Meaningful and sustained assessment is best achieved when a campus unit takes a collaborative leadership role to work with other departments, offices, and groups. Simply developing and implementing assessment in isolation and for the unit itself is not enough. While the value of collaboration among diverse campus constituents is widely recognized,…

A formative program evaluation using Stufflebeam's (2010) Context, Input, Process, Product (CIPP) model was conducted to assess the use of digital badges for tracking basic library instructional skills across academic programs at Nova Southeastern University. Based on the evaluation of pilot library modules and Blackboard Learn's badges…

The Quality Matters™ (QM) Program is utilized by over 700 colleges and universities to ensure that online course design meets standards imperative to student success in a Web-based classroom. Although a faculty-driven peer-review process, QM provides assessment from a student perspective, thereby identifying opportunities for improvement that may…

Distance librarians often do not have the opportunity to engage face-to-face with users of library services. Without this personal interaction, it can be difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of library services in meeting the needs of the distance learners. Distance librarians may not realize it, but most have a wealth of information at their…

Distance librarians continually develop information literacy instruction in a variety of formats. Assessment, when it occurs, tends to be of the traditional multiple-choice variety and does not measure more complex skills. Authentic assessments offer the instruction librarian a way to re-think their instruction strategies and assessment of student…

This article presents a qualitative evaluation methodology of academic departments for library organizational learning and library enhancement planning. This evaluation used campus units' academic program review reports as a data source and employed collaborative content analysis by library liaisons to extract departmental strengths, weaknesses,…

Demonstrating the value of library and information services has been a theme in library discussions in recent years. The application of many different approaches to evaluation has waxed and waned together with the development of theories of evaluation across the humanities and social sciences. Over the past two decades research and activity on…

This article discusses a project undertaken to assess the journals in a Big Deal package by applying a weighted value algorithm measuring quality, utility, and value of individual titles. Carried out by a national library consortium in Canada, the project confirmed the value of the Big Deal package while providing a quantitative approach for…

Purposeful assessment of space for the understanding and improvement of the academic library is a relatively new area of inquiry. This essay offers a framework to consider different factors affecting such an assessment and insights for undertaking a meaningful inquiry about the relationship of space to an academic library's evolving purpose as…

This paper proposes utilizing a combination of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD)-Kano model as a useful tool to evaluate service quality. The digital library of the University of Guadalajara (Mexico) is presented as a case study. Data to feed the QFD-Kano model was gathered by an online questionnaire that was made available to users on the…

Increasing demand for biotechnology and biomedical resources prompted the Engineering Library at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB) to complete a collection assessment of the journals, books, and other resources provided by the University Libraries. This paper presents a variety of methods for evaluating library collections and describes…

Discussion of the ARL (Association of Research Libraries) E-Metrics project focuses on understanding how academic libraries might specify, produce, and assess institutional outcomes. Offers a framework for approaching the outcomes assessment process and suggests that multiple approaches to assessment are needed for an assessment of libraries in…

Describes the card sort technique that was used by Cornell University to help determine how users would organize a set of concepts to be included in an online digital library help system. Presents Cornell's experiences as a case study with detailed instructions for conducting and evaluating the card sort technique. (Contains 13 references.)…

Reviews research on impact assessment of libraries and considers potentially useful methodologies for measuring the impact of university libraries, i.e., how library use affects students' academic performance. Topics discussed include categories of library use, purposes of library use, and indicators of library impact. The user panel methodology…

This investigation of a methodology for evaluating the reference effectiveness of academic libraries in New South Wales tests the answering of questions with a set of 10 questions seeking general background information on a range of topics. Student volunteers pose the questions by unobtrusive methods to reference staff at three college libraries.…