Valuing Libraries | Peer to Peer Review
Are we asking the right questions when we choose which beans to count? Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Sep 16, 2010A new report on how academic libraries can demonstrate their worth has just been published by the Association of College and Research Libraries (and has been covered here at Library Journal as well as at the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed). Megan Oakleaf of Syracuse University conducted an exhaustive review of the literature and lays out some of the kinds of assessment libraries should undertake and what kinds of institutional research the field needs to make the case for libraries.
A solid base
I was surprised, when surveying chief academic officers last spring, that among that cohort of administrators, the value of libraries was not in question. Even during a terrible recession, when layoffs and deep budget cuts had to be uppermost on their minds, they were not entertaining the idea that the library might not be worth the expense.
Many of them expressed excitement about the role their library played in student learning and in the ways the library was reinventing itself to foster student engagement with ideas and to enable collaborative work. They seemed well informed about the shift to digital collections and the costs involved. One commented that the library was essential for her largely low-income students who needed a quiet place to study, computers, and Internet access—resources they simply don't have at home.
Others wrote about the importance of librarians as experts at filtering in an era of information abundance, able to help students learn the skills they need.
Overall, these academic leaders seemed to feel their libraries were essential for research and learning. At the same time, some wished their library directors were more aggressive about making their unmet needs known, providing hard evidence deans and provosts could draw on to argue for resources. Others wanted to be reassured the library was getting used and that use was making a difference for students.
Aligning with institutional priorities
Oakleaf's report suggests a great many ways libraries could turn their attentions from tinkering with library operations toward understanding the contributions the library makes (or fails to make) to the institution as a whole. She points toward the kinds of measures institutions care about: how many students succeed in their courses? Graduate? Get jobs? How much does the library contribute toward faculty productivity in terms of publications and grants? How does the library enhance the institution's prestige?
Answering these questions requires libraries to think of the institution's goals, not the library's, and to collect data that may be hard to capture-such as tracking students who have had library sessions and seeing if those sessions correlate to enhanced retention or higher GPAs.
The A word
I happened to read this report right after attending a department chairs meeting about assessment. My institution is gearing up for our next accreditation visit three years from now. We were all asked to revisit our department assessment plans, originally drawn up in 1998 and, in some departments, buried somewhere in a file cabinet.
We didn't bury ours; for more than a decade we have been gathering a modest (and manageable) amount of data and analyzing it routinely. We have held annual retreats to discuss what we've learned and have made changes as a result. Our goals are mapped to institutional priorities, and our research agendas are rooted in the scholarship of teaching and learning, because student learning is what my college is about and that's what we find interesting.
But still I am finding myself bristling a bit at the idea that libraries must provide a quantifiable return on investment using such blunt instruments such as whether the library encourages students to stick around long enough to pay another tuition bill or helps train them for better jobs or what percentage of grant dollars the library can claim as being their contribution to the bottom line. Toward what end? I keep wanting to ask. Aren't those students here to learn? Isn't that what we should be examining-what they've learned, and what they have difficulty learning? This isn't necessarily an outcome that the library can take credit for-but taking credit isn't the point: improved student learning is.
Faculty "productivity" is another issue that begs to be queried. One of the reasons we have to spend so much money on acquisitions is that mountains of stuff is published-not to expand our knowledge of the world, but because publications are the coin used to gain tenure and promotion, and in this context quantity is more important than quality (and in most cases more important than student learning). The Royal Society recently announced a hefty increase in its chemistry journal subscription prices amounting to as much as 20 percent. When asked how it could possibly justify such a steep hike, the society explained the price increase was needed because it plans to publish more articles in each issue, so naturally we'll have to pay more. One librarian grumbled on a discussion list that we never asked them to "supersize me." Yet it's somehow assumed that more is always better. I'd rather ask what the point of all this productivity is rather than justify our existence by claiming we helped generate yet more stuff.
Healthy curiosity
This obsession with bottom lines is part of the corrupting influence of managerial approaches to higher education, treating students and publications as interchangeable units we produce rather than caring about individuals and knowledge. Meanwhile, we'll keep doing what we've been doing for years, something that our accreditation team was happy with last time they visited: we'll talk with students and faculty about their research needs and experiences, examine student work with a rubric we developed to see if our students are learning how to find and use information effectively, and we'll let curiosity drive our assessment efforts rather than try to quantify our economic value.
Because when you get right down to it, it's learning and the advancement of knowledge that matters. It's what libraries are for. If they also happen to help students stick around, attract good faculty, or contribute to winning grants, fine-but let's keep our eyes on the prize.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), has just been published by Minotaur Books.
