Why I Hate Quantitative Data

We've been talking about assessment a lot at work. More importantly, we're talking about meaningful assessment, which is good because if we were only going to discuss counting things - inputs and outputs - I'd roll my eyes so hard that I could possibly do damage to my ocular nerve. And then I'd pass out from boredom.

I should be honest, though. I don't actually hate quantitative data. It can be useful, especially when you're trying to make staffing decisions, to know when your busy times are. Also, some upper administrators like numbers better than stories. (I still think you need to know why people are coming into the library to understand the meaning of head counts.) Really, what I hate is the supremacy of the count-all-the-things mentality, which frequently rules supreme because people think it's easier. It's not actually easier, if you really want to do it right, but people think it is. Here's a list of things that people don't seem to consider:

• Counting just to count doesn't accomplish anything, and actually adds to your workload without any kind of meaningful outcome. Counting just to count literally and figuratively is just a waste of time. 
• You frequently end up gathering information you shouldn't have. I get angry when I think about all the surveys I've taken that want to know my gender or my age that have NOTHING to do with gender or age.
• You will never have a consistent definition of anything you're counting. Want to know how many books do you have? You have to figure out what do you even mean by books. Titles? Monographs? Physical entities? Want to know how many people come into the library? Are we doing a door counter? Is it actually working? What about people who go out and come back in again? Want to know your circulation numbers? Should renewals be included? What about things that are pulled off the shelf but never checked out? And so on and so on... And this is exacerbated when you are talking about multiple institutions instead of just multiple people. Yes, I'm looking at you, IPEDS.

Instead of gathering numbers because "we've always done it this way" or "we need to give them some data", try thinking about why you want the information. If you're trying to make decisions about staffing levels, numbers are exactly the thing to do. But if you're trying to learn what gaps you have in your collection, you'll need to gather a different kind of information as part of reference interactions. Also try thinking about how you'll use the information. If it's a report that you've sent to the provost every month for years and years, maybe ask your director to check with the provost to see if they find the report useful.

There are so many good places to look for qualitative assessment tools in libraries. The Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project is a good place to start if you're new to the idea. I've used a lot of techniques I learned from reading that website and a book that came out of the project, College Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know. Also attended a talk given by one of the authors, Andrew Asher, a few years ago. And that's what you should do - look to see what resources you can find at conferences. Do a quick search in an education database for "qualitative assessment and libraries". If you're at an academic library, go talk to people in the sociology department or anthropology department or pretty much any social sciences.

I want to say this again: it's not so much that I hate quantitative data as that I hate our over-reliance on it as some kind of be-all-end-all method of assessment. We need to have more ways of looking at how we're doing than just counting inputs and outputs. I hope I've convinced you of that.

The Neverending Story (of Assessment)

A while back, during the first year of this blog's existence, I wrote about how I see librarianship as an asymptote. I never stop trying to improve my professional practice. The same thing, obviously applies to the library where I'm a director. That's why assessment is such a crucial part of my (and every librarian's) job. Lots of people act like "assessment" is a vulgar word, but if you approach it properly, it can be your friend.

The thing that everyone hates is assessing things just to assess them. The useless counting heads without figuring out why people are there, or the circulation stats that mean nothing in a vacuum. But I'm here to tell you that assessment needs to be part of everything you do, and if you plan for it assessment can be easy. (In this post, I'm intentionally focusing on a more typical set of circumstances. I'm glossing things over a bit to show you how you can and should integrate assessment with everything you do.)

Let me walk you through a typical project, and how assessment factors into each stage:

1. Identifying a Need: the beginning of any project is an assessment in and of itself. Paying attention to what's going on around you and noticing a need - whether in your work processes or to address community concerns - is making a judgement and therefore an assessment.
2. Initiating the Project: gathering your stakeholders and discussing why the project is needed, even if it's just making your case to your boss, already has judgement involved as well. The issue here is making sure you do it intentionally. Stakeholders are people who will be effected by a project, and this is an important step of any effort. Sure, Project Awesome will make things smoother for your patrons, but how will it change the workflow of the person/people who manage your circulation desk or your website or whatever? Thinking that through is one of the most important assessments in any project and you can't do it alone. This is also where people typically establish a goal (why are you doing this project?) and desired outcomes (specific, measurable end results). 
3. Design/Development: Sure, sometimes the perfect solution presents itself, but just as often you need to design something to solve the problem. Keeping stakeholders involved so they can give you feedback is crucial. If something is complicated enough, you will want to test early iterations of the solution as well. That can be a pilot of your new instruction technique with a faculty member who trusts you or asking a friend who works at another library to try to find something on the test website. Take lots of notes here. 
4. Implementing the Project: This is rolling out your shiny new "thing". Taking notes about timing and people involved and such is important. How long did it take? Did people say anything about the "thing" while it was happening?
5. Formal Assessment: Did you achieve your goals? Outcomes? Why/why not? This is writing the report for your director or reporting back to the instruction committee. This is also the point at which you try to figure out how to improve even further, which starts this list all over again since it's another example of identifying a need.

