Written specifically to address the library's role in education, this book provides guidance on performing assessment at academic institutions that will serve to improve teaching effectiveness and prove your library's impact on student learning outcomes—and thereby demonstrate your library's value. Academic libraries are increasingly being asked to demonstrate their value as one of many units on campus, but determining the outcomes of an academic library within the context of its collegiate setting is challenging. This book explains and clarifies the practice of assessment in academic institutions, enabling library managers to better understand and explain the impact of the library on student learning outcomes, teaching effectiveness, and research productivity. Providing essential information for all college and university librarians, this volume discusses and summarizes the outcomes of research that has been conducted to investigate assessment within the context of higher education. This updated second edition incorporates additional research, examines new trends, and covers groundbreaking advances in digital assessment tools as well as the changes in the amount and forms of data utilized in the assessment process. The chapters address assessment from a campus setting and present data that demonstrate the value of the library within that setting in terms of learning, research, and overall impact. In sum, the book presents librarians with up-to-date, practical guidelines for planning and conducting assessment.

Assessment is essential to describe a library’s value and to inform decision-making. Using the four key assessment components of design, data collection, data analysis, and dissemination, Assessing Academic Library Performance: A Handbook provides strategies and case studies for performing four different types of assessments: Service assessments for the library’s outward and inward facing services that either help library users or other library employees to help users. These assessments focus on providing and improving how things are done to better serve others. Resources assessments for the physical and virtual resources that the library has in its holdings or to which it provides access. Resources are the reason libraries exist as they help patrons in instructional and research pursuits. Space assessments for physical and online library spaces. These assessments help ensure that spaces meet user needs. Personnel relationship assessments look at how library employees interact with each other. as library professionals. While not for evaluation or advancement purposes, these types of assessments provide information on what library employees can do to improve their relationships with one another. Each section has information on conducting each aspect of libraries followed by three examples to illustrate how assessment is used to support descriptions of library value and to help library employees make decisions that are critical to library improvement.

Featuring plentiful examples of how to proceed through each phase of the OBPE model, this book boils down planning and evaluation into an approachable, easy to understand process for public librarians, library managers, and grant writers.

Assessing impact is increasingly critical to the survival of services: managers now require comprehensive information about effectiveness, especially in relation to users. Outlining a rigorously tested approach to library evaluation and offering practical tools and highly relevant examples, this book enables LIS managers to get to grips with the slippery concept of service impact and to address their own impact questions in their planning. The 2nd edition is fully updated to include international approaches to qualitative library evaluation, new international research, and current debates on the evolving nature of evaluation, as well as reflections on the importance of involving stakeholders and of evaluation to guide advocacy. Key topics include: • The demand for evidence • Getting to grips with impact • The research base of this work • Putting the impact into planning • Getting things clear: objectives • Success criteria and impact indicators: how you know you are making a difference • Making things happen: activities and process indicators • Thinking about evidence • Gathering and interpreting evidence • Taking stock, setting targets and development planning • Doing national or international evaluation • Where do we go from here? Readership: Practising library and information service managers and policy makers in the field. LIS policy shapers and managers in public, education (schools, further and higher education), health and special libraries and information services working in any country or internationally and people engaged in professional education in the field such as lecturers or students.

Doing Library Evaluation complements the authors' earlier Facet Publishing book Evaluating the Impact of Your Library by showing how the impact evaluation model presented there has been applied to meet a variety of real evaluation challenges.