 Welcome to the overview of the Research and Assessment Cycle Toolkit offered by the Association of Research Libraries and made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. This presentation introduces the purpose and intent of the Research and Assessment Cycle Toolkit, reviews some basic definitions related to assessment, describes the stages of the assessment cycle, provides a brief overview of the five modules included in the toolkit, and closes with the impetus to focus library assessment on outcomes and impact. We hope the content is useful to library practitioners seeking to conduct assessment projects. At the close of the presentation, you will find a link to a feedback form. Please let us know what elements were useful to you. Let's begin with the intent and purpose of the Research and Assessment Cycle Toolkit. One of the lessons learned from the IMLS-funded Research Library Impact Framework Project is that many library workers need skills and a toolkit of information about assessment methodologies to launch their projects and see them through to their conclusion, including acting on their findings. The Research Library Impact Framework Project also reinforced the interest, desire, and need for library workers to continue developing skills and assessment. In concluding the Research Library Impact Framework Project, ARL had an opportunity to ask experts in library assessment to develop a set of training materials to share with the broader academic library community. Thus, the Research and Assessment Cycle Toolkit was developed to support assessment needs in research and academic libraries. The goal of this toolkit is to share materials that review the principles and practices of library assessment, enable library workers to develop the skills necessary to assess library programs, services, resources, and spaces. Our modular, accessible to newcomers to library assessment and easy to follow can be self-paced or used as training materials for collaborative efforts and are supportive of a community of learning. To provide your feedback on the usefulness of the content provided in the toolkit, please use the feedback forms available at the end of each presentation. Overall, the Research and Assessment Cycle Toolkit is envisioned as a starting place for library assessment practitioners to access information about assessment processes in libraries. The toolkit is not intended to be comprehensive and covers information that can be used by library workers at all levels of assessment experience. To those ends, it's helpful to begin with some clarifying definitions. There are many terms and phrases related to library assessment that can be confusing or unclear. To some degree, these terms are used interchangeably or synonymously in discussions. In other situations, knowing the nuanced differences among them can be helpful in creating shared understanding. Two such terms are evaluation and assessment. These terms, again, are often used casually to mean the same general concept. Having said that, there are differences between them. Evaluation is a term more associated with discerning service quality or user satisfaction in libraries. The goal of evaluation is likely to be managerial in nature, that is, ensuring that libraries run well, are properly resourced, and are satisfactory to users. Assessment, on the other hand, is associated with the process of determining progress toward a goal or outcome, usually related to the ability of the library to enable users to achieve their goals and aspirations, fulfill needs, and so on. Whether focused on a concrete outcome, perhaps in the immediate or short term, or a more long-term impact, the goal of assessment is typically continuous improvement towards change and more beneficial experiences, engagement, and accomplishment for users. Related terms include reflective practice, evidence-based librarianship, and accountability. Each of these has slightly nuanced connotations as well. Reflective practice involves the commitment of library workers to add to their learning, knowledge, skills, and awareness to make improvements in library services, resources, and spaces in alignment with user needs. Evidence-based librarianship has roots in the health sciences and is focused on the use of research data and evidence to make informed decisions in professional library practice. Accountability involves providing users and both internal and external stakeholders with evidence of quality, improvement, and progress towards organizational missions and goals. All of these terms are useful in considering the purpose of library assessment, which is to include users, partners, and stakeholders as co-creators of understanding and change, pursuit of continuous improvement, informed decisions and actions, and communication of results in order to improve outcomes and advance equity, engagement, and excellence in libraries. To achieve these goals, assessment follows a process or cycle, one that is never completed, but which should help library workers accomplish improvement over time. The assessment cycle is based on five major steps. Typically starting at the top of the cycle, library assessment practitioners begin an assessment process by choosing a focus and setting goals. The focus and goals are usually centered on a library service, resource, space, or some other library offering. Once the goals are set, data of various forms is collected and analyzed, decisions are made, results are shared, and goals are revisited to start another iteration of the cycle. While this is a general framework of assessment, of course variations occur. For example, it's often advisable to share results with users, stakeholders, colleagues, and partners prior to making decisions, as all those individuals and groups may be integral to the decision-making process. Thus, the cycle is suggestive but not