Several ProQuest employees attended the Library Assessment Conference that took place earlier this month in Seattle at The University of Washington.
Some of the key messages and takeaways were summed up by Mark Tullos, our Director of Product Management for Intota™ Assessment.
>> Assessment = Survival: The keynote speaker was clear to point out that this library role is of critical need and points out the value and support the library brings to research and scholarship. The assessment librarian can use newly available evidence to prove that resource expenditures are being effectively deployed and that there is an impact when cuts are made. How deep the impact is, is still debatable, and there is a struggle to tie library collections and service to student success.
>> New additional metrics of usage: Several speakers indicated the need to discover and track not only the primary use of documents (COUNTER), but secondary usage and sharing among researchers. This is an area of innovation by librarians, vendors, and standards organizations. There were several new ideas on how to create a “usage factor” — letting the aggregate use of a resource become a new attribute of importance, or at least a trending metric.
>> Librarians need tools: Librarians need to handle and make sense of big datasets, including usage (including the never used), collection overlap, peer analysis, ILL analysis, and factors related to library service. The use of Tableau, Oracle, and MS applications were shared.
>> ARLs are looking to promote and enforce fiscal responsibility: Some are looking to smaller libraries to learn about efficiency and cost savings. Sophisticated resource-sharing schemes between large ARLs are proving to be successful in satisfying researchers’ needs for both titles and preferred format. As large ARLs become ‘net borrowers” in ILL terminology… it’s a tipping point.
Take a look at ProQuest’s assessment tool, Intota™ Assessment.