Abstract
The Managing Information Services Outcomes (MISO) Survey was originally developed in 2005 at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, USA by staff from a consortium of higher education institutions to assess library and technology services using a single instrument. Since then, the survey has grown and changed under the collaborative management of an all-volunteer team of library and IT professionals from various participating institutions throughout the United States. The survey has been implemented at 171 institutions. This chapter reviews the guiding principles, ongoing partnerships, and the value of working across departments, across campuses, and across cohorts of participating institutions to leverage local expertise, reduce costs, and create a culture of collaboration and assessment. In an environment where libraries are increasingly dependent on information technology, assessing library services in the context of IT brings layered intelligence to data-informed decision making.
TopAssessing Library And It Organizations
Academic libraries have a long history, and the first higher education institution, University of al-Qarawiyyin in Morocco, arguably has the oldest academic library still in existence, founded circa A.D. 859 (Oswald, 2017). Many institutions of higher education in the United States have started with the gift of a library. Just as John Harvard’s personal book collection formed the basis of his eponymous university’s first library, libraries have been, and continue to be central to the creation of a university, although funding for their continuance was never assured (Shiflett, 1981). As part of the growth of higher education in the United States following the Morrill Act (Britannica, 2019), libraries grew alongside their respective universities, and size became arguably the easiest way to assess collections. But size, especially for smaller libraries, was not a good indicator of the usefulness of, or satisfaction with, library and IT services. General academic surveys such as those produced by The Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium might include a limited set of library questions, but do not provide enough context to truly assess the full range of library and IT service offerings. As Charles Henry, President of the Council on Library and Information Resources, (CLIR) wrote, the “collecting numerical statistics—the counting of books, journals, digital objects, subscriptions, datasets, staff, and dollars—is inadequate to capture the dynamic response of modern research libraries at the analog-digital boundary” (Henry, 2013).
At the same time, anecdotal evidence was insufficient to satisfy administrators who were increasingly asked to provide evidence to support decisions. As a “culture of assessment” grew in libraries in the latter half of the 20th century, leaders were urged to create frameworks to support continuous assessment in order to ensure maximum positive outcomes for services and collections (Lakos & Phipps, 2004). But how could small academic libraries, with limited staff and expertise, assess services and analyze the results of those assessments on their own? Staying up to date in the profession was already hard enough, and few library or IT staff had in-house expertise to create survey instruments and analyze the collected data.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Qualitative Data: Data that is non-numerical. Also called categorical data.
pdf: Abbreviation for “Portable Document Format.” A file format developed by Adobe Corporation to present documents independent of software or operating system.
Drupal: An open-source web content management system.
Assessment: The process of defining, selecting, designing, collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and using information to understand and improve services.
Survey Instrument: The questionnaire used to gather information from respondents.
Benchmarking: Evaluating or checking a data point by comparison with a standard.
Excel: A spreadsheet software program developed by Microsoft Corporation.
Morrill Act: The Land-Grant College Act of the 1862 United States Congress. Named for Vermont Senator Justin Smith Morrill.
SPSS: Data analysis software developed by IBM Corporation.
Visualizations: The graphical representation of data through visual elements.
Liberal Arts: Academic subjects such as literature, philosophy, mathematics, and social and physical sciences as distinct from professional and technical subjects.
Quantitative Data: Data that can be counted (quantified) in numerical form.
Survey Testing: the process of evaluating a survey instrument and validating the questions and items in a survey to ensure the quality of the data collected.
Information Sharing Agreement: A contract indicating what data can be shared, appropriate uses for the data, standards for data storage and use, and other prescriptive requirements.
Data: Facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis.
Data-Informed Decision Making: Relying on measurable data to guide the process of making a management decision in an organization.
Standard Deviation: A measure of how “spread out“ the data is from the average value (mean) within a data set.
Response Rates: In a survey, the number of responses divided by the entire sample. Also called the completion rate.
Net Promoter Score: A measure of customer experience inferring loyalty, developed in marketing research.
CSV: A “comma-separated values” delimited text file in which data elements are separated by a comma.
Information Technology: The use of any computers, storage, networking and other physical devices, infrastructure, and processes to create, process, store, secure, and exchange all forms of electronic data.
Effect Size: A quantitative measure of the strength of the relationship between two variables. It reveals the practical significance of a research finding.
Results Workbooks: For the MISO Survey, the individual campus survey data packaged in a file for ease of analysis and comparison.