ERUS Meeting, Saturday 7/11/09, ALA Annual Meeting, Chicago, Swiss Hotel
Minutes
Present:
Carol Anderson, U at Albany SUNY, canderson@uamail.albany.edu
Richard Caldwell, U of Californioa, Santa Barbara, Caldwell@library.ucsb.edu
Richard Kaplan, Carnegie Library, kaplanr@carnegielibrary.org
Jeanette Moss, Northwestern U, j-mass@northwestern.edu
Colleen Seale, U of Florida, colleens@ufl.edu
Kornelia Tancheva, Cornell U, kt18@cornell.edu
Members who were unable to attend with prior notice:
Caroline Bordinaro, CSU Dominguez Hills, cbordinaro@csudh.edu
I. Welcome and Introductions
We spent some time discussing who we are and why we are interested in this committee. Some
highlights include:
Colleen: she has done no formal evaluation at her institution; they have done observational
evaluations; they have not done evaluation of chat; is most interested in the evaluation of quality of
service—how we should be evaluating staff performance
Richard Caldwell: has done no evaluation; is interested in ideas how to evaluate reference at his
institution
Richard Kaplan: works at a public library, which is different from an academic library; is interested in
assessing new competencies acquisition; use of appropriate resources, quality of answers; is also
interested in tracking resource use in order to determine what level of specialization is needed; recently
they looked at the broad areas where their questions fall and determined that 10% was in the social
sciences; 15% in the sciences, 10-15% in the humanities; but music around 30%; which in turn
determined how to consolidated service points
Jeanette: is interested in methodologies, processes and education; how to do assessment; they have
done focus groups with student employees; intend to continue with students who are non-library
employees; she is also interested in the research process—what should we be doing in terms of
reference; e.g. they have a roaming librarian in the student center—how to assess the effectiveness of
this program
Carole: has assessment as part of her title; they use DeskTracker and the READ Scale; is interested in
assessing what training is needed; looking at the level of questions to determine staffing patterns; they
have gone to using texting, IM-ing, and phone instead of in-person reference in the science library; is
also interested in ways of tying in data from different sources together to produce more holistic
assessment; assessment of organization of virtual resources, assessment of outreach—what do you get
out of outreach; focus on outcomes-based assessment; how can we tell a story with data
Kornelia: has done quantitative and qualitative assessment of reference services using an online
statistics system created in-house, which records date, time, length of transaction; staff answering;
content of question, ARL category of question; used the data for changing staffing patterns and overall
coverage; verifying the validity of the sampling method and assessment of training needs; is interested
in outcomes-based assessment of user services in general, not just reference
II. Committee membership
Kornelia is the chair for 2009-10 but since Ruby is not present, she is taking over at this Annual.
As far as we know, we have three new members: Asia Gross, Adolfo Prieto, Robin Kinder. Robert Vega is
not sure he is willing to continue; neither is Jennifer Pickle.
Note: Subsequently, both informed us they will not continue.
Action item: Kornelia will get an up-to-date list from Barb Mann and circulate it.
III. Open Forum on Sunday
We discussed what we were interested in getting out of the discussion forum on Sunday. Richard K. and
Jeannette volunteered to lead the discussion. Colleen volunteered to take notes.
Questions we are interested in: what have other institutions done in terms of assessment; what would
they like to see from a committee like ours; if we were to offer a mid-winter institute or a preconference, what would they like to see.
IV. Guide of Assessment resources: Jeanette, Colleen and Richard C. volunteered to work on updating
it.
V. Midwinter Institute/Annual pre-conference Discussion
One of the things that we’d like to offer possibly in collaboration with LLAMA- MAES is an institute/preconference on assessment roughly on the lines of “Using the numbers of today to plan the services of
tomorrow.” We thought that for a pre-conference we would need 3-4 presenters and brainstormed for
possibilities, contacts, topics:
a/U of Rochester ethnographic study
b/Brandeis, Colorado State U – on closing reference desks
c/IS of ACRL: Jeannette volunteered to contact them
d/ARL assessment conference: Kornelia volunteered to look through their presenters
e/evaluation of spaces, reader advisory services; chat reference; data packages
There is an Executive Committee meeting on Sunday: Kornelia and Carole are going and will bring the
information back to the committee after the open forum on Sunday.
Carole is going to a LLAMA-MAES meeting to see if they are willing to co-sponsorship.
Action item: by August 15, everyone should suggest 2-3 possible names for presenters.
Richard Kaplan, Carnegie Library, kaplanr@carnegielibrary.org