Toward a Shared Approach to Program Evaluation and Alumni Career Tracking: Results from the Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science 2 Study

This article provides an overview of the findings of the Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science 2 (WILIS 2) study funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The study set out to develop a survey tool to gather information on both program evaluation and subsequent employment experiences and a model of delivery that could potentially be used by all library and information science (LIS) programs. The resulting model includes a shared survey, shared yet customizable methodology, a Web-based data collection tool, program-specific data products, and shared data products. The study team provided the thirty-nine participating LIS master's programs with both substantive data on their recent graduates and basic benchmarking capabilities. WILIS 2 used a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach that involved members of the LIS community in major aspects of project design and implementation. Data were gathered in three phases over a fourteen month period from May 2009 to June 2010. Phase 1 was a pilot study of graduates from eight programs. Phases 2 and 3 included an additional thirty-one programs. Programs were asked to select a random sample of 250 of their master's degree graduates from the previous five years; however, a few programs included some graduates from earlier years. The final data set includes graduates from 2000 to 2009. Fewer than 4 percent of these respondents graduated prior to 2003. The achieved response rate for all three phases of the survey was 40.5 percent. For purposes of this overview paper, we use the full data set of the thirty-nine LIS programs graduating between 2000 and 2009, or 3,507 cases.