tag: Library assessment
Blog Post
November 18, 2022
Assessment Trends in the Late Pandemic Era
Reflections from the 2022 Library Assessment Conference
The COVID-19 pandemic has meant reevaluating approaches to, and the underlying goals of, assessment in academic libraries. Shifts to remote and hybrid work have accelerated digitization efforts and led libraries to rethink assessment, especially as perceptions of the library’s role and overarching purpose change. Against this backdrop, the Library Assessment Conference provided an important opportunity to take stock of how the field continues to evolve.
Blog Post
November 6, 2019
A Methodology for Testing Service Concepts
New Issue Brief
As academic libraries continue to evolve beyond a focus on collections, their leaders have long recognized the importance of developing new services that add value for learners, instructors, researchers, and other stakeholders. Sometimes, the demand for new services is self-evident, but in other cases the library must develop services speculatively and in a competitive environment. In these cases, planning and assessment tools can be of tremendous value in allowing library leaders to focus their new service initiatives most…
Issue Brief
November 6, 2019
What Do Our Users Need?
An Evidence-Based Approach for Designing New Services
In the face of evolving user needs, many academic libraries are reimagining the services they offer. As instruction moves online, how can libraries best provide support for teaching and learning? As research becomes more reliant on data, computation, and collaboration, where can libraries best add value? As colleges welcome more diverse student populations and greater contingent faculty labor to campus, what is the library’s role? As budgets shrink, how should a library prioritize which resources and services to provide?…
Blog Post
February 28, 2019
Landscape of Library Service Quality Tools
During the course of the past year, I have had a chance to speak with many assessment librarians, library deans, and others in academic libraries about the types of tools they are using, or considering, for their planning and assessment projects. We typically connect because they have fielded, or are thinking about fielding, one or more of the Ithaka S+R Local Surveys, which primarily focus on the ways in which students and faculty…
Blog Post
February 13, 2019
The Right Tool for the Job
Fostering Strategic Approaches to User Research
In October 2018 we had the opportunity to engage with attendees to at the Digital Library Federation (DLF) conference about fostering strategic approaches to digital library assessment. During the session we briefly presented a framework for thinking through various user research avenues and related methodologies (suggesting that the user survey isn’t the only useful tool libraries could employ even if we use them a lot!) and then invited participants to consider what they…