Alumni of the Year Speech at Kent State University, School of

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Alumna of the Year Speech at Kent State University, School of Library and Information
Science, April 11, 2007
By Martha Kyrillidou
It is indeed a great pleasure and an honor to be here today in front of you as the 2007
Alumna of the Year. There are so many memories that come back to me when I recall
my graduate school years here at Kent State that it will be impossible to make justice to
all of them through my brief remarks, so I ask your forgiveness in advance for all that is
left unsaid and I hope you will be happy with the shortness of these remarks!
Kent State became a home away from home when in 1988 I left Thessaloniki, Greece, to
come and study here for my library science degree for the noble purpose of changing
Greek libraries. My mother still remembers the day when I left and told her ‘Don’t
worry, mom, I will be back in a year.’
That first year was one of the richest learning experiences in my whole life -- learning a
new country, new people, a new university, a new profession. In my experience Kent
State is the finest example of expanding educational horizons, ‘excellence in action’ as
the welcoming billboard at Cleveland International Airport announces to the newcomers.
The Kent State School of Library and Information Science is offering a wealth of
learning opportunities, and provides the best that the US higher education can offer to a
student, and to the international student a sense of the uniquely warm Midwestern set of
values and culture.
The ways of the new country I did find peculiar in some ways – living in a graduate dorm
on campus as it was still possible for graduate students at that time, I still remember my
first day in that dorm when I was cooking in the kitchen enjoying a glass of wine while
the resident advisor stopped by and quietly wrote a ‘pink slip.’ He handed it over to me
saying nothing wishing to show his reprimand with his silent posture. The poor resident
advisor was faced with the ignorant eyes of a foreign graduate student who comes from a
country where a glass of wine is part of the essential elements of the food pyramid! And,
the poor foreign student did not quite know what this was all about, so she found a
resident citizen, who eventually became her dear husband, to guide her through the ways
of the new country.
The new country had so much to offer and it was going to make possible a dream -- the
dream of changing libraries for the better. I benefited from using libraries, I wanted
others to enjoy the benefits of using libraries, I felt the barriers of using libraries, I knew
libraries could be better if they dealt more effectively with these barriers. And, what
better way to change libraries than tapping on the psychological needs of the library user
by actively seeking user input and acting upon this information with the professional
insights that a responsible librarian can bring together.
I read and read and read and read and read almost everything the Kent State library had
on user needs assessment, on the social role of the libraries, on the professional
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responsibilities of the librarian. I found a brave advisor in Rick Rubin, newly hired
assistant professor at that time. He was eager to see more original research take place in
the profession and trusted my judgment to carry forward a ‘User Survey of the Library of
the English Department at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.’ Indeed, I
went back to Greece after a year, as I promised to my mother, to collect the data for my
thesis.
Coming back the following year, I had a pile of surveys and little knowledge of how I
need to deal with them. It took me a year to master the intricacies of the mainframe
VMD IMB systems that were available at that time, to learn enough statistics and SPSS
to code my surveys and analyze my data. While learning all this, I was intrigued by the
methodological rigor of the research process and decided to get a second Master’s degree
in Evaluation and Measurement at the Department of Education, and I enjoyed the
benefits of a wonderful research assistantship in the Bureau of Education Research that
offered more intellectual stimulation to my never ending hunger for more knowledge.
In the meantime, I am truly happy to report that my thesis work on the English
Department Library at the Aristotle University indeed changed that library! Can I take
full credit for all the changes that happened there? Nancy Birk, KSU’s archivist at that
time and the coordinator of the Aristotle/KSU Greek Exchange Program, can easily call
me a liar if I did!
Indeed, the libraries at Aristotle University were changing thanks to the good work of
many people that were going back and forth through an active exchange program, sharing
experiences, collaborating across borders, and actively engaging in research, teaching and
learning between the Kent State University and the Aristotle University libraries. Even
before coming to the US I was the beneficiary of working closely with a Kent State
visiting librarian who successfully brought the first OCLC live connection to Greece at
Aristotle University -- Evelina Smith, Director of the Trumbull Campus Library at that
time. The librarians of the English Department and the Central library, among them
Athena Salaba currently an assistant professor at Kent State, were among my best friends.
The impact of the libraries exchange program between the two universities is still
legendary and active. Susan Weaver, director of library services at East Liverpool, was
the most recent KSU faculty visiting Aristotle. As recently as last year, she trained
librarians in Greece on assessment methods. Her work as an ARL Visiting Program
Officer was supported by Mark Weber, Kent State library director and by the Association
of Research Libraries Statistics and Measurement Program.