The biggest thing is that it absolutely has to be a cycle. You never stop assessing just like you never stop trying to improve. And with a little luck (dragon), that's exactly what you'll do.

Wherefore Art Thou Surveying?

source

I try to start any endeavor at work by asking myself why I'm doing it. Sometimes, the answer is easy to find. Paying the ProQuest bill means continued access to a resource my community uses a lot. Building a circulating board game collection supports members of my community beyond the classroom (or even inside, depending on the professor). So you can be sure that when I decided to create a survey, I had very specific goals in mind. But probably not the ones you think.

Surveys seem easy to create and conduct, but they're not. Even if you can avoid leading questions, remember to align your Likert scale carefully, and design the survey in such a way to elicit a solid response rate, there's still so much you miss. You'll want to know why people answer certain questions the way they did, but also how important things are in context. Maybe someone thinks the library is super helpful, but they haven't been there since their freshmen year or since they got tenure or since they got a new job. 

And yet, I still run surveys semi-regularly. I don't expect to learn a lot from the surveys themselves; instead, it's about starting a conversation. I sent a survey out to the faculty of my school towards the end of last semester asking about research assignments and library resource use and outside resources. I do care that kinds of assignments and resources are being used, but I knew that - even with a desirable prize possible (a $10 gift card to Wawa) - the return rate wouldn't be that great. Survey fatigue and high teaching loads were conspiring against us. But it did exactly what I'd hoped: it gave me a new way to start discussions with faculty.

I sat down, one-on-one, with each of the respondents. Since there were fewer than a dozen of them, it was relatively easy for me to find the time. Even if there had been more, I would have figured it out because those conversations were invaluable to me. I've been, slowly & steadily, building relationships with the faculty at my institution - both adjunct and full-time faculty. It's true that the group who completed the survey was mostly made up of the same people who always respond to library requests, but there were a few with whom I'd only had passing conversations. Even better, although I predicted 90% of what the faculty said to me when we talked, in each conversation I learned one new thing that hadn't been part of my thinking previously.

Best of all, though, we got these faculty members thinking about the library as a resource for their teaching - not just for the students. We got them thinking about ways to improve the library. We got them thinking about the services and resources we provide. And we got them thinking about how the library can support the whole community. 

So, to bring this back to where I started: wherefore art I surveying? It's not assessment; it's marketing.

How about you? Have you ever used surveys for marketing? How so?

Killing it with Kindness, Incorporating Sustainable Assessment through Kindness Audits

Killing it with Kindness from librarianjessica

This post is a lot longer than what is normally published on this blog, but both Joe Hardenbrook and I want to make as much of the virtual session presentation we gave for ACRL 2015 available as we can.

This post is identical to the one published on my presentation partner’s blog, Mr. Library Dude, and here it is.

Slide 1:

Jessica: Hello everyone and welcome to Killing it with Kindness, Incorporating Sustainable Assessment through Kindness Audits. We will introduce ourselves in a minute, but first I wanted to give you an overview of how this session will go. After introductions, we're going to give a brief explanation of kindness audits, then each of us will discuss one aspect of the overall process and how that aspect played out at our schools. We're going to try to keep that part brief so that we can save time, hopefully 15-20 minutes, at the end for question and answer. You have our twitter handles and our session hashtag and also the email address we set up specifically for this session for people who aren't on Twitter. Of course, we also have the chat function here in the Adobe Connect session. We're going to do our best to keep track of questions as we go through the session and we'll also have a good chunk for Q&A at the end.

Slide 2:

Jessica: Now to introduce ourselves...

Joe: Hi, I’m Joe Hardenbrook. I’m a reference and instruction librarian at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin. I coordinate research assistance and information literacy and am the library’s liaison to the university’s education, psychology, and diversity programs. I’ve been at Carroll since 2014, but I’ve been an academic librarian since 2003.

Jessica: Hi, I'm Jessica Olin. I've been a librarian since 2003 and the director of the library at Wesley College since the beginning of 2013. We want to do something a little goofy as a way to make this less formal, so we're going to play a game called Two Truths and a Lie.

Slide 3:

Joe: OK, so here are three statements about me. Two of them are true, and one is a lie. To get you used to using the chat box, type in the letter of the statement that you think is a lie...So what’s the lie? My favorite movie is not Legally Blonde. It’s an OK movie, but my favorite movie is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I am actually a certified storm chaser through NOAA and I won an airport trivia code contest once - it came down to “LGW” which is London Gatwick and I won.  

