Assessment Metrics and the Catalog

By way of introduction to this post, I want to tell you, I am terrible at math. This posed something of a challenge for me in one of my classes last semester - Library Planning, Marketing, and Assessment. The assessment part was a challenge, but I think I have a good grasp of the practices and broad theories of assessment in libraries. I filed away my assessment tools and have been thinking about them vis a vis the Manifesto project.



However, in her post We’ve implemented a next generation catalogue, now what?, Laurel Tarulli shares this pertinent thought about assessment and cataloging/metadata:

So, we’ve implemented a next generation catalogue, now what? So many libraries have implemented these catalogues and then…nothing. Staff are trained, a preliminary feedback survey may have been implemented to seek patron and staff opinion and that’s where it ends. However, exploration needs to go beyond this most basic and preliminary stage. How are staff using the catalogue? Has it made the reference department’s tasks easier because of federated searching and the ability to search multiple, additional external data sources (such as websites) all in one search? Are staff promoting the tagging and reviewing features to local book clubs? Are cataloguers looking at tags and their local usage by patrons? Has the library website been added as a data source so that library locations and hours, as well as programming, can be searched from within the catalogue in one search?

As a regular reader of my posts here on The Dean Files, you know I wave the user-centered libraries flag all the time. What makes a library user-centered? One of the best ways is to constantly do assessment - both formal and informal. Talk to your patrons, talk to your front line staff members. Look at the raw data that circulation (and other areas) generate about your patrons. Maybe make some really cool infographics (Libraries need more cool infographics, but that's another post)



Use this aggreated and categorized data (and those infographics!) to then constantly improve and tailor your library to your patrons - from acquisitions to reference services, and I would say most of all the catalog. After all, the catalog is the primary method by which patrons interface with the collection. Shouldn't it be the most user-centered "thing" in the library?