What are some assessment activities that you could do?

• Look at InterLibrary Loan (ILL) statistics to better understand who does and doesn't request via ILL and what subject areas are most highly requested.
• Text mine reference interactions for common topics or to look at the sentiment of interactions to identify common threads of negative or positive interactions.
• Perform workflow analysis or workload balance analyses to find bottlenecks in production processes and better organize work in a department.
• Analyze the number of people in various spaces around the library at set times to find under- and over-utilized spaces in the library.
• Run a short in-person survey to answer a specific question about a potential product or service.
• Analyze interaction or usage statistics to find what products, outreach methods, or webpages are most effective.

Much of this data is already collected, so reach out to the relevant departments or check out our Data for Use tab to see if you can access this data today. You can also find a lot of assessment projects that have already been done at UNT Libraries under the UNT Library Assessments tab.

Below are tools that are free or may be available to you through your UNT account.

Survey Tools

• Qualtrics (through your UNT account)
• Survey Monkey
• Google Forms

Pre-Built Analysis Tools

• OCLC Choreo (contact Collection Assessment Department)

Data Cleaning

• Microsoft Excel (through your UNT account)
• OpenRefine
• R
• Python

Statistical Analysis

• SPSS (through your UNT account)
• SAS (through your UNT account)
• Stata (through your UNT account)
• R
• Python

Data Visualization

• Tableau
• Power BI (through your UNT account)
• R, Python, and Excel have some visualization options

Standards and Surveys 

• ACRL Value of Academic Libraries  

  The primary objective of this comprehensive review is to provide academic librarians with a clearer understanding of what research about the performance of academic libraries already exists, where gaps in this research occur, and to identify the most promising best practices and measures correlated to performance.

• Project Information Literacy  

  Project Information Literacy (PIL) is a large-scale, national study about early adults and their research habits, conducted in partnership with the University of Washington's iSchool.

• RAILS  

  Rubric Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (RAILS) is an IMLS-funded research project designed to investigate an analytic rubric approach to information literacy assessment in higher education. The RAILS project is intended to help academic librarians and disciplinary faculty assess information literacy outcomes.

• AIA (Assessment in Action)  

  Part of ACRL's Value of Academic Libraries, AIA grant program supports the design, implementation and evaluation of a program to strengthen the competencies of librarians in campus leadership and data-informed advocacy.

• Project SAILS  

  Project SAILS helps faculty and academic librarians better understand the information literacy skills of their students.

• Archival Metrics  

  This project creates standardized user-based evaluation tools and other performance measures in an archival setting.

Torrence, Matt. (2017). USF Tampa Library Assessment. University of South Florida Libraries.

If you select "no," please send me an email so I can improve this guide.