prescriptive. Let's look in just a bit more detail at each stage in the general assessment cycle. In the first stage of the assessment cycle, library assessment practitioners will determine what questions need to be answered by an assessment project. They will discern what the goals are, typically both of the service, resource, or space being assessed, as well as the goals of the assessment project itself. They will also pin down the aspects of the service, source, or space, resource, or space that is of interest in a particular assessment. Knowing the goals of an assessment is essential in making subsequent choices in the assessment process. In the second stage of the assessment cycle, library assessment practitioners collect data using appropriate methods, review the collected data, analyze it, and derive meaning from it. In the later stages of the assessment cycle, library assessment practitioners, in collaboration with colleagues, communicate with users, partners, and stakeholders, make decisions and take actions, and revisit goals to improve services, resources, and spaces, and restart the cycle for another iteration. This pattern can be seen in other processes central to librarianship as well. In evidence-based practice, this cycle is used. Beginning with formulating a question, librarians find evidence, appraise it, apply it, and evaluate the impact of it before beginning anew. Reflective practice follows a similar process. Librarians identify a situation of complexity, decide to find a solution, seek information to inform the solution, decide to act, and then do so in order to improve a situation of complexity, continuing to check it through subsequent cycles of action. Pragmatism in the workplace also incorporates a pattern like these. Individuals reflect on past experiences and interpret their environment, engage in inquiry to reduce doubt about a situation, use reasoning to create new rules for practice, build knowledge through experimentation, incorporate what they learn, and then reflect again in order to move forward. Information literacy itself moves in a similar way. An information seeker formulates a question based on an information need, finds sources and information that help answer their question, evaluates the information they discover for use, applies useful information, and assesses the final product in the quest to answer their initial question, perhaps beginning again to improve upon the initial process or seek out answers to a related question. Likewise, the information literacy instruction assessment cycle follows a path reminiscent of these others. Over and over again in library practice, similar cycles are encountered. New comers to assessment practice will likely find the assessment cycle to follow familiar patterns such as these. Now let's take a look at how the assessment cycle forms the basis for the research and assessment cycle toolkit. In general, library assessment follows a basic cycle or process. Library assessment practitioners begin with a question or problem to solve or another need to fill. They consider carefully the problem area or knowledge gap that the question seeks to address. If the question, problem, gap, or need can be situated in a larger theoretical framework, they do so. Then they develop a plan for attempting to learn more about the answer to the question or possible solutions to the problem. Library assessment practitioners then gather data needed to solve the problem or respond to the question, determine the meaning of what they've collected, and decide whether the information is sufficient to act on their improved understanding or whether more information is necessary before deciding to act. This process is reflected in the five modules of the research and assessment cycle toolkit. The five stages that form the organizational structure of the toolkit are identify, articulate, collect, organize and analyze, and finally act. In the identify module, materials are provided that will help library assessment practitioners discover what they need to know, why they need to know it, and how anticipating what is needed will help ultimately to lead to action in the form of decisions made and actions taken at the close of an assessment project. In the articulate module, library assessment practitioners will learn to identify and construct research questions, user stories, or hypotheses to guide an assessment project. The collect module focuses on identifying potential information that can be gathered in order to answer assessment questions, understanding the wide range of assessment methods and tools available to collect assessment information, and determining an appropriate sample size for various assessment approaches. It also provides starting places for conducting some of the most common assessment strategies, including interviews, focus groups, participatory and observational research, and surveys. The organize and analyze module supports library assessment practitioners in seeking to clean, organize, and analyze quantitative data, including the use of Excel, Google Sheets, and Tableau. Finally, the act module helps library assessment practitioners prepare to reflect and make meaning from their assessment results, communicate the results to others, and use the results to take informed action, realize outcomes, and create change. Modules include video lectures, handouts, and selected external links to support library assessment practitioner learning. All modules also include forms to gather feedback on the modules. Taken as a whole, the Research and Assessment Cycle Toolkit can be used to support newcomers to library assessment and provide a foundation for future practice. Thank you for viewing this overview of the Research and Assessment Cycle Toolkit. Please use the link provided to complete a feedback form on the usefulness of this information for your purposes.