Library Assessment Conference Aha! Moments, Post 1

I had the good fortune to be able to attend the ARL Assessment conference in Arlington, VA’s Crystal City. I traveled with colleagues via Amtrak, which was an enjoyable and new experience for me. Once at the conference and checked in, we employed a “divide and conquer” approach to the conference and attended different sessions. Instead of a blow-by-blow account of each session of the conference like I have done in the past, I hope to provide some of my own Aha! Moments that I had throughout the time there. I hope that these will apply to those of you who consider yourselves newbies or outsiders to assessment librarianship. I hope that my reporting can help those who are not yet converts to see assessment not as scary, but more of as an accessible toolkit to use to prove library value.

Assessment Aha Moment #1: It all starts with a question.

A major shift in thinking happened for me during this conference, which could be related to the old adage, “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” I believed that we were collecting data points, such as number of instruction sessions, interactions at the desk, etc. in order to be able to report those statistics outward. And although this is an important thing to do, I think that I was equating these statistics and their collection to Assessment (with a capital A). Instead, I learned that in order to conduct assessment activities, it is important to take the stance of a researcher and start with a research question. This may not seem groundbreaking to those reading this, but it very literally changed my thinking about something I thought I knew about. In one of the sessions I attended, a presenter made a throw-away comment in which she said that the library should make their mission statement into a series of questions. This was my biggest Aha! Moment of the entire conference. Starting with a well formulated question should be the start of an assessment project, whether you are dealing with instructional data (“are they learning?”) or space (“how is it being used?”) or services (“what can we offer or how can we improve?”) It is not simply enough to ask if we are valuable or not, but the question must be formulated to look at a certain group or activity happening in the library. This made me think of our annual departmental objectives. I believe that if we looked at each of the library’s objectives and turned those into questions, it would be easier to classify these departmental actions—do these departmental activities work to prove or answer this question or not?

 This will be a series, so expect more of these as I work through my conference report.