The Assessment Minute is an internal newsletter series of brief updates highlighting some of the many successful and ongoing assessment activities taking place in the UNT Libraries.  

The goal of the Assessment Minute is to stimulate ideas for including assessment in everyday practice, resulting in a culture of assessment.  Examples include highlighting assessment projects, sharing outcomes of assessments, and demonstrating methods. 

In September 2020, the Special Collections Preservation unit began working on a preservation survey and assessment of departmental holdings permanently stored at the Research Collections Library (RCL). The primary goals were to gain a better understanding of the scope and material content of the department’s collections, and to identify preservation concerns capable of adversely impacting the accessibility of collection materials in the future.

We initially estimated the project taking 5-7 years to complete, but annual re-assessments of our objectives, a few small tweaks to our workflows, and the Preservation team’s move to the RCL in 2023 resulted in the project wrapping early, in late spring of 2024. The biggest factor in deciding to accelerate the pace of the project was the anxiety of potentially waiting three-quarters of a decade to begin taking active measures to preserve our rapidly deteriorating AV materials!

Using the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Preservation Self-Assessment Program online tool, and their invaluable Collection ID Guide, in conjunction with in-house resources, our team surveyed 354 collections and 714 boxes, and assessed 1,196 items. After compiling the data, we were able to make four recommendations: create an item-level inventory of Special Collections’ AV holdings to guide future digitization efforts, develop a cold storage program for the permanent storage of nitrate negative and color slide film, begin long-term preservation project to address issues identified during assessment and begin high-density storage and environmental assessment discussion.

Each of these recommended action plans are in the beginning stages of implementation. We are currently working on a case study that will soon be submitted for publication.

Submitted by Justin Lemons

The Assessment Committee recently checked in with Meranda Roy about her assessment methods for instructional videos, and here's what she had to say.

I’m excited to share how UNT Libraries is advancing our assessment methods for instructional videos. Traditionally, I’ve relied on basic metrics like views, likes and comments to gauge video performance. However, these provided a limited snapshot of our impact.

To deepen our insights and reach, we've transitioned to posting our instructional videos on YouTube. This platform not only expands our audience but also offers the robust tool of YouTube Analytics. This advanced analytics suite allows us to explore viewer demographics, engagement metrics and traffic sources in depth. Such data enables us to understand who our viewers are, how they interact with our content and how they find our videos.

This strategic shift allows us to tailor our videos more effectively to meet viewer needs and preferences, ensuring we deliver high-quality, relevant educational content. I look forward to sharing future insights from YouTube Analytics to continually refine our approach and better support our community's educational success.

If you have any questions about instructional videos or would like to create one, please contact Meranda Roy.

Is the information you are collecting going to be useful? Here are two questions to ask to ensure that the survey data you are collecting will produce the needed insights for decision-making.

How many responses do you need to collect? If conducting a primarily quantitative study, 30 responses is the minimum sample size you will need in order to be able to draw statistically sound conclusions. If your survey leans more towards a focus group for qualitative data, then the number of participants should represent 3% of your survey population, i.e. 4-5 people of a 150-population.

What is the minimum quality you need from the response entry? Determine minimum criterion for an acceptable response prior to administering the survey. Consider what is the level of incompleteness you are willing to accept, such as responses to benchmark questions, skipped questions and little to no detail in short answer responses. Checking for these markers will help you determine how useful your data is.

To learn more on managing survey data, check out: Business Statistics: Communicating with Numbers by Jaggia & Kelly and User Experience Research by Gage and Murrell.