential for peer comparisons, when this data are not in a shared, collaborative space. Creating and sustaining a repository such as this would be a challenge, particularly if raw data about library use is made public, but definitely worthwhile.
ACRL Assessment Discussion Group
Patron privacy was also a topic the next day at the ACRL Assessment Discussion Group I convened. The meeting was well-attended by a good mix of librarians and researchers and we had a lively discussion related to assessment in libraries. What particularly struck me was the increasing use of new data collection methods, including card swipes and wi-fi tracking systems to get more detailed behavioral information: Who is in our building? Where are they going? The balance of privacy and usable data for demonstrating value came up more than once in this wide-ranging discussion. Let me know if you’d like notes to the meeting, also posted at ALA Connect.
Ithaka S+R
I attended the Ithaka S+R participants meeting, as Temple will be involved soon with one of their sponsored projects on how faculty do research in the discipline of religious studies. If you aren’t familiar with this organization, I encourage you to take a look at the newly designed website – much of their research on libraries is open access – see for example a landscape review of where digital scholarship is placed in large research libraries. In the upcoming year, Ithaka’s research arm will focus on education transformation and libraries & scholarship communication.
LLAMA MAES Hot Topics
The hot topics sessions sponsored by LLAMA MAES are always at the forefront of what libraries are doing with measurement, assessment and evaluation. Lisa Horowitz, MIT, discussed the assessment of their outreach to new faculty. The starting place was an agree-upon set of principles, or best practices, that librarians would all use in their liaison work. For instance, conducting research on the 40-50 new faculty members coming to MIT each year. The outcomes that were measured included a number of face-to-face meetings and an increased knowledge by faculty members of library services – both for faculty research and their students. The results have not yet been published, but this is sure to be a provocative, but practical analysis.
Other ideas and projects described by participants:
- Using Zotero to create faculty profiles
- Adding information on outcomes to data input for reference transactions
- Mining monograph acknowledgements for references to librarian research support
The general thread, and one I heard multiple times over the course of the conference, was libraries using assessment and data in order to create more effective, yet meaningful ways of telling the Library’s story.