Slide 4:

Jessica: My turn. Which one of these is the lie? I'll give you a moment to read through them and then just vote for your choice by typing the letter in the chat window. {wait until someone guesses B} Yes, [name] was the first to guess that I have not lived in 10 states. I've only lived in 7. And if you're curious, William Whipple of Connecticut is the signer in my family tree and I played Pearl at age 5 in the 1979 PBS miniseries of The Scarlet Letter.

Slide 5:

Joe: What is a Kindness Audit? It’s all about taking a concerted effort to look at your library with fresh eyes and experience it as a new user. It’s taking a look at things such as wayfinding, signage, library spaces, and furniture. It’s also about asking things like: Are the service desks welcoming? What obstacles do your users encounter? I was first introduced to kindness audits through a MOOC I completed in Fall 2013: The Hyperlinked Library MOOC from San Jose State University taught by Michael Stevens and Kyle Jones. I completed a kindness audit at the library I was working at and I’ve now replicated it at my current workplace at Carroll University. Jessica and I each did things a little differently for our respective kindness audits, so we will walk you through how each of us approached it prior to discussing how you can recreate it at your own institutions.

Slide 6:

Joe: First, a little bit about Carroll University so you know my background. We’re located in Waukesha, Wisconsin--about 20 minutes from downtown Milwaukee. Our enrollment is just over 3,000 students. Starting in the mid-1990s the institution  transitioned from a traditional small liberal arts college to a university with a strong health sciences focus. Today, our most popular undergrad majors are: exercise science, nursing, psychology, business administration, and biology. We also have several graduate programs, including MBA, Master of Education, and Doctor of Physical Therapy.

Slide 7:

Joe: The Todd Wehr Memorial Library opened in 1942. It was expanded in the 1960s and remodeled in the late 1990s. A renovated Library Classroom in 2013 was our latest change. Our staff includes 6 librarians, 2.5 staff members, and 5 part-time evening/weekend staff.

Slide 8:

Joe: I conducted my kindness audit in May 2014. This was a librarian-led audit. I also did one with students, but Jessica will talk more about her experiences with that. For my audit, I really wanted to see it as a “new user” - so I started at our front entrance on the main floor and wound my way through the building. I used a library iPad to take photos and when I was finished, I divided the photos into 2 categories: 1) Commendable, or 2) Needs Improvement.

Slide 9:

Joe: So what did I find? Let’s start out with the “good stuff.” In terms of commendable, I think the library does a good job of providing information about the library. The photo on the left shows the large plasma screen when you walk in that rotates with library news and announcements. It also features photos of the librarians and their subject areas. I’m a big proponent of the idea that the library isn’t just a building - it’s about the people. This helps to promote that. The photo on the right are the librarians’ business cards. Again, they feature photos of the librarians to help students connect a face to name. This is vitally important since we have a very strong library liaison program. These cards are available at all of the service desks.

Slide 10:

Joe: Another commendable item is technology. There are plenty of computers for use in the Information Commons. It’s not the largest lab on campus, but it is definitely the busiest. There are also 60 iPads available for checkout at the Circulation Desk.

Slide 11:

Joe: The library’s coffee shop is another commendable space. It’s very inviting, has large windows with great views of campus, and lots of soft seating--something the rest of the library lacks. Also important: the coffee shop doors close so noise is not a disruption to the library proper.

Slide 12:

Joe: So what needs improvement? We could definitely do a better job with our signage. The photo on the left is food and drink signage. It’s negative, overly wordy, and in some cases looks cheap. We have a coffee shop in the library, so I think you need to expect food and drink to travel. What the library probably needs to do is to re-evaluate its policy and likely liberalize it. The photo on the right is missing call number signage. In my walkthrough I noticed some end caps didn’t have call numbers and some were handwritten. I also noticed some that listed subject areas (like “US History” or “Psychology”) - that’s very helpful. Why wasn’t this applied to the entire collection? Again, we just need to be consistent with our signage.

Slide 13:

Joe: Also needing improvement: some of our services and how we market them. The photo on the left is our Information Desk - not that you would know that. There’s no branding. What is the desk for? What questions can you ask here? Why is no one there? How is it different than other service desks that are nearby? Well, there usually is a student worker seated here and it’s intended for patrons to ask simple questions about printing, technology, copying, and scanning. We just need to identify and market it better. The photo on the right is our disability workstation. Again, same problem: no signage and it’s not labeled. It looks like a scanning station if you happen to walk past it. So again, another branding and marketing opportunity.

