I just returned from the 2014 Library Assessment Conference where colleagues from around the world shared a number of amazing strategies and ideas for demonstrating the academic library’s contribution to student success and the library’s value to the university’s research enterprise. With over 7 workshops and 27 concurrent sessions, I unfortunately couldn’t attend every program I wanted to see. Luckily the presentation slides are already online at http://libraryassessment.org/schedule/index.shtml Here are some of my largest takeaways:

The Library Cube: Unlocking the Value from Your Library’s Data – Margie Jantti, University of Wollongong

There was much chatter within the library assessment community when Brian Cox and Margie Jantti published their summary about the University of Wollongong’s Library Cube project back in 2012. Margie provided additional project details, along with a live demonstration of the Cube during her pre-conference workshop. I learned that the Wollongong Library viewed the Cube as a means to represent the library within the university’s enterprise system. Their project was also a response to their realization that libraries collect a lot of data, we’re just not very good at leveraging it. Further, library systems don’t typically talk to other university systems.

Wollongong has successfully blended data  from a number of platforms, including Innovative, EZ-proxy logs, and other sources and can now successfuly show correlations between e-resource use and student grades, segmented by gender, academic discipline, international vs. domestic students, and other demographic categories. They are also in the process of developing a marketing cube, to inform collection development, librarian relationships with faculty, promotional initiatives, and more.

This project could definitely be implemented at The Ohio State University, as it appears our university is using the same enterprise and library systems.

Who’s Asking What? Modeling a Large Reference Interaction Dataset  – Andrew Asher, Indiana University

The Indiana University Libraries is currently looking at unused and underutilized datasets for their assessment initiatives. This session focused on the stories which could be told from an aggregated dataset of approximately 500,000 reference transactions from 2006-2013. Email questions specifically were analyzed using topic modeling, a probabilistic approach to inferring themes by looking at the frequency of co-occuring words. We may be able to use this approach to better understand the nature of questions logged in our LibAnswers database.

Discovering the Pattern: Discerning the Potential: The Role of the Library in Unraveling the Cat’s Cradle of Activity Data – David Kay, SERO Consulting

I appreciate that this presentation noted that there are two competing philosophies for determining what data should be collected for library assessment. One camp advocates that we should collect whatever data we can and let the data tell its story, and other believes we should collect data specific to areas of interest or known to be useful. Both approaches are equally valid.

Data Management – It’s for Libraries Too! – Monena Hall, Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech deployed the Data Asset Framework methodology to determine what data the libraries collected, and where and how this data was stored (essentially a data audit). The studied revealed many data silos within their library system, along with little data oversight, and minimal data preservation planning. As libraries position themselves as data managers for the university research enterprise, we need to be able to implement the same policies and strategies that we advocate for our constituents.

Driving Partnerships for Assessment and Engagement – Katy Mathuews, Rebekah Kilzer, Shawnee State University

Serving a large population of first-generation college students, Shawnee State University has implemented an intrusive advising program on campus. The library is in preliminary discussions to participate in campus learning analytics interventions. Using current data, the library has been able to determine at an aggregate level which students are using the library and which are not, and may parse this data by a number of demographic attributes. They are also able to correlate student usage of library materials with GPA. As a Innovative/OhioLINK library, Shawnee State’s experience may inform our library’s efforts with these initiatives.

Show This, Not That: How to Communicate Assessment Results – Jen-Chein Yu, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Kudos to Jen-Chien Yu for this entertaining and enlightening presentation. I think the PowerPoint for this program speaks for itself! See http://libraryassessment.org/bm~doc/12YuLightningTalk.pdf