"Assessing the Educational Role and Effectiveness of the Library at Your Institution"
The Task Force collaborated with IDEA to create an open source survey instrument for libraries to gather feedback from stakeholders (faculty, administration, and staff).
The survey instrument is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and is able to be freely used by PALNI, The IDEA Center Inc. and by the general public and other rights as governed by Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License including commercial remix and reuse.
First Steps
To begin, we asked other library directors...
and we hosted a workshop on the ACRL Standards for Libraries in Higher Education
Focus
We knew we could not assess NINE principles; three assessment fallacies are: 1) Measure nothing, 2) Measure the wrong thing, 3) Measure too many things (Wood). Therefore we surveyed the library directors and found what THEY wanted the assessment tool to measure:
BUT we needed to determine WHO our stakeholders needed to be.
Most of us were already surveying students and PALNI has a committee dedicated to surveying the effectiveness of Information Literacy programs within our institutions. Given the nature of the principles we determined that we needed to survey
Therefore, we surveyed our administrators and found that they were interested in assessing much the same principles that the directors were interested in assessing. The only difference was that "Institutional Effectiveness" ranked lower with our administration stakeholders. That was explained by one person's comment that they had no idea that libraries could be effective in ways other than the Educational Role.
Because Institutional Effectiveness was high on the directors' list we included that principle in our question formulation.
We gathered approximately 150 questions related to the chosen principles then met with an expert in survey design who guided us to think about what we REALLY wanted to do with this survey:
The survey will be a Formative Assessment of the Educational Role and Institutional Effectiveness of the library. We will use the results to Implement Improvements, to Advise Allocation of Resources and to disseminate this information to educate and advocate for the library to the decision-makers on campus.
Final Steps for Completing the Survey Instrument
PALNI contracted with IDEAedu, the organization that creates surveys and hosts the Faculty Evaluation surveys that are administered at Huntington University (and others around the nation).
The survey instrument was developed with the understanding that it will be an open access product. If other libraries wished to use the survey, and many librarians across the nation have expressed interest, they can do so free or if they wish to benchmark with other libraries they may administer it from the IDEA servers for a very nominal cost.
The IDEA team assisted the committee with:
The survey will be a Formative Assessment of the Educational Role and Institutional Effectiveness of the library. We will use the results to Implement Improvements, to Advise Allocation of Resources and to disseminate this information to educate and advocate for the library to the decision-makers on campus.
The 24 PALNI libraries were given the opportunity to administer the survey during the spring semester, 2019. Ten libraries did so; The other 14 PALNI libraries will be given the opportunity to adminster the survey in the fall after which the committee will gather suggestions for improvement. IDEA will report out the findings to the individual (PALNI) libraries and aggregate the responses to inform the PALNI group how best to use ITS resources to support the 24 PALNI institutions.
Assessing Library Impact and Value:
Our presentation covers the origin, development, and deployment of an openly available survey instrument to assess the ACRL standards of institutional effectiveness and and educational role of the library. The survey was designed in collaboration between supported organizations of the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) and the higher education analytics nonprofit IDEA.
ALI Assessment Day presentation
2020 Library Assessment Conference Poster