Slide 14:

Joe: So here’s why I love kindness audits: Changes can often be implemented quickly and easily. Shown here is our Library Classroom. We made some changes immediately after the kindness audit. The photo on the left shows an open door. Prior to that the door was kept closed. We now leave it open to be more welcoming. Since the room had changed from a traditional computer lab with desktop PCs to a laptop classroom, students weren’t sure how they could utilize the space. If you looked through the closed door, all you would see is movable furniture. So to help, we also positioned our student worker (photo on the right) from the front of the classroom to the entrance to answer student questions about using the classroom and checking out laptops for students. Now the space has seen increased usage.

Slide 15:

Joe: We love the movable furniture, but the default set-up shown on the left was not conducive to group work. So we changed the set-up to pods of tables, shown on the right. This is more popular with students. Also prior to the kindness audit, students were not permitted to use the touchscreen technology and whiteboards. We changed that. Students are now encouraged to use the technology and they can also move the furniture around to suit their needs, too. These simple changes have made the space much more inviting and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from students.

Slide 16:

Joe: One thing I questioned on the kindness audit was our single occupancy restrooms. They just don’t make any sense. However, it turned out that the kindness audit matched good timing: The university decided to switch all single occupancy restrooms to gender neutral. It’s more inclusive and it reduces wait times.

Slide 17:

Joe: Here’s another quick change we implemented. The librarian’s offices in the Information Commons are fishbowl style. Pictured here is my office. The photo on the left is before the kindness audit: I have my blinds down. The photo on the right is after: To be more noticeable, I now keep my blinds up. I also placed a research sign in my window encouraging people to interrupt me. As a result, I get more questions now. So again, another fix that was free, quick, and easy.

Slide 18:

Joe: Another change that didn’t happen to cost us any money involved our group study rooms. The photo on the left is the before pic: The rooms featured trapezoid shaped tables that made maneuvering in the room difficult. The photo on the right is the after pic: We swapped out the trapezoid tables for round tables that came from another campus department that was getting rid of furniture. Now the rooms are more inviting for groups.

Slide 19:

Joe: Like most libraries we suffer from a deficit of outlets. The photo on the left shows how one student has a strung a laptop cord across the floor which creates a trip hazard. Although we didn’t have the funds to put in more outlets, we’re utilizing the ones we do have more wisely. We placed additional plugs that also include USB ports in strategic locations where students typically study. The new plugs cost $15 each.

Slide 20:

Joe: So what surprised us about the kindness audit? I was impressed by how many of the things I noticed were easy fixes, quick changes, and low cost--or even no cost in most instances. There weren’t any major suggestions related to infrastructure. My findings mirrored the kindness audit that my students completed too. There was also more to like than not like--and that was good to see. We just need to do a better job of marketing and branding.  

Slide 21:

Jessica: First I'm going to give you some context, background on the school and my library, and then I'm going to show you some of what we learned by having student workers conduct kindness audits as a balance for librarian audits. Wesley College was founded in 1873 as a prep school mostly because the Methodist mothers and fathers of Delaware were tired of sending their children out of state to attend college. We still have a covenant relationship with the Methodist church. We became a 4 year college in the 70s under the guidance of the library's namesake. Right now we have approximately 1400 undergraduates in 24 majors. Business Administration and health related majors are our most popular programs, but we have the full range of what you'd expect from a small liberal arts college. We have a few masters programs, but they are still relatively small. We have plans to start a master's of occupational therapy in the near future. One last thing: we've recently been designated an official minority serving institution which means that more than 50% of our enrolled students are african american, hispanic, and/or native american.

Slide 22:

Jessica: While the college has had a library all along, we've only been in this location since 1970. Our building originally housed classrooms and faculty offices and was renovated. We had another round of renovations that were exclusively cosmetic in 2001. We aren't the only department in the building. We share the space with academic support, the tutoring center, disability services, the career center, IT, and the history department. We have a super small staff with 1.91 full time librarians (me and a reference librarian who is on a 10 month contract, although there is a frozen 12 month MLIS position), 6 part time non-degree holding staff, and 7 work study. We still manage to open 7 days a week for a total of 94 hours. We're part of a 50 library consortium with almost every library in Delaware, which helps a lot.

Slide 23:

Jessica: The student audits were conducted towards the beginning of the spring semester of the 2013-2014 school year. Since these 7 students had worked for us for a semester by the time we did this, I felt comfortable giving them just a general direction. I had them read the blog post that Joe wrote about his own kindness audit, told them to take pictures and take notes on what they'd seen, and to look for both things they liked and things they didn't like about the library.

Slide 24:

Jessica: These were student workers, so I'm assuming they were a bit biased, but they all commented on how helpful and friendly the staff were.

