I presented today to the library staff about the current academic program review the Librarians’ Departmet is embroiled in. The requirement for an academic program review came down from above in an already tumultuous year (but aren’t they all), and we are making our way through it, steadily.
I have to admit, there have been some outcomes to this review process so far that I’m very pleased with. We developed Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs) for our department for the first time, aligned with the 6 frames from the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy. I know there are varying opinions of how much these high-level goals documents matter, but I sincerely do love finding the points where these goals and ideals interact with our day to day. It made it clearer for me when designing the ELIP program to see how what we were doing there factored into our outcomes, and in discussing where we wanted to go with outreach the other day, I suggested going back to the PLOs to figure out ultimately what we wanted to acheive. It’s the same principle as backwards design for courses.
Of course, the major problem with mapping library services directly to PLOs is that it glosses over the massive amount of infrastructure support work necessary to providing these services. Unlike other academic departments on campus, we largely support our own technology and infrastrucure, they are essential to the services and resources we provide, and the amount of labour required needs to account for this support. Technological infrastructure can’t directly support learning outcomes but it can support the programs and services that do. So, my favourite innovation we’ve made on the standard process was to design an infrastructure support crosswalk, mapping all of our systems and software infrastructure to our programs and services. One of the goals of this process should be to communicate the work we do and the work required; I’ve been fairly relentless in attempting to communicate to academic leadership what it means as faculty to support infrastructure, so I feel really satisfied with how the pieces fell into place on this one.
The other perpetual challenge that we (both us specifically and librarians as a whole, I think) face is connecting directly with students and faculty as a pan-institutional program. Surveys, focus groups and the like typically target library frequent and habitual users, so that there is never an opportunity to hear from who we don’t hear from already. This year, rather than attempt to send out our own surveys, we’ve developed some standard survey questions that will go out in other program review cohorts’ surveys to be answered by their students, alumni, and faculty. We developed 3 questions for each survey, and I’m honestly excited to see the responses.
The current major project is the self-study report, which the Program Review team will work on over the next few months in preparation for inviting 3 external reviewers to campus. I can’t think of an external review report without hearkening back to my very favourite report, the UBC Library External Review from 2012 or 2013. I can no longer locate this report on the Internet, so instead it will live in my head forever as the most elegantly scathing report I have had the pleasure to read. I remember a well-placed use of “anhedonic” and a quote from Anna Karenina (“All happy families, etc.”) in particular.
In mentioning this to a colleague, she brought up and was able to send me a copy of the TRU Library External Review report from a 2007 Program Review. While not quite rising to the level of UBC, the 2007 report offers its own particularly delicious nuggets, including the following:
It may be that the lack of change has contributed to lower morale in the library and the perception that nothing will change. The librarians appear to be suffering from “learned helplessness”; ie their belief in their ability to lead change is almost non-existent and they are skeptical that positive change is possible.
Kimberly B. Kelley and Michael Ridley, Review of TRU Library, 2007
I imagine that would have felt like a gut punch to read back then, but from my position of distance, I don’t think the review is targeting the TRU librarians, so much as TRU’s lack of support for the library. There are recommendations in the 2007 report that didn’t happen until long after I arrived. There are some recommendations that I don’t believe have happened yet. I don’t know that any “learned helplessness” has entirely gone away; I catch myself at times wondering why I should bother with certain things or even when we think of goal assessment, realism and achievability are touted as important factors. That being said, I do think we’ve made changes and I think we want to make more. I think we’ve at least made it to a place where our anxieties have not prevented us from having aspirations, which is a starting place if nothing else.
