Library Assessment Conference Seattle, WA August 2014

This is an interesting conference.  I went down a day early to attend Megan Oakleaf's pre-conference workshop, Demonstrating Library Value.  I have a bunch of new ways of thinking about value demonstration.  One idea that came to me as I was sitting in this workshop is to take the LibQual data that we have (thank you very much, David Vess) and turn them into research questions.  I have a handout on how to do that, and I think it would further helps us understand what those numbers mean and what we should do about them.

The conference proper was "quite humane," (Van Vuuren) in that most days we were done by 3:30.  But the conference seemed unprepared for the turnout.  My first session, I couldn't find a seat and ended up on the floor next to an open window (really, there are parts of the civilized world without a/c?) which was unfortunately right next to a busy bus stop.  By the second day, they had managed to re-arrange rooms, but that made figuring out where the session you wanted to attend a little crazier.  Cool trick from David and Genya - session-hopping.  People would come in just to hear the paper they wanted and head over to another session.

I presented at this conference in a lighting round with eight others in a session concerning teaching and learning.  I was a bit of a fish out of my water, in that, most of what my colleagues talked about in this session were rubrics.  Rubrics are very fashionable in info lit assessment land.  When I got up and started talking about the MREST, I lost some folks.  But Jason Sokoloff kindly noted that there were audible gasps from the audience when I blithely mentioned that students can't register for 2d year courses until they pass the test.  But my n= is a whole lot more impressive than any rubric can ever hope for. And, I seriously doubt if other academic disciplines worry if testing is an authenic assessment method.

Fortunately, I found my other fish/friends.  The LOVELY people from  Project Sails attended my talk.  When I said words like "item mapping" and "backwards-translation" their eyes lit up.  We had a long and very productive conversation (and this is when I love working at JMU), they were openly jealous of the assessment culture here.  We are going to keep in touch about working with ACRL's new information literacy framework. That is reason enough to go to this conference again.

One of the more interesting talks was about IMLS funded research efforts.  SAILS, RAILS and Project Information Literacy were all IMLS funded, which I didn't know.  Jason's paper was cited by the nice PIL folks as they continue their work with life long information literacy skills and investigating if employers value info lit skills in college graduates.

I attended a session on Assessment of Liaison Librarians, from University of Maryland.  The most useful take-away from that session is they identified two levels of liaising - new and continuing, and I have their long list of what sorts of activities they define as liaising.  They indicated, but I didn't see, a rubric (sigh) that they use to assess their liaisons.  I will follow up and ask for it if it doesn't appear in the proceedings.

This was my first trip to Seattle.  Very cool town.  See, fish.