Developing Your Assessment Toolkit

I was curious to learn that Kathy Ball (McMaster) and Margaret Martin Gardiner (U. of Western Ontario) have the title of Assessment Librarian at their respective universities, so I decided to attend this session and see what kind of assessment they take have initiated at their institutions.

Not surprisingly, there was some discussion about LibQual, which they feel is a worthwhile tool which can give hints at what aspects of the library needs work -- especially when it is followed up with targeted efforts (focus groups, interviews) to assess the improvements needed in those areas.

Some of the assessment tools they discussed were: surveys and questionnaires, focus groups, interviews, and observational techniques. They suggested that in this day and age a library administrator cannot ask for funding without proper support for their endeavours.

Although not surprising, they repeated at least three times to "be aware of your bias." Whether at the question-writing stage, during an interview or focus group, or at the data analysis stage -- bias can creep up and skew one's results. In more basic terms, they told us to "be prepared to hear both what you want to hear and what you don't want to hear."

Note for Rita: A programmer at one of their institutions devised a way to send their LibQual comments to a PostgreSQL database, attach categories to the entries, and render them searchable and sortable. Perhaps we should contact them and see if they would share some notes about this?