Assessing library contributions to university outcomes: the need for individual student level data

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to suggest move beyond examining the impact of the library from the library's perspective but rather to collaborate with university‐wide assessment efforts to determine the impact of the library from the student's perspective, the instructor's perspective, or the researcher's perspective.Design/methodology/approachA limited number of studies have been conducted in an attempt to determine the impact of the use of the library's physical or electronic resources, reference services, and the library as place. Considerably more studies have been prepared that have examined library instruction programs and information literacy programs although the results paint a very mixed picture. A majority of the evaluation efforts for information literacy programs have used opinion surveys, skills testing, and observed actual behavior using rubrics and other methods. A consistent criticism of such studies has been the small sample size and the lack of replication of such studies. Clearly an approach that collaborates with the university's assessment efforts and allows the library to determine the correlation levels between use of a library collection or service and a desired university outcome will be welcome by all academic libraries.FindingsThe suggested approach is to combine library usage data with university data. In the best of worlds the library data would be combined with both indirect measures of learning (such as student persistence, graduation rates) as well as direct measures of student learning such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment, Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency, and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress. If university libraries were to embark on a coordinated program of data analysis then the results would have greater credibility and impact within the university.Practical implicationsThe paper provides a set of recommendations for combining library data (where the identification of each user is preserved) with institutional performance and demographic data for each user (after which the unique identification information can be eliminated so as to preserve the privacy and confidentiality rights of the user). The resulting large data set can be then used to explore possible relationships between use of library services and important outcomes – student success, student retention, graduation rates, and so forth that is necessary in order to demonstrate the value of the academic library.Social implicationsOnce libraries have a better understanding of the impacts of specific library services in the lives of their students, faculty and researchers, libraries can enhance services that produce positive results and drop services that have marginal or no value. The end result will be that academic libraries will better serve the needs of their customers.Originality/valueThis paper offers a new broad perspective that will encourage libraries to undertake a collaborative effort with others on campus in order to better assess the impact of the academic library.

Envisioning the Academic Library: A Reflection on Roles, Relevancy and Relationships

“…Academic libraries need to modify assessment from user satisfaction to meeting unarticulated needs. They need to be less library-centered and more user-sensitive (Matthews 2012). The real challenge lies in maintaining relevancy through communication, and this should involve meaningful communication to all potential users from the first year undergraduate to postgraduate students, PhD students, and academic staff and researchers.…”

Personalized Boutique Service: Critical to Academic Library Success?

“…Recent studies based at the University of Huddersfield tentatively conclude that there are correlations between library usage data and students' final degrees. Joseph Matthews (2012) suggests that there is a need for libraries to collaborate with the university using more extensive sets of data to prove what works and what does not. In Cambridge as part of the Arcadia project, Nagy (2012) conducted an ethnographic research project investigating user habits and patterns.…”

Learning from degree-seeking older adult students in a university library

“…Due to the anonymity of the study, individual participant data was not linked to the survey response. According to Matthews (2012), additional data about the students would have contributed to the validity of the study giving a more "holistic" picture of the students' responses. For example, student characteristics (e.g., GPA) are not linked to the individual student responses providing potential associations to library usage .…”