Assessment Conferences

Posted for Kathy Crowe...

Kathy Bradshaw and I attended the ARL Libraries Assessment Conference October 29-31, 2012 in beautiful Charlottesville, VA.  We and several other UNCG librarians (Jenny Dale, Amy Harris Houk, Christine Fischer, Terry Brandsma) also attended the NCLA Mini-workshop on assessment, jointly sponsored by the College and Universities Section and the Community and Junior College Section, at Davidson Community College November 2, 2012.  It was the week of assessment!

Some takeaways from these conferences:

•    Provide evidence to show their value and communicate it to stakeholders

•    “Own the change” (John Lombardi, President of the LSU system)

•    Publicize our mission

•    Federal government is dominating accountability in higher education rather than higher ed itself

•    Many faculty retirements and hiring of new faculty.  Libraries need to support these new faculty.

•    We should continue to work on copyright

•    Library assessment had become more external; we didn’t use to have to justify our existence

•    Traditional measures of “goodness” (e.g. counting things) don’t provide an adequate picture

•    Online education will have a huge impact  on higher education

•    Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate!

These were gleaned from the keynotes at both conferences.  There were many great papers with good practical advice.  The ARL conference will post the presentations soon.

Several of us also presented at these conferences.  At the NCLA workshop, Jenny presented on libraries and retention and Amy on library and the QEP.  Kathy and I presented on the mystery shopper project at both conference.  Assessment at the UNCG Libraries rock!