So much of the success of changing Greek libraries is a shared success, the benefits of a
larger collaborative and community effort that brought forward positive social change.
Of course, having changed Greek libraries, I had to seek other professional goals for
myself and by then it was clear to me that even libraries here in the US could use some
positive organizational changes. Having been trained in good research methods, I had at
my disposal the tools needed: systematic evidence gathering, use of that evidence in an
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effective way, and collaboration and community building. From Kent State I did find my
way to the University of Illinois and eventually to the Association of Research Libraries
where since 1994 I have been blessed with the opportunity to work in bringing forward
positive changes in libraries in more ways that one.
From the systematic gathering of the traditional input measures, we have been able to
move forward into the systematic gathering of user perceptions and expectations with
LibQUAL+®. LibQUAL+® is a service that offers a web-based user survey for libraries
to gather feedback from their users. The service allows libraries to identify whether they
are meeting user expectations, how they compare with other peer institutions, and how
their performance trajectory moves through time. I ended up establishing an operation
that can analyze hundreds of libraries’ and thousands of users’ survey data within a week
– coming a long way since 1988 when I started analyzing my own thesis data. In 2007 we
are celebrating 1,000 libraries that implemented LibQUAL+® and we have data from
more than 1,000,000 library users.
And, if I were to take credit for all that has been accomplished, I am sure many more
people would call me a liar or would be upset for the implied omissions and
commissions. Much of what is accomplished is based on strong collaboration efforts
with other researchers and practitioners. Such collaborations are effective when they
build bridges between what is meaningful and what is practical, between rigorous
research and effective practice, between individual accomplishments and community
awareness.
Through the ARL Statistics and Measurement Program I have worked for more than a
decade to bring to the profession an increased sense of the need to aggressively market
the good work libraries and librarians are doing using evidence-based methods.
Libraries are among the good things in life! The good things in life can easily be taken
for granted and neglected. I hope we can all share the responsibility of not being taken
for granted, of actively engaging in demonstrating our value, of making sure that we
COUNT!
To paraphrase a popular saying ‘I COUNT, therefore I am!’
Martha Kyrillidou’s Biosketch
Martha Kyrillidou left Greece to come to the US in 1988 to study librarianship hoping to
gain knowledge for improving Greek libraries. In the process she stumbled into the need
to improve libraries all over the globe. In the late 80s, while still in Greece she had
worked with visiting US librarians from the Kent State - Aristotle University exchange
program to modernize the library system of the University of Aristotle by proposing the
use of OCLC services, reviewing and evaluating reference services, and identifying
library technological solutions. While pursing her Master's of Library Science at Kent
State supported by a Fulbright scholarship, Martha had the opportunity to establish strong
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mentoring relationships with all the visiting librarians who were part of the KentAristotle University program during 1988-2001. She was also the co-founder of the Kent
State ALA student chapter. She completed a second master's in Evaluation and
Measurement at Kent State through the Department of Education and embarked on her
career in library assessment with her Master's thesis, "A User Survey of the Library of the
English Library, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece."
She left Kent State to pursue her doctoral degree at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign where she worked at the Library Research Center in assessment projects
ranging from the ACRL Statistics, the ALA Salary Survey, marketing studies
commissioned by publishers, and research projects ranging from bibliometric studies to
evaluation studies of library education programs.
Martha was hired by the Association of Research Libraries in 1994 to establish a data
analysis capability at ARL. From the institutional studies of ARL Statistics and the ARL
Annual Salary Survey, she moved the ARL Statistics and Measurement Program into a
service operation helping libraries demonstrate their value through the systematic
collection of evidence and the application of rigorous evaluative methods. As one of the
principal investigators in LibQUAL+®, she oversaw the establishment and expansion of
this service which this year will collect library service quality data from the 1,000,000th
library user from more than 1,000 libraries across the globe. She is actively engaged in
developing the next generation of evaluation tools to help libraries improve service
quality: Measuring the Impact of Networked Electronic Services (MINES for
Libraries™) and measuring the value of digital services and collections (DigiQUAL™).
She has co-chaired the first Library Assessment Conference held this past September at
the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. And, she is a strong believer that effective,
sustainable and practical assessment can help libraries adapt in this increasingly
competitive information environment.
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