Should we serve bagels or croissants? An irreverent look at library assessment

Assessment and evaluation of programs is a major component of my rather non-traditional librarian job of a whopping 3 months. I can't say I'm any good at it yet but I'm optimistic, relatively good at picking up things quickly and running with them, and surrounded by phenomenal resources on an everyday basis.

At the same time, I think every one of you can relate to this...


The conference I crashed on Monday (sitting on the floor in the back of the room without a conference badge, let alone a single ribbon from it) was the Library Assessment Conference. We had kinda-but-not-really been invited to attend sessions of interest to us as long as we didn't eat the food or attend their social events. Fair enough. I scanned the schedule to see what was possibly useful to me from my job perspective and found something I couldn't miss:

Plenary Session I: The Most Important Challenge for Library Assessment
Three visionary library leaders each present what they see as the most important challenge for library assessment in the future. The session promises to be provocative and stimulating, but never boring.

I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting with a buildup like that, but I can assure you it wasn't along the lines of the provocative future Andrew Zolli had at MLA 08 in Chicago.

First up, with the best-designed Powerpoint for clarity in a large room, was Susan Gibbons, Vice Provost of the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester. She challenged our field's obsession for focus on quantitative data (suggesting maybe The Count from Sesame Street was partially to blame) and instead to consider what are we counting, why, and what the numbers actually tell us. Reference queries are down: is the Internet to blame? On the surface it's easy to say yes, but their deeper look found other barriers. Users did not want to leave their spots at the popular library computers (they did another study that found students walking 2-3 miles a day, thus why they didn't always want to haul laptops with them) to ask a reference librarian a question. They had students photograph what they always carried with them; cell phones appeared in every picture, yet both their own & 41% of the Association of Research Library (ARL) websites didn't have a phone number on the front page.

Next up was Rick Luce, with an overwhelmingly detailed dark blue background/white text with yellow headers Powerpoint I couldn't read most of the time, who is Vice Provost and Director of Libraries at Emory University. He whipped through his presentation with amazing speed about the $100 million investment approved for his aggressive strategic plan that wasn't based on ARL statistics and emphasized staff understanding for the need for systems-wide improvement. He suggested studying the criteria for the Malcom Baldridge National Quality Award winners, to get beyond assessment as a "happiness meter" (level 1) or just asking what's important (level 2) and considering 'How do we rate against the best in the industry?" (level 3). He ended with a charge of avoiding measures not focusing on strategy, a lack of accountability, a lack of discipline, and an emphasis on no action without a plan, and no plan without data. Whew!

Last but not least was Betsy Wilson, with another blue background/white text/yellow headers Powerpoint but she used minimal text with clear pictures for a better effect, Dean of Libraries at the University of Washington. She focused on 'accelerating relevance', of looking to the past to think about the future with a clear vision in mind. What got everyone's fingers tapping on laptops or scrawling on notepads was when she asked us to consider something I'll highlight and get back to later:

What will the scholar of 2050 want us to preserve? Blogs? Mashups? Wikis? How can we stem the data deluge? How can we make quality data convenient?

She continued with two main points of how assessment can help listen, look, connect & replenish; and that we are not the first to wrestle with the relevance of the library of the future. President Suzzallo at the University of Washington was canned by the Governor over the campus library's vision and construction, but then the voters sacked the Governor in the 1932 election. (source)

My brain merged obsession with front page library phone numbers (can you tell from yesterday's post?), level 3 thinking about (perceived) 'best in the industry' (can't you just Google the information and get it?), and what 2050 would want us to keep about today's information torrent.

For the last one I wasn't thinking along the lines of blogs (plenty of backup opportunities there) but the vast stream of both data and ephemera in various forums of social networking and instant messaging. What is useful for 2050 about now? Is it pointless to write a traditional journal article about these media when it can and will morph into something else within 6 months & have a shorter half life still in the future? Or is this part of what we need to document about the data flow in society now?

These communication methods are a part of everyday life for most students and what many of our library users are used to while many librarians are not. I believe in the use of wisely applied assessment measures, but not in using them as a crutch to keep from trying out new things without reams of data first and/or fear of the unknown. Get the mammoth when it's in sight! If we spend much time looking for our ribbons instead of encouraging users to use their cell phones to call us or efficiently respond to their Meebo widget queries, they'll never even know about the fine quality cheese to go with the bagels and croissants.

Conference Notes: WMLA '08 (aka yay!)

Yesterday I attended the Washington Medical Librarians Association (WMLA, which is pronounced 'wim-lah' or 'w-m-l-a' depending who you ask) meeting on the beautiful and snowy (?!) Bastyr campus. WMLA '07 was the first time I went to the meeting as a second semester graduate student, and during it I received the news that I would graduate at the end of the year (yay!) This year as a new graduate I actually understood everything, and celebrated the news of accepting my first librarian job (yay!)

After our business meeting and updates from our Regional Medical Library (RML), we learned more from Will Stuivenga (who also went to North Texas, yay!) at the Washington State Library about the upcoming April launch of Wayfinder, a multilingual online library catalog project providing a single search entry covering an initial 250 libraries ranging from public to tribal in our state. It is a partnership between several state library associations and the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS, who also funded my degree... yay!) Wayfinder has options to filter search results, such as state region and type of library, and the ability to click directly to search results on individual online library catalogs for users to request a book. When users navigate to other websites, the top bar retains a button to return to Wayfinder with its logo, which was well-designed to reflect our region and the catalog's purpose. It will be interesting to see how well this is marketed & received by the community, I look forward to posting a link to Wayfinder when it's public.

