Purpose & Goals

In 2022–2023, the Learning & Outreach Services (LORS) department within the University of New Mexico’s Libraries responded to post-pandemic challenges with a renewed focus on project-driven strategic planning. The department set an annual goal to develop a LORS-specific assessment program and charged a small team with the task. The assessment team grappled with how to operationalize the literature on library assessment at a level that makes sense for a department of 12 librarians within a larger library organization. Many of the publications identified in our initial environmental scan described assessment at an institutional level for an entire library or at a granular level for individual projects.

Design & Methodology

This paper will summarize the assessment team’s approach to developing a consensus-driven assessment framework tailored for our department’s scope and context, focusing on how we defined values to guide assessment efforts and creating useful tools to promote long-term program sustainability. This process began with targeted reading and using multiple methods to capture LORS librarians’ preliminary ideas and concerns, which informed a series of exploratory conversations among assessment team members that led to the recommendation to create a custom assessment framework. The framework includes a guidance document, an impact map (adapted from work by Megan Oakleaf), and templates. The guidance document articulates deliberate choices LORS librarians made about what and how we plan to assess, pursuing projects and methods meaningful to our group. Intended as a living document, the guidance document also demonstrates alignment with library-wide and campus-level strategic planning, captures logistical and institutional information for the purposes of knowledge management, and outlines procedures for planning and tracking future assessment projects (i.e., instructions for how to use the templates).

Conclusions

Our team found it beneficial to strip down relevant assessment concepts and resources in order to rebuild from the basics our departmental understanding of what we hoped to achieve with an assessment program. Our framework intentionally emphasizes projects that support decision-making and service enhancements over other types of assessment. After two years of refinement, the framework we have developed functions as a pragmatic toolkit that will see long-term use within our department.

Implications & Value

Our experiences can provide an example of one approach to developing and implementing an appropriately scaled assessment program. The lessons learned from this effort could prove applicable for similar groups at other institutions. Our assessment framework (particularly the templates) are suitable for reuse and remixing.