February 8, 2017 Meeting of Library Assessment Committee

1. Introduction and review agenda

Introduced new member Kelsey Cheshire, who is serving the remainder of Cindy Ingold’s term. Agenda reviewed.

2. Library Assessment professional development event planning (format, date, venue, funding…) (20 min)

We discuss the time and days we should avoid (ACRL and the spring break). We decided that on/after the week of April 10 is ideal.

Possible topics:

• “Magic Button” – if there is one thing that can be done to make things better, what would that be?
• Showcase past Library Assessment Committee grant projects
• Library Assessment tools review – Desk Tracker, instruction statistics, etc.

3. Library Assessment website (public facing vs. intranet) (20 min)

Jason provided a quick summary of library web projects: The pilot project to move library web content from OpenCMS to WordPress is more or less complete. There is also an ongoing project to move intranet content to WordPress.

The assessment web page was discussed. Other web pages that could link to the assessment page currently do not because the current data dashboard customized style sheet is not tolerated. Recent assessment projects need to be added to the “Library-Wide Surveys” page. Susan suggested that finished and ongoing LAC Grant-funded projects should be public-facing on the web-page. Perhaps grant recipients could write up a short abstract of their work for the page. Other material such as the e-resource usage statistics, READ scale page, and many links under Tools & Resources could be moved to an internal webpage or placed behind authentication. Some pages may just need to be let go.

4. Student Survey instruments (LibQUAL+ Lite vs. Ithaka Undergraduate Student Survey) (20 min)

• 2013 – Ithaka Faculty Survey
• 2014 – LibQUAL
• 2015 – ClimateQUAL
• 2016 – Ithaka Graduate Student Survey

Jen summarized the work of the current Post-Ithaka Graduate Student Survey working group. As of now, there are no large-scale surveys planned for this year or next year. Library advancement department suggests that the majority of advancement funds come from alumni who attended for undergraduate degrees here, but we don’t have very new data on the undergraduate experience. A new survey of undergraduates was proposed. The library has used Ithaka in the past. It receives fewer complaints about the design, although it is a longer, more in-depth survey. LibQUAL is a shorter survey, but with less pleasing design and less thorough questioning.

We would need to look at the option modules for the Ithaka Undergraduate Student Survey. Some core modules of the survey may not have an actionable result that can be made based on the answers. Interesting information isn’t as useful if nothing can be done about it. In particular, some demographic questions are problematic and/or unhelpful. Another concern is that we have an undergraduate library, few of our librarians specifically ONLY serve undergraduate students. However, we shouldn’t neglect undergraduate research. (It may help us make better sense of our graduate research as well.) The LAC generally agreed that a survey would be a good step. Jen plans to speak with library advancement and librarians at the UGL for their comments on this plan.

5. Updates (Round-robin)

• Jen’s updates: In December Jen, Mike Nelson, and Esra Coskun attended Tableau training. The library is considering purchasing a limited number of user licenses for Qualtric to be managed by Scholarly Communications. Assessment Office hours have been ongoing for the past several months, but with rare regular attendance, so it has been combined with Esra’s collections assessment hours. By the end of February, the Post-Ithaka Graduate Student Survey working group will have a report on the findings.
• Jason’s updates: IT has created an Idea Form. The purpose of the form is to capture new ideas related to the library so we can route these ideas to the appropriate channels for support. The form has fields to describe one’s role in the university, their idea, skills/tech that would be helpful, timeline, outcome, etc. This form would help IT get involved in new projects as a very early stage in the easiest manner possible. Jason would like committee members to visit the Idea Form web page and make a sample submission to test the form. The link is here: https://illinois.edu/fb/sec/6181874
• Kelsey’s update: SSHEL has recently received a grant to supply free library giveaways as incentives for surveys and other activities.

Jen-chien Yu, Susan Braxton, Jamie Carlstone, Kelsey Cheshire, Erin Kerby, Jameatris Rimkus, and Jason Strutz

February 8th 2017 Minutes