 And this is another topic that showed up on several evaluations last year, and we have been trying to cover lots of topics, so if you ask and we think of some of these as great to cover a topic, I know like a lot of libraries, our library is ramping up assessment efforts in the area of instruction and a whole lot more. What does it mean to do assessment? Professor and reference librarian at the MSU Library is going to help us think about that as an associated discussion and teach us a new needs. Thank you, Mary Ann. I'm really happy to be asked back because that means I didn't really annoy anybody too much the last time I was here. I want to also do truth in advertising, which is that I am not an assessment expert by any means. I don't have the title of assessment librarian. What I have done is led an assessment effort that was pretty major in our library to assess our library commons, the new area that you guys have all seen now where we redid the whole first floor. And I worked on that last summer and fall with a group of people. So I'm kind of scratched from that. I'm also starting to work some on instruction assessment. But I also want to tell you that although the title says, I'm using library instruction, I want to stress that and more because I'm really not talking specifically about a certain type of assessment. I'm doing something a little bit different. And what I hope that we'll do here today is basically have a conversation because I am guessing that many of you have a lot of assessment experience. I'm also guessing some of you have no assessment experience. I have everything in this room, I would say, from beginner to expert. And so I'm hoping that we will have a major conversation where we get to share some ideas. That's one of my goals. I want to start with a sort of broad why and what assessment and then open it up for discussion at the tables and then as a big group discussion. And then end with starting points and resource options. Again, sort of an input time for all of you as well. And I really feel as if you all should interrupt me at any point. Please. Because that's, you know, we're here to talk to each other, not to listen to one person. Can you hear me? Everybody in the back, can you hear me? Anita, can you hear me? I can hear you, Jen. Good. I'm going to pick on the poor people that I do know at this room. We won't call you a lab librarian. Alright, so, why assess? This is a big term right now. This is something we're seeing a lot of in literature for academic libraries, college libraries, libraries of all kinds. And our institutions that we're embedded in are all very concerned with assessment. We're in economic climate. Money is always a great motivator for assessment. And as Ortiz and Byer Boyer are saying, assessment has to include looking at your weaknesses as well as the really nice things that are going on. I think a lot of times we really just want to find the nice things. And that when you talk about assessment, people kind of get this image in their head. We were talking the other day or the other week about creating an assessment librarian position. And a lot of us were saying, who would actually want to be that? Because this is the image that people might have of you. As soon as you start talking about assessing what you're doing, finding the weaknesses, finding what you need to get rid of, of course, you're thinking chopping block. How many of you in this room have someone on your staff who is in charge of assessment? So three or four organizations have that. How's that going? Great. How's that going? No, no, I'm not. I don't know. They do their thing? Who else had their hand up over here? How's it going for you guys? To have an assessment focused person. Well, their title is Usability and Assessment. And they are also tasked with other things like our virtual reference. This is in your library. And I think it's really valuable the work that she does, but it ends up isolating her as a librarian compared to the other librarians because she's assessing everybody's work. So she ends up being, you know, like internal affairs. The room goes quiet when she enters the room. How about you? It's good. A person who's doing it for our campus has us really focusing on projects instead of everything. We're not assessing everything. We choose what we want to assess, and we'll do that for two years or so, and then we want to do something else. So it's a manageable thing. Okay, so you're making choices in it and binding it off there? We are a campus library president. The library is as well open. Within the library, I get to do that. But institution-wide, we have a person who keeps asking me questions. I'm continually going back and saying what do you mean by this question and then educating them as to what questions they really should be asking. Right, how do those questions translate to the library environment rather than just all of the departmental areas? Okay, so... A lot of us, I often tell our assessment people I'm so glad for that because my mind doesn't always work that way. I actually have a pretty good line for evaluation and assessment, but I'm happy that there's somebody else out there who has that passion and that gift who wants to do it, so that I don't have to. And I'm not saying that to be smart, because it's nice to have a spectrum of people with talents and expertise, and this is an area that a lot of people think about like this about, but it's nice that there's somebody who's got the energy and the interest to do it. And the personality type that makes it less like this. Exactly, for people. And to be honest, we do have a lot of things going on. And so when you think about, you know, the