Measuring Relevance After September 11

The September 11^th tragedy, only one week old as I write, changed our culture. Burned in our minds are pictures of the airliner piercing the World Trade Center, trapped employees flinging themselves from the building, walls collapsing from structure into rubble, and posters identifying the individuals who suddenly are missing. Some of our national and personal assurance is gone. Feeling rather dislocated, I seek for meaning, focus, and relevance. The evolving answer to that search is a resounding affirmation of my professional commitment to academic libraries. The work of providing information to students and faculty continues to be worthy of the highest professional and personal commitment.

In my last editorial, I spoke about several assessment initiatives underway; now I consciously reprise that offering. Work reflected in articles in this issue can help librarians focus their efforts more effectively. However, beyond merely designing, collecting, and processing the data, each library must interpret that data for its own campus and tell its unique story about campus information-seeking behavior and campus use of resources.

Collecting and Processing the Data

Denise Troll's article, "How and Why Libraries are Changing: What We Know and What We Need to Know," outlines difficult issues confronting libraries. Many statistics measuring paper library use are either flat or declining. Measures of the electronic library use are nascent, and a quick agreement to them would aid librarians in beginning to understand new patterns of use. Troll's advice about focusing more often and more effectively on student and faculty learning and research patterns is excellent. This work derives from Ms. Troll's fellowship with the Digital Library Federation, which has allowed its publication in portal.

Ms. Troll's work helped the Digital Library Federation and its parent organization (CLIR, The Council on Library and Information Resources) to focus on the need for a scholarly information research survey. The survey will query faculty and students across types of academic institutions and across disciplines about how they find and use information. When the results of the survey are in, librarians will understand this process a little more clearly. Respondents will be asked questions about conventional library use, digital library habits, web searching, bookstore purchases, and personal library holdings. Relevance, verification, and unmet needs will be assessed with enormous benefits to academic libraries. The results from the survey will help libraries focus their efforts on current and emerging information needs, and will provide a context for interpreting known trends in library use. The findings will reveal the relevance of libraries in the broad information landscape. They will also enable libraries, publishers, and other information providers to develop digital resources, services, and tools that meet user needs and expectations better than our current offerings.

The 4^th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services, held in Pittsburgh as a preconference to International Federation of Library Associations, underlined the breadth of this concern. Worldwide, librarians are using a large variety of assessment methods to understand change and to create change themselves. Ms. Troll, the Texas A&M contingent noted below, and many others contributed to the success of this conference. Presentations from the most recent conference are available at http://www.arl.org/stats/north/program.html, and proceedings from previous conferences are available at ARL's Publications Best sellers page, http://www.arl.org/pubscat/best.html.

Texas A&M University Libraries, under the leadership of Fred Health and Colleen Cook, have labored to perfect a LibQUAL+™ survey instrument that allows librarians to understand key reactions of their constituents based on assessments of library service quality. Bruce Thompson, Russel L. Thompson, and Martha Kyrillidou have all contributed to that development effort, and the Association for Research Libraries is prepared to administer the survey both for ARL members and for other interested academic libraries. portal is proud to publish several articles about LibQUAL+ in this issue, supplementing the feature and article that we published in volume 1. The...