Slide 25:

Jessica: The majority of them also talked about how much they liked the different book displays we put out and the white board polls we conduct. They liked how it made the library more interactive. If anyone is interested in more information about our white board polls, I wrote about it for my own blog recently.

Slide 26:

Jessica: While this wasn't strictly part of what they were supposed to capture since we were looking for their response to the physical environment, one student talked about how much they liked the consortium because it helped with school work and fun reading and saved them money.

Slide 27:

Jessica: Unlike what Joe experienced, our student workers found a lot more to dislike than they did to like. This is just one example. Our study areas looked, quite frankly, like a mishmash of leftover furniture that didn't get sold at a yard sale. Though some of how things were arranged had more to do with students rearranging our spaces, it was still a big problem.

Slide 28:

Jessica: Another thing they didn't like was the furniture itself. Most of what we have in the building is pretty old, a lot of it dating from the 1980s. We don't have a single study carrel that is without graffiti, and the arrangement of furniture was off as well.

Slide 29:

Jessica: I don't know if there is a library out there that doesn't have at least a couple of problems with signage, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't work on it. Students talked about how hard the signs are to read in some places, how there were lots of handmade signs, that they aren't always up to date like that directory sign you see there, and there weren't enough signs by far.

Slide 30:

Jessica: This is actually an after picture since it's kind of hard to capture a picture of noise, but that was a major problem we were having. Some of it can't be helped since we share our space with so many other departments, but we have made a lot of progress towards improvement by designating specific spaces for quiet and loud. We have also started walking through the library, being a seen presence, once or twice per hour.

Slide 31:

Jessica: We have a lot of technology problems at the college as a whole, it's just that the library is a place where those problems are most noticeable.  In some ways this is out of the libraries control, other than we developed and/or asked for workarounds to help students. Those two sheets of paper you see there are detailed instructions for basic functions such as logging in and printing as well as how to enact the fixes we need. We have brought an outside company onto campus to fix our IT issues, but there is a lot more to fix than we realized.

Slide 32:

Jessica:  Our print system is a bit of a throwback. Students don't like having to pay for printing regardless, but the fact that they have to use a coin operated system that frequently breaks makes it even worse. While I haven't been able to address this just yet, I have been soliciting quotes for print management software and have been working with our new IT to make sure it's a scalable solution that can extend beyond the library in due time.

Slide 33:

Jessica: While the student workers think the staff and the librarians are great, there was some concern about us spending so much time in our offices. We didn't have a reference desk of any sort at that time, and really the circulation desk is too small for more than one person to stay back there, so there wasn't much room fo us to be anywhere but our offices at that time.

Slide 34:

Jessica:  Most of the changes, other than designating areas of the library for quiet and for loud, took a bit longer than what Joe said about his library. This change couldn't happen until the summer when we students wouldn't be around as much. We spent a lot of time rearranging furniture to make the loud area more conducive to group study. You can also see a white board in the back. Students weren't allowed to use it, but we've changed that and now have a kit with dry erase markers and an eraser and students now students use this space for practicing presentations and planning out group projects.

Slide 35:

Jessica: And we moved furniture to make the quiet study areas more conducive to individual work. We also spent a lot of time moving chairs from one level to another so that, even if they are a bit older, they at least match. One other thing that hasn't happened yet but that is in the works is that our Student Government Association is talking about buying the library some new study carrels. They are also a big part of the reason why we will be able to afford the print management software as they are going to sponsor that in part or maybe in whole.

Slide 36:

Jessica: While we haven't been able to solve the print management problem just yet, we have gotten new printers for the library. Our old ones were incredibly old for the setting at 5 years, so these new printers have been a good thing even if it is only one small aspect of our overall technical issues.

Slide 37:

Jessica: And the change that we're most proud of is that we now have a reference desk. This library hadn't had one in recent memory, and we didn't really have anyway to put a regular computer anywhere that would have made sense, not without spending a lot of money from a small budget. However, we did some research and found that a chromebook and a table with two chairs serves just as well. We just started providing this service last semester. We're still getting students and faculty used to the fact that we provide this service now, but our numbers have been slowly climbing. More recently we've  started bribing students with candy to ask us reference questions and that is pretty popular.

Slide 38:

Jessica: One of the biggest surprises we had was how much the student audits overlapped with the librarian audits. These specific student workers had been with us for a few months so our perspective had rubbed off on them a bit, but it still made us feel that we had at least some understanding of the student perspective. We also were surprised that students had noticed the consortium and could articulate so specifically the kinds of benefits it brought to them. Finally, although our easy fixes weren't as immediately put in place as Joe's, it was a bit startling how much moving our old furniture around could change the atmosphere.

