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These are the notes from the Library Assessment Committee’s guided discussion about assessment fundamentals. This discussion occurred at the committee’s meeting on May 28, 2025.
Assessment is taking what you did and what you are going to do and assess it on:
Why did it happen?
How did it go? What went well/badly?
What can we do better next time?
Merriam-Webster (n.d.) defines to “assess” as “to determine the importance, size, or value of.”
Assessment is measurement and evaluation.
Assessment is proving the value of a thing
Assessment helps to gain value ($$$) from someone else
Assessment supports data-driven decision making
Assessment is telling the story you want to tell to external stakeholders. You create the narrative and tell your story using evidence.
Assessment is understanding needs and how to measure meeting those needs.
Project assessment
Did the project meet the stated goals? How well did it meet those goals?
Collection assessment
Is the library meeting patron needs? What are the gaps in the collections?
Library needs
Is the library meeting the needs of its home institution?
Disclaimer: We are the assessment committee and are a biased audience on the question on whether assessment is important.
Good assessment can be valuable to improving services and collections.
Assessment helps you to clearly identify what you are doing and communicating that.
Reflecting on projects and assessing processing can improve the quality of data you get.
Assessment is only important if you act on it.
It can help to better align programming with user needs.
Are we working efficiently?
Helps to prioritize projects based on cost and impact.
It is almost like we should do a meta-assessment answering the question, “What is the value of doing assessment?”
Assessment is important because it is asking am I making my work and who can I serve better?
Assessment is relevant at different levels for different roles, and different roles have different priorities and time availability
Assessment has to start off with audience and what the purpose of the assessment is
You have to have outputs that speak to your intended audience. Some audiences are more swayed by anecdotes, some are swayed by numbers, and some like things like return on investment.
Different stakeholders want to see different things as outcomes.
For assessment to be useful, it must actually answer the question you needed to answer.
It is not good to just collect everything. Always ask yourself why are we measuring this?
Assessment is very useful for things like cyclical projects where you can reflect at the end of the project and make changes for next cycle.
It can help you to take a breath at the end of a project, but this is often hard as you are moving so fast.
Add assessment into your final report to force yourself to do it.
Break down the problem into things that are manageable and useful to you.
Assessment can be something small like a post-mortem meeting about a project or it can be something bigger like intentional data collection about a project.
Every situation is different, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
The lack of time is always an issue.
It takes time to learn how to use tools like Power BI, to collect data, and to analyze and reflect on data, and that is time that could be used on something else.
Make sure that your assessment and data collection is seamlessly integrated into the workflow and communicate results and actions with those collecting the data so that they understand its importance.
Assessment can help with looking for efficiencies in a process and save time in the long term.
In general, the funding cycle invests in research and innovation but not going further. It can be hard to spend time and money on the assessment phase of things as you often have to move on quickly to the next project.
Avoid focusing only on the easily measurable things because they are easily measurable. Instead decide what really matters and what counts.
Your choice of what units of measurement to use is really important.
Assessment can be used as a management crutch to avoid digging in and seeing the unmeasurable benefits of a project or program.
It is not good to put numbers to everything and then cut them regardless of intangible benefits.
Some things are just intangible, and that is OK.
“I am worried that if I assess it, it will prove that it isn't worth it.”
University administration often expects numbers to continue to keep going up.
Communicate how much a number can increase. If it can’t increase, then identify something else that could be improved. Once you've achieved all you can on one project, then move on to the next thing.
You can run into Goodhart's Law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
For example, if the number of books a library has is a measure of a library’s quality, then some libraries will start to take in more book donations regardless of their relevance to the library’s patrons. This inflates storage and processing costs without actually adding value for patrons and may decrease the actual quality of the library by increasing book processing times and taking funding away from programming or purchasing that would benefit patrons.
Assessment is a gap in the library science degree, whether it is project assessment, library assessment, or collection assessment. This includes how to practically structure projects to include assessment, how to develop meaningful metrics, and how to do valid assessments. This is topic that is relevant to all types of libraries. This is a topic that supports other topics taught like change management.
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Assess. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved June 25, 2025, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/assess