ALA Annual 2011: Attentive Crowd Packs ACRL Session on Demonstrating the Value of Libraries
By Michael Kelley Jun 26, 2011On Sunday morning, it was fortunate that a fire marshal was not assessing the room where the Association of College and Research Libraries was making a presentation on assessment tools to demonstrate the value of the academic library.
The small room at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans was overflowing with attendees who crammed every nook to hear about ways to convince stakeholders, particularly funding bodies, about the library's worth.
The session, the ACRL's assessment committee's first ever presentation at the ALA Annual convention, exhorted the academic librarian community to develop and support "a culture of assessment in libraries," in the words of Jennifer Rutner, an assessment and marketing librarian at Columbia University in New York and the incoming chairperson of the committee.
In tough budget times, assessment results can have a powerful impact, Rutner said.
"In this environment it has become imperative that libraries demonstrate the value that we bring to our communities," she said.
Megan Oakleaf, an assistant professor at the iSchool at Syracuse University and the author of the ACRL's September 2010 report on the value of academic libraries, said academic librarians need to get more forceful about demonstrating, with data, how what they do advances the overarching mission of the institution.
"We are not being militant about this," Oakleaf said. "We should be. And we should be aggressive about this conversation and maybe even a little angry and get ambitious about what we could provide to the conversation," she said.
Librarians need to get organized with their data, using assessment management systems, to show how they are having an impact at the institutional level, for example on accreditation or enrollment or faculty research productivity.
"There is a shift from skills to impact and the best way to demonstrate that impact is to put things in the context of what the institution wants, not just what we want," she said.
Annette Day, the head of collection management at North Carolina State University libraries, Raleigh, demonstrated how her department created an SQL database to measure expenditure data which helped managers to measure how the library's purchasing power is distributed across different subject areas.
"[The data] can really help us test our assumptions about the strengths of the university and what we know about the work of the colleges and departments, and it enables us to make realignments in our collection scope and emphasis if necessary," Day said.
The data approach also helped facilitate discussions with other stakeholders on campus about the library's collection development. For example, a data-driven review of journal usage helped Day's library to determine not only what journals to keep but also to make a data-supported argument for the decision.
"Because we had this process it was easier to explain to the faculty why the things that fell to the bottom did and why the things that rose to the top did," she said. "So, we found it to be a very productive process."
See our ALA Conferences site for complete event coverage from the editors of Library Journal and School Library Journal.