Slide 39:

Jessica: You are looking at pictures of the namesakes of our two libraries. We thought it would be a cute way to introduce our discussion of how the differences in our libraries may have impacted specifics, but each library benefitted from the kindness audits.

Joe: For me, I was only about 6 months into my job when I conducted my kindness audit, so it was easier to see things with fresh eyes. However, I needed to rely on co-workers to get a historical overview about certain aspects of the library. In addition, although we operate in a very collaborative environment, I don’t have final decision-making or budgetary authority to make large-scale library changes. That would be handled by our library director.

Jessica: I've got a smaller budget and staff and library than Joe, but I was in a position as the director to make this a priority for us.

Slide 40:

Jessica: Okay, now we want to talk about how you can do your own kindness audit. For me, it worked to give the students just a general overview of what I expected and wanted then give them an opportunity to ask questions. I required that they take lots of pictures, but all of them had phones with cameras so I let them use their own rather than providing a camera. I also asked them to take detailed notes about what they were photographing so I could know what I was seeing. Finally, it was crucial to get the students involved above and beyond the librarian audits.

Joe: For the student kindness audit, I was a little more explicit in my instructions. I was using brand new freshmen student workers during their first week on the job. I got the feeling that they might be hesitant to provide critical feedback, so I gave them instructions to take photos of things in the library and place them into one of these categories: Things I like, Things I didn’t like, That that confused me, Things that surprised me, Things I had questions about. It worked. Students took over 200 photos.

me: one final thing that I want to urge you to do is to share the results of your assessment, both with your immediate stakeholders and with the community. It was that kind of sharing that got the Wesley College SGA interested in helping us pay for new study carrels.

Slide 41:

Jessica: Here's a list of a few of the barriers you want to keep in mind. If you don't have a background on any of these, you'll probably want to consult someone who does or teach yourself about them. For instance, I'm biased because of my first job in higher ed to be sensitive to ADA requirements, but there are a lot of regulations for public spaces. An example of this is that there are specific regulations for how much difference you need to have on signs between the background and the print. You also need to remember the needs of any international students you might have as well was taking into account campus culture. We're both in shared spaces, so any major changes we want to institute need to keep those partnerships in mind - those shared spaces and also influence how students and other parts of your community perceive the library. Add bit about need states.

Joe: If you are recruiting students for your kindness audit, be aware of any approval you may need to seek from your university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) since your work involves human subjects. Both Jessica and I used student workers who were performing the kindness audit as a task related to their employment, so we did not have to go through the IRB process.

Jessica: Finally, this isn't a one-off assessment. We're planning to run it again this coming Fall and hopefully every other year from now on. Like any assessment, this needs to be part of a continuous cycle of improvement.

slide 42:

Joe: We are more than happy to take your questions through the chat window. We can also keep the conversation going on Twitter by using the hashtag #acrlkindness. You can tweet directly to Jessica at @olinj or to me at @mrlibrarydude. You can also send us an email to librarykindnessaudit@gmail.com.

Slide 43:

Jessica: Thanks so much for attending this session. I think I've learned just as much from your questions a I was hoping to impart. We both really believe in the benefits of this process and want to help you put it in place at your libraries, so here are our emails so you can contact us in the future.

Post Script: We got a lot of great questions both throughout the presentation and during the official question and answer period. The recording of our actual presentation is available via the ACRL 2015 Virtual Conferences website (for a fee), but we also hope to publish an article with more details sometime in the near-ish future. Let us know if you have any questions at any time. And thanks for your interest.

White Board Polling

I work at a small library at a small school, so everything we do needs to be the epitome of "bang for the buck." Truth be told, even at bigger libraries and library systems, librarians are expected to pinch every penny. One of the best returns on time invested I've ever gotten is with white board polling. (Not original to me, but I don't remember where I first encountered it so I can't cite my source. My apologies to whomever introduced me to this.) I've been doing this for a while now. I thought it was time to write about it, so here's a quick overview of what we've done and how we approach white board polling.

We try to have fun with it, first and foremost. Here's what we did during a recent cold snap and I know lots of other people recreated it at their libraries:

We balance out our fun/goofy ones (examples are a recent poll pitting chocolate vs. lollipops and further back we asked where everyone was going over a school break) with more serious polls like when we asked for student input on popular magazines to add to our collection:

The plea for Playboy aside, you can see we got great response to this poll, as we do with all the simpler polls where the only response needed is a check mark or a hash nark. This poll did shape our periodical collection - we added the top vote-getters to our annual order.

More recently when we asked for feedback on our new mission statement:

We don't get near the number of responses to substantive questions as we do with simple ones, but the answers we get are just as valuable. This is such an easy way to test ideas that I'm considering doing it with any major changes.

