How Libraries and Librarians Help: A Guide to Identifying User-Centered Outcomes (review)

The authors open with a lament often heard in the library world: No one understands us, and no one places enough value on library services or recognizes the impact that libraries have on a community. They then move on to describe a model they have developed to alleviate that problem—a model that provides for a much more holistic, broad-based analysis of the impact of library services.

The How Libraries and Librarians Help (HLLH) Model is fairly basic in concept but complex in execution as it tries to explicitly contain many factors—from library services to the environmental context factors for both the library and the user. The authors attempt to go beyond common measures or statistics. For example, statistics about the number of participants in literacy programs are eschewed in favor of qualitative studies that address the real-life impact that literacy improvement has on people's lives and in their communities. Similar assessments might well be of value in academic libraries—studies that consider, for example, not the number of instruction sessions taught or students reached but the impact that those sessions had on the students throughout their academic career.

Those who have trouble with the abstract explanation of the model in part I, as I did, will find much more to work with in part II, which specifically describes how to measure outcomes, conduct an outcome study, and use understanding of outcomes in the planning process. This is where the real value in the book lies for academic librarians interested in this kind of project.

Step-by-step sections—from "Getting Started," through collecting and analyzing the data, to "Maximizing the Results of Your Outcome Study"—are quite accessible and should provide some good practical advice for those who are considering undertaking a study. Additionally, the use of outcomes as part of the planning process should be familiar to many in the academic world. On a larger scale, this is not unlike designing a lesson plan, beginning with the desired outcomes for students and moving backward to design a lesson that creates those outcomes.

Some of the information is particularly helpful for practitioners who are less experienced with research and data collection. For example, one section describes the process of organizing focus group results using themes and subthemes and is quite a bit more accessible than a textbook such as the widely used Basic Research Methods for Librarians (Ronald R. Powell and Lynn Silipigni Connaway, 4th ed., Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2004). Examples and case studies are generously provided throughout and include not only question batteries for both focus group and individual interviews but also sample survey forms and forms to use in organizing and analyzing data. Again, these resources are quite specific to public library programs but possibly useful in outlining structures for other projects. Case studies ranging from a literacy program and a senior services program in Ypsilanti, Michigan, to after-school public library technology programs in several different communities and community information programs in San Mateo County, California, flesh out the authors' concepts.

Services for immigrants, teen technology programs, and community service partnerships are the primary examples of library services that are discussed here. This is where I think the authors missed an opportunity to publish a broader work. Although this book aims to uncover the valuable contributions of libraries, the most basic services are not discussed. The authors acknowledge this omission to some degree with the assertion that they are interested in focusing on outcomes that are not already "over-measured" like circulation statistics and other, more easily quantifiable services of libraries. However, in the context of this work that aims to reassess the way libraries are evaluated and to give librarians tools to use in trumpeting their efforts and successes, perhaps we are assuming too much about the long-collected statistics of gate counts, reference transactions, or book circulation. Could we not...