Aha! Moment #2: Let's take this show on the road!

Assessment Aha Moment #2: The academic library literature has already proven that supporting libraries are worthwhile. Now we need to get this information out to higher education as a whole and advocate for ourselves.

              

I attended one long paper about the Value of Academic Libraries project. This committee is an outcome of the ACRL Plan of Excellence. The speaker presented a meta-analysis of the library literature that has been published on the topic of assessment. This work builds on the 2010 Value of Academic Libraries by Megan Oakleaf and the 2012 whitepaper from ACRL that give recommendations for assessment. The type of analysis being done was a gap analysis, which is looking for what information still needs to be published upon. The takeaway of this session for me was that librarians have already “drunk the assessment Kool-Aid” and they are undertaking numerous important library assessment projects that show the overall value of libraries. I am not sure if the number of people involved in assessment and the deluge of papers being written was clear to me before this conference. To put it into perspective: there were over 190 articles published since 2010, and over 600 attendees at the conference.

                One of the most important things posited by the speaker in this session is that information literacy instruction needs to be added as the 11^th “high impact practice” put forward by the AACU. Other high impact practices include service learning, first year experiences, global learning, and writing intensive courses. The work being done by the University of Minnesota and Grand Valley State University is proof that information literacy instruction and library services can be tied to student retention. But when we tell this story only to other librarians in library literature, we are leaving the external campus stakeholders out of the conversation. We need to advocate for libraries to be at the table, and this is a big job that is being left undone. I left this conference feeling that librarians collectively need to grow their self-esteem.  We need to advocate for ourselves on a higher level and use the assessment we are doing to prove it.