Advances in Librarianship Vol. 35: Contexts for Assessment and Outcomes Evaluation in Librarianship

The latest offering from Emerald's popular Advances in Librarianship series brings a fresh and useful perspective to the emerging area of assessment and outcomes evaluation within librarianship. Volume 35 in this series is titled Contexts for Assessment and Outcomes Evaluation in Librarianship and examines just that. Originally from the field of education, assessment and outcomes evaluation is a form of measurement now being applied to a wide variety of library purposes, including service effectiveness and impact, collection strength and learning outcomes for both staff and library users.

Editors Woodsworth and Penniman have carefully selected eight individual research projects within the area of assessment and evaluation and presented these as individual chapters, each by different authors. One of the key features of this volume is that it considers assessment and evaluation techniques and the usefulness of the resulting data in a range of library contexts, covering public and academic libraries and also library education. As the studies are conducted within each of these contexts, discussion identifies the successes and failures of some assessments within these specific contexts and highlights the applicability of these techniques to real library situations. This is a key feature which brings this volume out of the realm of an interesting academic exercise and into the more fruitful area of practical research with wide applicability in libraries.

The arrangement of this volume is in three key areas: first, the broad view considers three instances where the need for conducting assessment or evaluations of programmes in different public libraries has been acted on; second, needs analyses and results document practical uses of assessment and outcomes evaluation techniques for three different purposes in academic libraries; and finally, two online educational case studies are presented with specific focuses on electronic portfolios and staff assessment within a Master of Library Science programme.

Two chapters have been singled out in this review to highlight the nature of this volume from Emerald. Walter's chapter applying outcomes evaluation to library services for children provides a useful application of this process within a public library setting. It is used, as the author describes it, to document the results of good intentions. It outlines the growth and development of a measurement tool that gives age‐specific measures for the success of individual customers with their services and in their programmes. The tool was used to measure the success and impact of their Summer Reading Programme and the results given back to funders of the programme. Consideration was also given to the practicalities of implementing such an assessment tool across a range of youth services in public libraries, providing a practical basis for any public library to use this study as a springboard for their own assessment and outcomes evaluation purposes.

For academic librarians, the range of case studies includes Wexelbaum and Kille's chapter examining the relationship between collection strength and student achievement. This is an important measure for academic libraries as it supports the case for library funding by measuring the link between library collections and the main aims of the institution in terms of student success. This comes at an important time when collection management is moving away from a collection‐centred focus and towards a more client‐centred focus. The authors discuss the challenges associated with this shift in focus and identify the range of assessment tools that also need to make this change, bringing citation analysis and student satisfaction surveys to the fore alongside the more traditional tools of circulation analysis and interlibrary loans. As with other chapters, this provides a useful starting point and springboard for ideas and methods for similar assessment and evaluations to be conducted in other libraries.

The book is highly recommended for library managers in public and academic libraries who are interested in developing effective assessment and outcomes evaluation methods for their own libraries, as it provides case studies, discussions, and the identification of associated challenges and difficulties from a range of libraries already involved in this emerging area of library management.