Focus on Assesment - Jul 25, 2011

On May 17, 2011, members of the Penn State University Library faculty and staff participated in the Pennsylvania Library Association-College and Research Division (PaLA-CRD) Annual Spring Workshop titled “Higher Ed Assessment: How do libraries measure up?’’ presented by Dr. Megan Oakleaf at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. The workshop focused on the results of a recent publication of Dr. Oakleaf, “The Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report.” The aim of the workshop was to educate participants on how to demonstrate the academic library’s value from an institutional viewpoint.

When determining the library’s value, it is important to define clear goals. Dr. Oakleaf posed two questions to think about before and during the process of assessing the library’s impact, “What is of institutional interest?’ and “How does the library reflect the goals of the institution?” The answers to these questions are essential in portraying the library’s impact from an institutional viewpoint.

To be able to describe the impact of the library, one must be able to show its value. According to Dr. Oakleaf, there are five definitions of value: use, commodity, competing alternatives, library impact and return on investment, with the latter two being the most important. It can be difficult, at times, to quantify the library’s impact and return on investment from an institutional standpoint. Dr. Oakleaf went through and briefly described her recommendations for librarians to quantify these values. Small groups of workshop participants were asked to create a simple correlation chart between general campus needs, goals and outcomes and services provided by the library. Individuals marked down whether they felt there was, wasn’t, or could be a correlation between items. While working through the exercise, some other important ideas stressed were, “What is most important to the institution, the faculty and the students?” and “What are the libraries contributing as well as what are libraries doing that is not contributing to these items?” This exercise was useful to demonstrate the potential areas for assessing the value of the library.

After the exercise, a panel of experts was brought in to discuss how institutions assess impact and value. The panel was made up of representatives from universities, colleges, community colleges and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. A central theme resonated from each panel member: collaborate. Although it could sometimes be a difficult task, librarians were advised to collaborate with others within the library, the university and beyond when determining focus areas of impact and value. This prompted an interesting comment: “Who better than librarians have a better sense of what is going on within their university?”

As a final message to summarize the events of the day and keep people thinking about the value of academiclibraries, Dr. Oakleaf reminded participants to focus on two core areas. How do we, as a library increase our impactand how do we document that impact?