Will was also kind enough to supply our meeting swag: cool WebJunction pens and orange rubber bracelets with Dream. Learn. Achieve. LIBRARIES promoting www.libraries.wa.gov :)

Ann Whitney & Sherrilynne Fuller from UW Health Sciences Libraries presented an update on HEAL-WA, an online portal to evidence-based medicine (EBM) databases for most licensed medical professionals practicing in the state of Washington & the librarians who assist them. HEAL-WA is one of several directives of the Washington State Senate Bill 5930 that passed in 2007, and the portal is currently in very early stages of development with an expected launch in 2009. This is an excellent opportunity to remove barriers to often costly EBM databases funded by a small addition to current licensing fees that is far less than the cost of most monographs in the medical field. Additional updates regarding HEAL-WA's development will be posted in a category of Dragonfly, our RML blog.

Fran Clark from Highline Community College presented an update on the recently revised Library & Information Services (L&IS) program the library there now directs. With a focus on paraprofessional library careers, Highline offers both face-to-face and online classes for programs ranging from an Associates of Applied Sciences (AAS) to K-12 certification taught by library staff who are currently doing what they teach (i.e. the cataloger teaches cataloging, and for the Spring quarter an RML employee will teach the Medical Reference class). Highline welcomes the opportunity to place L&IS interns in libraries, and Fran mentioned she's creating a list of those open to doing so. I need to connect with her as there is a similar project for the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association (PNC/MLA) I'm working on so we can share resources!

I'm a huge fan of WMLA meetings at Bastyr because of their fantastic vegetarian buffet at the cafeteria, and the cream of asparagus soup with spanakopita for lunch was perfect for our cold, snowy day (yay!) There was also gluten-free gingerbread with some yummy topping for dessert that tasted 'normal' to me and quite delicious. I was bummed out that their bookstore was out of stock on their cookbook and their online recipes don't include it :(

We all kept staring out the window at the snowfall, which was beginning to accumulate by lunchtime, and a decision was made to continue the meeting but cut it a little short. Those traveling back home to Eastern WA left early and I hope they arrived safely since Snoqualmie Pass was closed for a while due to a nasty accident later in the afternoon.

David Masuda, MD and instructor for the UW School of Public Health, gave an informative presentation on Clinical Informatics: The Genie in the Bottle. My program of study was Health Informatics and I still can't give a crystal clear definition of it; I was glad to see he couldn't either. He highlighted the 5 core information issues for clinicians; being patient-specific, a medical knowledgebase, awareness of social influences, logistics (insurance & related) information, and population information. He then nested the physician-patient relationship within a sphere of 5 influencing factors of electronic medical records (EMRs) including 1st degree delivery organizations such as hospitals, 2nd degree delivery organizations such as pharmacies, others such as employers and the community, measurement organizations such as the Joint Commission and CNS, and the "new kids" such as Cerner, Google & Microsoft. Value in the medical field is traditionally seen as an equation of quality over cost; the US cost for healthcare is currently at $1.7 trillion yet we are 30th in quality. Ouch. An unspoken factor in this equation is access, as currently 47 million people in the US are without health insurance including 20% of the population of California. What can we as medical information professionals do to help in all this? His suggestions included working with CE committees, creating sets of articles to respond to issues involving medical errors and difficult cases, and provide information support directly to the hospital administration staff in support of evidence-based clinical care.

Joseph Janes, Associate Professor at the UW iSchool and founding director of the Internet Public Library, presented What To Think About When We Think About Reference. In today's setting, there is more information coming to more people in more ways than ever before. Reference services can be provided in both synchronous and asynchronous methods, but the most important tasks for us as librarians is to determine the appropriate ways for our particular set(s) of users and to make certain they are aware it's a single, value-added service for them. Entry points for reference are up to the user (i.e. face-to-face, phone call, instant message) but it is up to us as the librarian to determine the appropriate exit/conclusion. His perspective is that libraries contain the secret weapon of print resources, but notes these will be a decreasing importance in the long run as more information becomes digital. It is worth the effort for libraries and librarians to learn, play, succeed, fail, share, lead and innovate. Libraries are not just stuff, help & place but also values and interaction, and our users are everyone.

A suggestion he had is to go to bloggers and post relevant input regarding their subject specialties (more on my perspective regarding this in a future post!) and that this is usually received well. As we learned in library school, it is important to do a good reference interview but know you will probably do a few lousy ones the first few times you try a new medium (i.e. instant message).

An example of outreach to online communities includes two new YouTube videos called Research Minutes that Cornell developed to give a brief introduction to scholarly articles and substantive news articles for their undergrad students below:



He closed with a reminder that librarians make humanity more human, and our task is to organize and keep the human record. We need to be central to the information lives of communities, wherever those communities may be, and in an extended notional of library and librarianship we actually have to be better online than we are in person. Social protocols (usually!) guide traditional reference interaction on the phone and face-to-face, but they do not exist on the internet and users can click wherever they choose for information.

Overall this was a very informative and relevant meeting, and it was great to connect again with colleagues to share that I managed to graduate in December and have a new job on the horizon. I'll keep an eye out at MLA '08 in Chicago soon and hopefully be able to find them in the masses there!