TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

Colleen Cook, Texas A&M University

Martha Kyrillidou, Association of Research Libraries

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

• ARL New Measures toolkit, StatsQUAL: LibQUAL+, ClimateQUAL, MINES for Libraries

• ARL descriptive statistics 1907 -

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

• What distinguishes a research library today?

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

• Call for qualitative data• Too limited by descriptive statistics• Profiles• Timeframe < 5 years

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

• Collections and services

• The special role of Special Collections

• Collaborations a key means to success

• Physical spaces for teaching and learning primarily geared for undergraduates

• How to describe value to the institution

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

• Instruction and information literacy

• Digital collections & institutional repositories

• Assessment• Service quality – listening to users

• Innovative means of providing access and website issues

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

• Open access

• Scholarly communication

• Google

• Copyright

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

• In addition to “Reference transactions” : Virtual chat sessions, consultations

• Move to substitute titles for monographic volume and serial subscription count to reflect depth of content

• Interlibrary loan borrowing, lending

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

• Ability to describe strengths & contributions signaling value to the institution

in an open-ended fashion: To tell a story

• Timely, easily changeable

• Taken together cover the gamut of ARL services, collections, contributions

• Subjective

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

• Not numbers (some people, some provosts want them) – can’t rank, discern differences statistically

• Are not simple, easily assimilated counts

• Not objective

• Are not represented easily in numbers and tables – require more intellectual energy to digest, draw conclusions

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

• As a source of self reported data useful to others for comparisons, best practices and vicarious learning

• As a source of mining possible new variables to use in descriptive statistics

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES