Assessment of Academic Library Effectiveness Using ACRL Standards for Continuous Evaluation/ACRL workshop with Bob Fernekes and Bill Nelson

Ferneckes and Nelson provided an introduction to the 2004 Standards for Libraries in Higher Education, provided some suggestions on how to apply the standards and provided some collaborative team table discussions on using the standards (by type of library). Workbook participants received a copy of their workbook called Standards and Assessments for Academic Libraries: A Workbook

Highlights:
Translating core values, vision, mission, and strategy
Linking to campus-wide values, vision, etc.
Exposure to a variety of methods of assessment using the workbook
Documentation of outcomes and assessments and linking back to the college-wide agendas
Challenge: “demonstrate ways in which library users are changed as a result of their contact with library services, resources and programs, and assess student learning and impact.
Use your established “culture of evidence” as defined by Bonnie Gratch-Lindauer
Prepare for next accreditation visit using regional standards, ACRL standards, SLO assessments .
Refer back to the established baseline (or establish one if not already developed)
Ideas and actions generated from this workshop:

! Idea! Work with Leslie to design an “automatic” SLO rubric at the point of the faculty request of the instruction session…then have students login and do a pretest..ask for email and then do end of session AS WELL AS end of semester evalution.
! Pull out the original presentation to the Board of Trustees and re-do the peer comparisons in state and out of state
! Krista….When doing a survey, start with the outcome that you want to measure…
! Use accreditation standards or ACRL standards to determine outcomes.

To share: Accreditation based outcomes chart on Library Effectiveness (handout #3)
LibQual…spend time in the exhibits looking at it…
Use first paper (in a portfolio as a pretest) to demonstrate progress of student with citations, resource use, writing ability, etc.
Solinet/Cal Shepard Customer service and assessment mthods…excellent presenter
READ and become aware of the professional association accreditation info for voc-ed areas like paralegal, rad tech, nursing, etc.

General observations: It is interesting to come from a six month period of working fairly exclusively with new technologies and delivery systems (Web 2.0 and social networking software, blogs, wikis, podcasting, anytime/anywhere thinking) to a traditional standards-based assessment evaluations where peer evaluations and ratios of resources/traditional services to enrollments are evaluated. With a whole new generation of students using web-based resources, it will be interesting to see decreases of circulations and increases of search hits, web hit rates, etc. How we evaluate use of programs. resources and services by digital natives will determine dramatically the movement of our institutions to where these users “live.”

Afternoon session consisted of discussion groups where we shared out mission and vision statements and worked on assessments. Not that helpful to me since it was similar to other workshops I have been to. I felt that PCC is ahead of the game in this arena.