Whether or not you were able to attend ACRL in Indianapolis last month, you can check out lots of the great conference content through the proceedings, now available online. Here are a few contributed papers that present Value-related projects. The authors of these papers respond to the research agenda of the Value report in interesting ways.
Academic and Public Library Collaboration: Increasing Value by Sharing Space, Collections, and Services by Daniel Overfield and Coleen Roy
This project, from Cuyahoga Community College (CCC), is in the very early stages of working to demonstrate correlations between a popular reading collection and student engagement. CCC is collaborating with neighboring public library systems to install a small popular reading collection in the college library and hopefully increase student engagement. The CCC librarians plan to assess the impact and value of the popular collection by tracking circulation, visitor counts, and public library card applications. They believe that student success, student retention, and even graduation rates may be aided by the presence of a more diverse and interesting library collection. We hope to hear results from the project sometime soon!
The author of this paper suggests that one of the most important questions asked in the Value report is “How does the library contribute to undergraduate student learning?” He presents the Understanding Library Impacts (ULI) protocol, which is designed to help libraries detect and communicate their impact on undergraduate student learning. There are two instruments in ULI: 1) a questionnaire to gather quantitative and qualitative data about student use of library resources, services, and facilities during academic work and 2) a “Learning Activities Crosswalk” that supports connections between library use and student learning outcomes. The ULI protocol has been used in ten library assessment projects over the past two years and examples from those projects are used in this paper.
Choosing and Using Assessment Management Systems: What Librarians Need to Know by Megan Oakleaf, Jackie Belanger, and Carlie Graham
The Value report highlighted the need for libraries to assess their information literacy instructional activities and programs and to demonstrate how their instructional activities contribute to student learning as well as the wider educational and research missions of their parent institutions. As a result, many academic libraries now face the challenge of assessing student learning and determining the best ways to collect, manage, and report assessment data. In order to support these efforts, the Value report highlights the potential usefulness of assessment management systems, or AMSs.
The aim of this paper is to inform librarians about various features and uses of AMSs in order to help them participate in conversations about the adoption and use of AMSs at their own institutions. Previous work on this topic within the LIS field has identified a number of significant benefits that libraries can reap in using an institution-wide AMS. This paper endeavors to forward this conversation by providing a more detailed discussion of specific features of a number of commercial AMSs, and by offering examples of how these systems are being used by academic librarians. This paper provides librarians with key selection criteria for choosing an AMS and explores the benefits and challenges faced by libraries and their institutions in using AMSs.
If you know of more research on this topic, please let us know in the comments.