Author Archives: Nancy Turner

From Inspiration to Improvement: Reflections on ALA 2025 

Last week I had the privilege of hearing wise words from three remarkable women – all featured speakers at the American Library Association’s annual conference. Thousands gathered to hear from Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, ex-Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, and … Continue reading

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Dear ChatGPT. Help me Learn to Make a Pivot Table

In my conversation last week with Karen Kohn, we discussed the necessity of humans interacting with data to achieve the best analytical results. We were exploring statistics from EBSCO on the use of our e-books to understand the top subject … Continue reading

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Deepening the ChatGPT Conversation with an Expert

The library provides access to over 3 million e-books (based on our 23-24 reporting to ARL). Most of that access is acquired through e-book packages and EBSCO is a big one, with over 370,000 titles in a range of subject … Continue reading

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Students Asking Students, “How Do You Use the Library?”  

The Student Library Advisory Board program provides a natural opportunity for library staff to learn from students and to gather feedback about their experience with the libraries’ spaces and services. Board members, paid a stipend each semester, are regular users … Continue reading

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Partnering with ChatGPT to Analyze User Feedback

As regular readers of this blog know, I like to explore the use of generative AI as a collaborator in my assessment work – today I experimented with using ChatGPT to categorize a set of 100 open-ended responses providing feedback … Continue reading

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Quick Poll Leads to Rapid Improvement

The University’s office of Institutional Research and Assessment launched a new assessment tool last fall, and the libraries was one of the first departments to try it out. It’s called a Quick Poll, and we used it to gather data … Continue reading

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What Care Looks Like

I have just returned from the 2024 Library Assessment Conference in Portland, Oregon.  I came away from that meeting with a true appreciation for what care can look like when we work together as colleagues and with our communities to provide … Continue reading

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On Citizen Science and Library Assessment

I first got hooked on watching birds when living on Peaks Island, Maine. Sitting at my kitchen table one morning and gazing out a window to the back yard, a flock of cedar waxwings settled onto a tree. I never … Continue reading

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We’re Getting Social

Reaching out to students where they are is a critical part of our communication and outreach program, and our new assistant director for editorial, Ella Lathan, is expert at creatively using social media platforms to connect with our community. She … Continue reading

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An Assessment Librarian Converses with ChatGPT

Inspired by Hyangeun (Jenny) Ji’s workshop out of the Scholars Studio yesterday on How to Talk with AI: Prompt Engineering, I continued my exploration of how generative AI tools might support my work in data analysis and assessment. Jenny’s lesson … Continue reading

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