People shared impressions, thoughts about assessment

Faculty are very resistant--continuous assessment/ continuous improvement
Finding books about this process

OBE training had beginner and advanced, going to take the beginner again
School libraries

What do you all mean by assessment
Did you hit the mark?
Did the people you are assessing get theinformation you intended?
Sometimes a simple thing, did you do what you thought you were going to do

Related to needs assessment--totally different things
Assessing how well we met those user needs

Output vs. Outcomes
Is the outcome what we say we're teaching?
We're going to do X and did we actually accomplish it?
Middle states accreditation--focus on outcomes
We have grades but do we have outcomes--Barbara Wallford (sp?) Notre Dame
She helped faculty understand what the evaluation committee is looking for
Library was the first unit on campusto have an assessment draft

We've had so many things come up on campus and we had already done it

How well did you do it?
CACI--mission and value
Your mission is your promise
Vision
Values statements--

Process mastering--policies and procedures--key elements--you can see bottle-necking
Based on Deming--reduce errors--save time--empowers people to improve the process

You identify certain steps, find areas where there may be variance or loss of efficiency

You find where departments interact with each other, if it is done well, people buy-in more to mission, vision, values

I've written so many mission, vision, values--How do you keep the continuous part going?

Buffalo State, Wells College have transformed their libraries through CACI

We had a lot of resistance, but we kept pieces, and have continued to add another little piece

Wells shared involvement with everyone on the staff, the living assessment document, we have updated our assessment draft 4 times since 2006
Based on CACI--they realized that their enrollment had gone up, they changed 3 processes in a short period of time, and their draft continues to change with each

In the eight months, how many training days did you dedicate?
4-5 days of training (8 in the 1st series, they pared it down after that)
Staff spent 1 1/2 days on the assessment document after they return to their library

A lot of post-it notes and sticky dots involved in this. The parking lot for good ideas.
Wells still has one from 2006--keeping it visual--keeping it in front of the staff

The committment from the administration needs to make it ok for whatever they are going to change, these successes are fine, if you analyze and you try it and it doesn't work, that's ok too.

I loved when we did visioning, our library director did not run things, I did it.
what does our perfect libary look like, what does it smell like, what does it feel like?

CACI was a starting point, how can you start at step 5?
Student training was disasterous in the fall, their were students behind the desk who were not trained. What were the main problems we need to address immediately? They revised their staff manual and then decided to share training of student workers. As a staff, they shared the first two weeks of the semester by all focusing on that training.

It becomes part of the culture of the organization.

We have a strategic plan and we have assessment for Middle States, we have new mission statement and it is all aligned to the college mission.

You could start in the middle on other services, as far as the tools you've learned, you know how to plan, we know how to chart out and gives you a place to start when addressing a new issue or service.

Many tools available, Yale site is another tool kit.

There's also support structure, NYLA, SUNY libraries

Where are you now with staff culture?
We operated in silos, cross-training, staff manuals--resource sharing, reference
The whole shouldered responsibility is shared; people realizing that it is easier
There is respect

Have the public librarians had a demand from boards for assessment?
We have not had any pressure to do it, we have an long range planning committee
We are looking at space issues, expanding into our basement, how are we going to assess, how are we going to decide?
Weekly reference meeting, marketing issues, I'm going to use the sticky notes idea
There has been no pressure from our board.

Goals and annual review of whether we have met those goals
Not external pressure for assessment, but a responsibility to our taxpayers to plan, report
It's my own pressure

How can I measure each of the action verbs in our mission statement?

Making measureable goals and outcomes

You can do the LIBQUAL assessment, you can't always prove it, but you can provide evidence

CountingOpinions/LibSat (http://www.countingopinions.com/products/libsat.html)
They've been successful with public libraries
Good feature: comparison with like libraries
probably will be a beta site for academic version of this system--SUNY Cobleskill

Workshops and simple Survey Monkey assessments as pre and post-testing
Questions for Information Literacy training assessment
(Cobleskill's pre/post-test questions as used with SurveyMonkey available on request from daviesac@cobleskill.edu)

Resources for CACI--

Most recent issue of JLAMS (from NYLA) co-published with Indiana Libraries contains articles on Continuous Assessment/Continuous Improvement from NYS libraries that did training series
JLAMS Click here

WHY DO WE DO THINGS?

pink slip story, the pink slip followed the book from its arrival to shelving, found out that was around from many years ago and when analyzed; they discovered it wasn't needed and everyone had been passing it on for decades without ever questioning it

Changing the culture for the better