Call for Book Chapter Proposals in Library Assessment
(For a PDF version of this announcement, please click here).
We are seeking chapter proposals for a book on library assessment. Please consider sharing your work in this area to this effort.
Working Title – Academic Libraries and the Academy: Strategies and Approaches to Demonstrate Your Value, Impact, and Return on Investment
Publisher
This book will be published under the auspices of ACRL (Association of College & Research Libraries). The anticipated publication date is early 2018.
Introduction
Assessment in academic libraries will play an increasingly crucial role in higher education. With the demand for greater transparency and accountability in funding for institutions, diminished budgets, and a shift to performance-based funding, academic libraries are examining and implementing new and creative approaches to demonstrate their inherent, immediate and long term value and impact to their institutions and stakeholders. Academic libraries of all shapes and sizes are understanding the need to establish their place and role in supporting institutional goals and objectives particularly related to student learning outcomes, academic student success measures, and faculty teaching and research productivity. To this end, many academic libraries are investing in efforts focused on implementing assessment initiatives that demonstrate their value and impact to their institutional stakeholders and community.
Objective
This book will present cases of how academic libraries are successfully implementing initiatives to demonstrate their worth and value to their institutional and community stakeholders. The cases will include proven strategies, lessons learned, effective approaches and practical applications successfully employed by academic staff and support professionals. The publication is intended to inform those at all levels of experience and stages of implementation— that is, those who are considering or just beginning to embark on this path, as well as others who have already taken the plunge and are looking to leverage or triangulate other strategies.
Target Audience
This publication will primarily target librarians, professional staff and administrators at all types of academic libraries, and we anticipate it will also be of interest to others across disciplines and industries who are engaged in similar assessment initiatives. It will present practical, easy-to-adopt strategies and approaches based on case studies, and will offer a breadth and depth of options to appeal to a wide range of readers at various stages of experience with demonstrating library value — from beginners to experts.
Proposed Book Sections
This book will be structured in four sections of case studies as described below:
Section 1: Seeding the Initiative. Explores the planning stages or “works-in-progress” in assessment that relate to the library’s impact and value. The results of these efforts may not be imminent. Nevertheless, these case studies demonstrate the potential value and the importance of the initial design and planning stage.
Section 2: Low-Hanging Fruit. Provides stories of assessments that are easy to measure, short-term (less than one year), low cost, require few resources (staff or tools), and are easily replicable at similar academic libraries.
Example: ROI spreadsheets at the University of West Florida
Section 3: Reachable Fruit (with some effort). Provides stories of assessments that may require more external and internal resources to measure, may take more than six months to one year to collect and analyze, feature medium costs and resources (i.e., incentives, equipment, tools), and may be replicable at other academic libraries that are similar in size or scope.
Example: Contingent valuation measures
Section 4: Hard-to-Reach Fruit. A range of assessment activities more difficult to measure and time and resource intensive, may require long-term data collection (e.g. longitudinal studies that require more than a year to collect a dataset or have measures that require more time, such as measuring a cohort’s graduation rates), and feature greater external partnerships, internal infrastructure, and/or additional resources to measure and analyze.
Examples: The Library Cube (which required the creation of a relational database), and Mixed-method Ethnographies, such as the ERIAL Project. (Ethnographic qualitative studies require more time to transcribe and analyze.)
Chapter proposals should focus on a topic that is related to one of the four sections listed above. Authors are also welcome to propose additional topics or sections that may be relevant to this publication.
Submission Procedure
Authors are invited to submit a chapter proposal as an email attachment in Word or PDF to academiclibrariesandtheacademy@gmail.com on or before Monday, January 09, 2017. The chapter proposal should be 300-500 words clearly explaining the intent and details of the proposed chapter as it relates to one of the four sections of the book described above. Authors will be notified by Monday, February 27, 2017 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Completed chapters are expected to be between 3,000-5,000 words, although shorter or longer chapters are negotiable. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by Tuesday, May 29, 2017.
Proposals should include:
- Author name(s), institutional or organizational affiliation, job title/role
- A summary of the proposed chapter (300-500 words)
Proposed chapters should be based on unpublished work, unique to this publication and not submitted or intended to be simultaneously submitted elsewhere.
Important Dates
Book Chapter Proposals Submission Due: Monday, January 09, 2017 Authors notified: Monday, February 27, 2017 Abstracts/Full Chapters Due: Tuesday, May 29, 2017 Feedback and revisions to Authors: Summer, 2017
Final Revised Chapter Due: September, 2017 Copy-editing, production: Fall, 2017
Publication Date: Early 2018
Inquiries to: academiclibrariesandtheacademy@gmail.com
Editors
Marwin Britto, Ph.D., MLIS
University of Saskatchewan
Canada
Kirsten Kinsley, Ed.S., MLIS
Florida State University
USA
