To be strategic, libraries commonly track numbers for an exhaustive list of services and systems. We track numbers for reference, teaching, hires, seats, square footage, loans made or received, resources catalogued, clicks on pages, downloads, money spent, etc. We use these numbers to evaluate if we’re meeting service needs, to anticipate future needs, and to follow changes over time. But when we list out all of the questions we wish we could answer (and answer now), we can’t always match those questions to the data we currently gather.
In order to prioritize assessment work and devise an assessment plan at our library, I began by collecting information about both what data we already gather and what answers we wish we had. The results highlighted a gap in our data collecting, which has been heavy on numbers and light on the qualitative assessment that would answer questions like: “what do students do when they run into a dead-end in our discovery tool?” “What do students like and dislike about our spaces?” “Where else are students going to find resources if not to resources we provide (and are they successful)? This poster will document my method and findings.
