Hello everyone! Vicky here to bring you some holiday cheer. I thought, since this is our last post before Hanukkah, Yule, Life Day, Festivus, Kwanzaa , Pancha Ganapati, Soyal, the Dongzhi Festival, Christmas, Newtonmas, Boxing Day, Omisoka, and New Years, I could wind down a busy few months by talking about the American Museum of Natural History party season!
@@ -38,13 +38,5 @@Until our next posting, happy holidays to all you fabulous readers!
- - - - - - - diff --git a/posts/2014-nov10.html b/posts/2014-nov10.html index 7957036..bba5a52 100644 --- a/posts/2014-nov10.html +++ b/posts/2014-nov10.html @@ -2,8 +2,8 @@ .. title: Prove Yourself: Needs Assessment Edition .. slug: prove-yourself-needs-assessment .. date: 2014-11-10 14:08:25 UTC-04:00 -.. tags: ndsr, assessment -.. category: +.. tags: ndsr, assessment, professional development +.. category: NDSR-Blog .. link: https://github.com/VickySteeves/personal-website/blob/master/posts/2014-nov10.html .. description: .. type: text @@ -13,6 +13,8 @@ + +What I’ve come to love about the library science field (which after years of waiting tables you’d think I’d hate) is the service aspect to everything we do. Librarians are intensely user-focused in all of our work: through the use of needs assessment surveys, we mold our libraries to what users want, expect, and need. We use the results to design programs, buy technology, even create positions within a library (YA librarian is a thing because of that!). Some common ways to implement a library assessment include focus groups, interviews, scorecards, comment cards, usage statistics from circulation and reference, and surveys sent to users via email or on paper.
This past week, I attended a workshop with the fabulous Julia Kim at METRO that focused on the implementation and design aspects of surveying, called "Assessment in Focus: Designing and Implementing an Effective User Feedback Survey." The presenter, Nisa Bakkalbasi, the assessment coordinator at Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, was a former statistician and presented on the many ways one could glean statistically valuable quantitative data from simple survey questions.
@@ -26,14 +28,14 @@While my work at AMNH is conducted solely through interviews, I found that the discussion Nisa had on the types of questions used in survey design was particularly helpful. She focused the session on closed-end questions, because there is no way to get quantitative data from open-ended questions. All the results can say is “the majority of respondents said XYZ,” as opposed to closed-ended questions where in the results its “86% of respondents chose X over Y and Z.” This emphasize was extremely important, because real quantifiable data is the easiest to work with when putting together results to share in an institution.
-When designing survey questions, it is important to keep a few things in mind: +
When designing survey questions, it is important to keep a few things in mind:
The two most common closed-ended questions are multiple choice questions:
@@ -65,15 +67,5 @@Librarians can and should use these surveys for their own needs, both internally for library services and externally on an institution-wide scale. Whether you are a public library trying to prove why you need a larger part of the community’s budget, or a corporate library vying for that larger space in the office, the needs assessment survey can prove helpful to cementing the importance of a library as well as development of library programs.
In the words of Socrates, “an unexamined life is not worth living.”
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