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. 

Here in Access Services, we are actively striving to revamp the way we capture and visualize our data. You may be wondering; how do we capture our data? And what exactly are we gathering data for? We have a department spreadsheet that houses our data for the fiscal year. For the entirety of that fiscal year, our staff are responsible for their perspective areas on the department spreadsheet. Every month, our team members add their data to several areas, such as data on ILL borrowing and lending, reserves processing, and a variety of Willis checkouts, to name a few.

For example, the dashboard above was created by our Reserves and Evening Coordinator, Ashish Thapa Magar. Throughout the school year, he consistently receives requests to add and delete materials for instructors. As seen in the Power BI data dashboard, we can observe the amount of the course reserves by month, whether they are print vs. e-reserves, and the total number of reserves by the check-out period.

As a department, we aim to highlight the services that we provide for our patrons and learn how to improve upon those services as well. How do we do that exactly? From that collected data, we are building data dashboards using the platform, Power BI. Having these visuals will allow us to better analyze our data for significant changes, such as increases or decreases in the use of our services. With this newfound information, we can strategize ways to better utilize our services, adjust staffing for better coverage, and plan additional services to implement.

Are you involved with some type of library instruction? Did you know we have a survey already in place that you can use to get feedback? Just direct your students to this link: https://unt.libwizard.com/f/instruction-assessment

We can relay the responses to you or walk you through how to customize the form to receive the responses directly.

We've received just more than 70 responses so far, primarily from sessions in the College of Business. The survey offers ratings on presentation, activities, engagement, and effectiveness. For instance, almost 90 percent of students rated the effectiveness of the presentations as excellent or very good.

Have you ever considered how much time is actually involved in a faculty search? Have you ever stopped to think about what that actually costs? Well, Shaureece has. And she enlisted Sian to help her figure it out. The goal of this work-in-progress is to be able to explicitly state how many work hours went into hiring, and how much the overall cost was to the Library. So far, we’ve documented the steps in a search, and we’re at over 50 so far, in 10 separate phases!

In the “Initiating a Search” phase – it takes 10-13 hours to prepare all of the required documents, get approvals, and actually post the position. For the “Search Committee” phase, there are about 5-10 hours of administrative work, kicking off the search, getting on the same page, creating an evaluation matrix, and so on.

For the “1st round interview” phase – consider a search committee of 5 people conducting 5 phone interviews…that’s 25 person-hours of labor! Add in the time of creating interview questions and reviewing notes/applications in order to figure out which candidates are moving forward – you could be up to 35 person-hours of labor.

“2nd round interviews?” 100s of person-hours involved for these. If you have 3 candidates coming in for all-day interviews…it really adds up. We had 207 person-hours spent total for everyone attending the on-campus presentations (both in person and virtually) for the Associate Dean for Public Services alone!

By assessing the practice of hiring, we will be able to articulate the actual unseen labor and costs associated with employee turnover.  If you'd like to conduct your own assessment, you can use our template.