Here are, in no particular order, the rules I use when deciding what to put on our board:

• Must be interactive;
• Polls where respondents just put a check mark or a hashmark should be used more frequently than ones with substantive answers (you'll get a higher response rate);
• Fun polls should be done frequently (we try to have the goofy ones be every other poll);
• Room for other answers should be given;
• Polls should be run for a week of classes at most;
• You need to do something with the results.

Sure, there are times when we need to reach out beyond the walls of the library (and trust me, I did solicit feedback far and wide on our new mission statement), but other times it's fine to tap people who are already using the library regularly and have a vested interest.

I know we aren't the only library to use these polls. Do any of you have advice to add to mine?

What's Data Got to Do with It?, by Elizabeth Psyck

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Let’s get one thing out of the way: While “data” is technically the plural of “datum”, colloquial usage has shifted to make the use of “data” as a singular acceptable. I have a Google frequency map that backs me up on this.

Whether you agree with me or not on the singular/plural use of the word data, it’s hard to argue that data is becoming more important to libraries and librarians. Whether you are collecting and analyzing your own statistics to see whether your library still needs a reference desk, or reading the latest ITHAKA report, it’s almost impossible to avoid. Like many librarians, I don’t come from a data or statistics heavy discipline and learned everything I’m about to share while on the job. Trust me, even if it looks scary right now, you can do it. With these 7 handy tips, you’ll soon be a data superstar! Or at least someone who can look critically at a report full of numbers and ask the right questions about what those numbers might mean.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative

Qualitative research involves descriptions, thoughts, feelings, opinions, and other things that can be observed but not measured. Quantitative research involves numbers and measurements and cold hard facts. Neither type of research is objectively better, but they do impact the questions you can answer and the arguments you can make.

Independent vs. Dependent Variables

Independent variables are the inputs or the things you do that influence (directly or not) the dependent variable/the results/the outcome. (For that to make sense, you also need a theory as to how and why these variables are related.) My personal (possibly unpopular) opinion is that it’s incredibly difficult to frame library work in terms of independent and dependent variables and we should be careful about getting too hung up on those terms, which can imply causation.

Causation vs. Correlation

Closely related to my last point, correlation is not causation. Correlation is when one variable changes consistently with another. Causation is when one variable causes the other to change. It’s really, really hard to argue causation in the real world because people and behaviors are complicated. That means it’s nearly impossible to isolate influencing factors. Did Student A get a better grade than Student B because A met with a librarian? Or is it because B had 3 papers due that week and is only taking this class for a general education requirement and was ok with getting a B-? I’m not saying we shouldn’t ever argue causation, but isolating the impact of the library in order to rule out all other possible factors (which is how you prove causation) is extremely challenging.

Samples Matter

Convenience samples – a research group chosen because they were available and easy to get involved – are bad. Don’t be a bad researcher. Ok, that’s probably a little harsh, but I do think that libraries rely way too much on convenience samples. I understand why, but research involving convenience samples don’t support sweeping arguments that they are often used to make. Example: asking the people in your library whether it’s a welcoming environment tells you whether people who are currently using your library at that time/on that day find it welcoming. It’s a biased sample because many people who don’t find your building welcoming just won’t come in the front door. A random sample in this case would help you find those people who study in a coffee shop or the student center instead of the library.

Age Matters

Data goes stale. Your library’s last large survey on information literacy might have taken place in 2008. That doesn’t seem so long ago to many of us (myself included), but to give you context I was still an undergraduate in 2008. My undergraduate classmates have finished law school and are assistant district attorneys. Old data doesn’t represent current students. Think of data as a snapshot that represents a single moment in a rapidly changing environment.

Anecdata

Humans are storytellers, which means that stories are more meaningful to many of us than numbers. Just because a story feels meaningful, doesn’t mean it actually is. Don’t fall into the trap of anecdata, giving more weight to the stories we tell (patron X writes a letter about how important a service is) than the numbers (only 10 people used the service in the past 6 months). Remember, each anecdote is a single data point.

Be Consistent

Whatever you do – be consistent about the questions to ask and how you interpret results. If you aren’t consistent, your results aren’t comparable.

Elizabeth Psyck is the government documents librarian at Grand Valley State University. If you’re extremely angry about her use of data as a singular, you can reach her at psycke@gvsu.edu or @psyckology. She finds writing biographies in third person weird, but not quite as weird as writing them in first person.

Values and Value, by Nicholas Schiller

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I’m an idealist and my values drive a lot of my decision making. I want to share a little about my core library values and what happens when professional pressures start to compromise them.