ways that you could assess stuff, I mean, I love what you were saying that this person, you choose projects to assess. Because, you know, many of us, when we think about our day-to-day work, you could assess just about everything you're doing. And so it's a little bit difficult to both make choices for focus and also to understand the best ways to do that. Plus, what we find out from people who are really seriously researching this and working at large institutions like Stephen Heller, who is, does anybody know Stephen Heller? Okay, good. I don't, but I love what he has written about assessment. He is the director of assessment and planning at the University of Washington Libraries. So we're talking, you know, he has a big job here. And he's telling us that really it's a structure process, that we need to have a sort of bigger picture. That, and this is one reason why I did not want to just focus on library instruction today. Because I feel as if we're better off if we take a step back a little bit and think about our environments and think about what the efforts are saying about how we might structure, how we look at our processors and our services and our facilities. So assessment ends up, you know, involving this structure. And it's also, well, I am learning, and I had to quote Wikipedia here, because all of my students do. Plus, I think it's really cool that Wikipedia has a section on library assessment. I thought we really made it there now. I think it is. Yeah. Well, there are some, you can look at the emails, the email addresses at the other page. But, you know, obviously, you are trying to learn, and learning implies what we were talking about before. You want to learn both the good and the bad about what you're doing and about what's happening. And this is taking me very far, but it's a way of life. This makes me think I'm going to go home and start assessing how my students are behaving after a long day at work. Raynell published the article More Than a Buzzword Assessment as a Way of Life in a 2008 Tribal College Journal. Some of you may not be familiar. I think that particular issue in 2008 in the Tribal College Journal was focused on assessment. So there are lots, you'll see lots of things that I'm deciding from there. All aspects. And the goal is to become better at what you're doing, of course. Lagos and Vips say that assessment needs to be an organizational part of the organizational culture. So in other words, it's not something artificial that we overlay on our things. It's something that we do from the get-go. We're born knowing this, and we're not, you know, our goal is to serve, right? I think our focus in our day-to-day lives at our libraries is frequently user focus, which is great. And it's focused on the things we have to get done, and we rarely have the time to step back and take a look at the bigger picture and the bigger program. I think what Lagos and Vips are saying here, really, too, is that this isn't just the director's responsibility. So, David, how many staff do you have? So Lagos and Vips would say that it's all six of you need to be doing assessment. What do you think of that? Well, it depends on really what activities you include in the process of collecting statistics, then we all need to know. So you can sort of translate this so that it works in your environment. You know, talking about where you make your choices, where you start. If you're not deeply involved already and have a plan in place for assessment, that slide where I had things flying in from every direction is how our minds are. Well, where on earth will I start this? How do you make your choice? I think at the MSU Library, we had a pretty easy choice in the sense that we had a new facility, a new part of our facility that had just been renovated, and it had a really seem to be having a really positive impact. So it was a sort of feel-good assessment to do. You know, we didn't think we're going to find out all these incredible weaknesses. And to be honest, we didn't really find a lot of weaknesses. We found the things we needed to tweak. But that was where we chose to start one of our assessment projects. It's not the only thing that we've been doing. But you might also say, well, where are a lot of your people involved? And instruction is often one of those heavy load, heavy workload, and therefore expensive services. And so library instruction might be a great place for you to start that one assessment. Going beyond evaluation of how instructors are performing in the classroom and moving more into sort of student-focused, student-outcomes-focused assessment of the learning process. Collections might be another point. And we can make a long list here. The point is to try and make some decisions. You can't do that without thinking about where you are and talking about where you are. What I'd really like to see happen here now is for you guys to talk amongst yourselves at your tables and focus on some of these questions. You don't have to go through my questions. The main thing is to think about how you're doing assessment right now if you're doing it, what your concerns are, are there obstacles, what's working well, how do you know what's working well at your library? Maybe you're doing more assessment than you realize. And then we'll report out and have a big room discussion. So how about for 15 minutes we focus at our tables and talk about your experiences with assessment, talk about what your concerns are, what you know. No, not just that. I mean you could focus on instruction if you wanted to, but really any kind of assessment that's going on. And please define the person who will be about to be and we'll see who will be.