The Holy Grail of Academic Library Assessment: Student Learning Outcomes – Theater
Lisa Norberg, Dean of the Library & Academic Information Services, Barnard College
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Accreditation agencies across the U.S. are requiring greater institutional accountability for student learning and ACRL’s own recently adopted standards recommends “libraries define, develop, and measure outcomes that contribute to institutional effectiveness.” (http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/standardslibraries) This session will describe a new assessment protocol developed by Derek Rodriguez called “Understanding Library Impacts” (ULI). The ULI protocol explores student library and information use during high impact experiences such as a thesis or capstone course within an undergraduate academic major. The goal is to connect library use with the student learning outcomes that matter most to faculty and stakeholders.
Lisa Norberg will discuss her experience using the ULI protocol to assess the Barnard Library’s effect on student learning outcomes in history and work currently underway to adapt the tool to assess a new College initiative on empirical reasoning. She will help participants brainstorm additional methods for demonstrating the library’s impact on student learning and offer tips for developing narratives that speak to faculty, administrators, and accreditation teams.
Assessing Library Web Portals: Usability and Beyond – IT116
Yu-Hui Chen, Bibliographer and Outreach Librarian for Education, University at Albany, State University of New York.
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Libraries have embraced the Web as a platform for reaching patrons. Academic libraries have also invested heavily in Web-based resources and make them accessible via their library Web portals. How successful is your library in delivering information resources and services to meet your patrons’ needs through its Web presence? Do your patrons use the library Web portal at all? If so, how do they use it, to what extent, and for what purposes? How easy is it to navigate? How useful is it? How satisfied are your users and why? Come join a lively discussion on assessment measures for library Web portals.
Assessment in practice – a breakout session with Dr. Nitecki – IT117
Danuta Nitecki, Dean of Libraries, and Professor, College of Information Science & Technology
Drexel University
This will be a practice session on framing the question and matching methodology for gathering data to the evaluation problem, with a particular focus on evaluating space. Dr. Nitecki will also respond to any follow up questions from her presentation.
The Contextualization of E-books – IT225
1st Presentation –
Scott Warren, Head of Collections; Bibliographer for the Sciences and Technology
Research, Collections & Scholarly Communication, Syracuse University
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Before patrons even begin to use e-books, there are a bewildering variety of decisions that libraries must make when it comes to choosing e-book providers. Do you want to purchase books one at a time, in sets, or on approval? Do you want to own them or merely rent (license) them? Are you interested in patron driven acquisitions? Do you want to work directly with a variety of publishers or are you more comfortable sticking with an aggregator? And what about your approval plan and jobbers like YBP? Plus, what sort of usage rights and restrictions can you live with? All of these – and more – are things libraries need to wrestle with before even getting down to actually buying any books! This session will be a quick overview of some of the choices confronting libraries and how to evaluate those options via the recent experiences of the Syracuse University Library. It really is all about what you are trying to accomplish.
2nd presentation –
Andy Krzystyniak, Interlibrary Loan/Science Librarian, Skidmore College
IFLA e-lending background paper
Numerous academic libraries have adopted an assertive acquisition approach to e-books in recent years. As tens of thousands of e-books are added to library collections at a rapid rate, serious questions are arising about this electronically formatted material in the realm of resource sharing. This session will focus on the difficulties in pursuing the guiding principles of interlibrary loan in relation to the dematerializing nature of e-books within the intellectual property commons.