It will probably help if I frame all of this in a story. A few years ago, I was at a local library instruction conference listening to a respected colleague present on a new program assessment effort she was leading. She encountered resistance from tenured colleagues who were slow to engage with assessment efforts that lacked clear incentives. I was newly tenured then and I had an epiphany: at some point I’d become one of these tenured barriers to new ideas. I’d stopped idealizing a “culture of assessment” and begun responding to it critically or even cynically.

I’m an information literacy librarian and a teacher because I value student learning. I’m emotionally engaged in my work; I imagine most instruction librarians are. When I’m doing my best work, I’m helping students unlock their curiosity and guiding them to master skills and methods for critical thinking. I’m making an important difference and this feels good. We should remember that our work has long-term social value. This is why I love what I do. On an individual level, my values are still rooted in reflective practice (from Char Booth’s Reflective Teaching, Effecting Learning: Instructional Literacy for Library Educators “Reflective practice: Instructor development strategies that observe and consider one’s own teaching effectiveness with the goal of improving the learner experience”), but on an organizational level I’d stopped believing in “the culture of assessment.”

This culture has been putting a lot of pressure on academic libraries being asked to demonstrate the value of libraries. Specifically, libraries are being pushed to provide systematic assessment of the impact of their programs. Demonstrating value involves assessment. Assessment involves setting program goals, listing leaning outcomes that demonstrate these goals, and then measuring how well we achieve these outcomes. Using this process we can know with greater certainty whether we are succeeding at what we set out to do and whether what we are doing is having a positive impact on library users. This is an unequivocally a good thing and a necessary part of reflective practice. It keeps us honest and helps steer our decisions with data. Assessment, however, is a loaded term with multiple meanings, some of which contradict each other. I want to be clear that I’m referring to “College Outcomes Assessment” which the ERIC Thesaurus describes as:

Formal or informal appraisal or judgment of two- or four-year college programs or students in relation to institutional or public expectations of achievement or development--often but not always measured against specific objectives.

College outcomes assessment is a necessary part of reflective practice, but it is not, by itself, sufficient to achieve reflective practice.  However, the definition above makes it easy to confuse outcomes assessment with reflective practice. This can be dangerous. Reflective practice is aligned with my core values, but merely “demonstrating value” is not. When it describes “College Outcomes Assessment,” the ERIC Thesaurus includes both assessment of programs and assessment of students. My assertion here is that assessment of student learning and the assessment of institutional effectiveness (program assessment) are significantly different efforts. Or, to paraphrase what a respected former colleague once told me: “There is the assessment you do to become a better teacher and there’s the assessment you do because the administration makes you.” My concern is that assessment of student learning appeals to the core values of instruction librarians and this appeal is being leveraged to entice us to engage in the kinds of assessment that don’t align with our core values. It can feel like a classic bait-and-switch con.

Good libraries assess because, when done correctly, assessment fosters student learning. However, when done incorrectly, assessment becomes a symbol for serious problems and issues in American higher education. Assessment can be a weapon used by administration to seize power from faculty. Assessment can be a Trojan horse for market values replacing the values of the public good and social justice. We love our work and we love student learning, but when this love and these values are co-opted to serve the neoliberal goals of demonstrating institutional effectiveness or to apply a market value to academic library services, it feels like betrayal. As an idealistic librarian, when I feel my values betrayed the quality of my work and my ability to help foster student learning diminishes.

So, how do we respond? To steal a simile, we should be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. We should know that the motivating agendas behind faculty and administration approaches to assessment are deeply rooted but rarely communicated openly. Assessment is political and its language is encrypted. We have to assess both to be true to our values and to survive in the current higher education environment. What we can do is to make sure that the value that we are demonstrating lines up with our values. We can be engaged, creative, and tireless in measuring student learning, social justice, and critical thinking. We can be more passive or somewhat-less-than- engaged, creative, and tireless when asked to measure return on investment, to value easy-to-quantify goals more highly than opaque goals, or to trade in our core values for the values of the marketplace.

My challenge in coming to grips with the pressure to assess has been to find a middle ground. I’m looking for a space between the idealistic librarian who is lured by the siren’s song of “the culture of assessment” into becoming a tool for the neoliberal takeover of higher education and the cynical librarian who can’t see past the pain of his betrayed values to engage in critical and reflective practice. The serpent and dove approach is helping me to do this. It reminds me of why I love my job while also encouraging me to put my experience and understanding of how the institution works (even when these workings are opaque to outsiders) to work for my core idealism and values.

Nicholas Schiller is the systems & instruction librarian at Washington State University Vancouver. He blogs at Information. Games. He tweets about capybaras, geeky things, running, and libraries at @nnschiller.