Tiny Studies

Chances are the work processes you already have in place are generating data that you could be using to learn more about those processes. In two blog posts, the author shares some steps for working with data that is generated by your daily tasks.

What does it mean to evaluate assessment practices through a DEIA lens? Sheila Garcia, Resident Librarian in Learning and Teaching, shares her personal journey applying a critical lens to her capstone project that centers the experiences of undergraduate language brokers.

How can we improve the familiarity and credibility between Library experts, resources and services we offer and the students, faculty and staff who use them? Whether we’re building new relationships or reconnecting with patrons/colleagues during assessment or user research activities, we have the opportunity to use certain marketing and communication best practices and tools during our user research to align clear and targeted communication with our key audiences.

Assessment and research activities focused on the U-M Library faculty, staff, and student experiences are happening regularly, and often the Library Human Resources (LHR) team is contributing to these activities if not leading the research. This work can focus on quantitative data, qualitative data, or take a hybrid approach, and can involve surveys, interviews, and/or some general number-crunching. This post looks over some recent HR assessment projects.

When planning an assessment project in the Library, one important step is to consider whether your project should be vetted by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at U-M, a committee that ensures studies with human subjects are ethical, that subjects are protected from unnecessary psychological or physical risks, and that subjects are participating in a fully informed, voluntary manner. This post details when your data collection may be subject to a full IRB application and review process.

Assessing library impact on student learning is essential for demonstrating libraries’ integrated value and commitment to higher education. In 2018 the author investigated faculty perceptions of student learning in library instruction sessions, and as a result, revealed that faculty observe enhanced learning when their students participate in library instruction opportunities.

In this post, the author describes how they used the assessments of a revised library curriculum for the College of Pharmacy to demonstrate the value of the sessions for students, and to stimulate the creation of a new learning object - a game - to improve student learning.

The 2018 Library Assessment Conference (https://libraryassessment.org/) brought together a community of practitioners and researchers who have responsibility or interest in the broad field of library assessment. This post recaps the conference poster content presented by Laurie Alexander and Doreen Bradley about how analytics advanced the Library's internal understanding of the course-integrated instruction provided by Library staff.

The first post ("Personas: A Classic User Experience Design Technique") in this 2-part series described what personas are and, generally, how to create them. I closed with some cautions about ways personas might come out less than helpful – creating flat, overloaded, or fake (unresearched) personas. The second post presents our persona development for a specific website project.

Document Delivery provides traditional Interlibrary Loan Borrowing service, and scanning and delivery service for books and articles from material owned by the U-M Library. As a result of a successful pilot to provide free Local Document Delivery for faculty and graduate students, the department next sought to change the fee-based service for undergraduate students and staff. Departmental managers wondered: What would happen if we made scanning and delivery service free for these patron groups?