 at Alden Library and today I have two library staff members who have new chapters in a book that's just been published called the Library Assessment Cookbook. So in just a second I'm going to turn it around and let them introduce themselves but we're going to hear about what they wrote about and what they're doing with that assessment data and just kind of what that process looks like. So I'm going to turn you around and first you're going to see Joyce Douglas who works in the stacks, right? So Joyce could you tell us your title and what you do here in Alden and like how long you've worked here? Good morning Jessica. I'm the library associate. We've changed titles so I've been here 18 years. I've always worked in the stacks supervising the students that work up there that do the shelving and maintain our inventory there. And you said they're like 15 students who work in the stacks? We have approximately 15 student workers every year. The majority of them are work-study students. And that's part of a pretty big group of students who work in the library overall, right? We have something like 200 students. A lot of students are getting their hours in here at the library and we couldn't do what we do without the students I don't think so. Alright so your chapter specifically is about the work that you did with them. It was assessment related to that, right? Yes. Okay so could you tell us about it? I've always wanted to do an assessment. It was never really able to and when I had a new supervisor she encouraged me to do this and helped me with this so I was able to put it together. I wanted to know things like we put away all these books. How long does it take us to put away a book? How long does it take us to find a book? How long does it take us to go down through a shelf and make sure that everything's in order? Is that shelf-reading? Yes. Okay. We call it shelf-reading. The aim of everything is to try to make it as easy for our patrons as possible. So I wanted to look at anything that I could think of unloading a cart just to get it to the temp shelves. And we did this over the summer. All the students had a sheet. They filled out the information. We compiled our data and it came out about approximately what I thought it was going to and we're able to use this now in upcoming things to help determine do I really need 15 students? Do I need more? Do I need less to do the job that we have to do? And we just finished a project last summer moving a particular collection and we were able to project before that about how long it would take us to do it and how much it would cost us to do it. And we've never really done that before. That's great. So you're able to plan with a lot more precision? Yes. Yes. And we're hoping the plan is to do this again spring semester and then probably a couple of years down the road. I'd like to be able to have information from different time periods with different groups of students to come out with a better average and even better information than we already have. And so by writing that up other libraries could also probably write or use that kind of strategy right about to measure things. Yes. That's the point of the library cookbooks. There's a collection of these that come from ACRL and the idea is to be able to help other people in your field. It tells who did the project, gives information on how to contact them. So if you have questions, you can always contact the people. And I'm looking forward to going through this cookbook and hopefully getting some ideas of other things I'd like to do or that may help me do my job better. And it's very it's very written like a recipe right for people who haven't seen this book before. So you can yes you can see it's like literally that it takes the theme all the way. Yes it does and some of them have silly little titles but yes it takes this theme all the way through the book. I like that it's simpler you know that gives you it's not you don't have to read a whole chapter to understand what's happening. It's like a survey just right there for you. Most of them are just a couple of pages some three or four and they really do have a lot of valuable information. Okay so did you work with Katie for that together? Okay so I'm going to turn over here to Katie Matthews and if you could tell us about what you do and then what you also you have some other chapters in the book as well right? Yes so I'm Katie Matthews I'm the head of collections assessment and access here at Alden Library so I work with Joyce to maintain the stacks then the general collections here in the library. I also work with the folks who work on Ohio Link in circulation and collections assessment. So we do a lot anything to do with the collections and moving it around and getting it to our patrons that's our business. So it's fun work and it was exciting working on something with one of my co-workers and the beauty of this book is that it they are short but they're just short recipes very practical so folks can implement them quickly and easily in their own libraries. So in addition to the recipe that Joyce and I worked on there are a couple others in there that we put together. I worked with a colleague of mine to write a little assessment plan for outreach activities so for example here at Alden Library we do a lot of really cool outreach activities you know coming up at the end of every semester we have our finals week activities we had an amazing event on the camp out at Alden to kick off our 24-5 with our second floor and fourth floor being open 24 hours a day five days a week. So when we do activities like that of course it takes money it takes planning time and so it's helpful to be able to assess the effectiveness of those types of activities so we can communicate to folks outside of the library to let them know that the resources invested in these activities really pay off to help support student morale student success that type of thing. So what we did the particular event that we assessed was a welcome back to campus party at the campus library and we had students swipe in so we had student ID numbers we had no other information about the student and with the student ID numbers we were able to tie attendance at the library party to different student success measures using institutional data. So the students who attended the library party are they more apt you know just descriptively to be students who are first-generation students do they get good grades you know so it kind of helped us to understand who the population for our types of events are so we can reach out to them and then reach out to folks who may maybe didn't attend the party but then also it kind of gives us an idea of how did attendance at a library event possibly impact a student's experience of course it's hard to tell about causation but certainly when you're building a story of a successful student understanding their library use is an important part of that and then there's another recipe in the book that I worked on or incorporated some of the work that I did in a former life and institutional research and again that was just getting into a little more detail about how you can take library data in this case it was library circulation data so using no identifying information about patrons at all we were able to take ID numbers from library circulation data to sync up with institutional data like GPA you know students in a course that may have received a library instruction and then the corresponding cumulative grade point average for students in that course or the grades that they earned so just a way to help communicate the value of the library to the success of our students so all of these recipes are really quick and easy two-page reads and then you can easily implement these techniques in your own projects thank you I guess for either of you did you anything you learned about writing or like trying to write in such a concise way and advice for anyone else who's coming up on a project like that of their own well for me I would say I am not a very good writer I think that's one of my fears and it wasn't for Cata's assistance I probably would not have done this she was very helpful in getting it organized helping me say what I wanted to say I mean she knew me well enough we could have a conversation and she could say oh well you want to say and I think it worked very well for me but like I said it wouldn't have been for her I don't know if I would have tackled this but they also kind of gave us a format you know kind of what we're looking for as we said it does follow the format of a recipe it's not meatloaf but it's kind of I think the advice that I could give particularly to students or folks who haven't done a writing project I think it's really valuable to work with co-authors so if you're hesitant about it or you know in the case with the recipe with Joyce I thought she had a really great idea and so she was able to bring the idea to the table and then I helped to bring the writing piece to the table so it's a really good exercise to you know learn how to work with others and learn how you can blend your talents together to create something that is hopefully useful to others awesome all right well so this book Joyce I think you have our copyright yes yes the library copy yes see the local number right here be on the seventh floor and of course if you can't find it you can always talk to someone in the library staff and Joyce and her students are pretty much pretty heavily involved in making sure those things are on the stacks or on the shelves when you need them I'm gonna flip the camera back around here all right so if you have any questions about the book or anything else of course you can always pop in and talk to us we're on the second and fourth floor desks or you can always text a librarian or let us know if you have any questions and thanks for watching and we'll talk to you later