Library Assessment Conference: Building Effective, Sustainable, Practical Assessment

http://libraryassessment.org/index.shtml

Baltimore, Maryland  October 25–27, 2010

The Association of Research Libraries, the University of Virginia Library, and the University of Washington Libraries are pleased to announce the 2010 Library Assessment Conference: Building Effective, Sustainable, Practical Assessment, to be held in Baltimore, Maryland from October 25-27, 2010. The conference goal is to support and nurture the library assessment community through a mix of invited speakers, contributed papers and posters, workshops, and engaging discussion. The conference is geared toward library and information professionals and researchers with responsibility for or an interest in the broad field of library assessment with an emphasis on, but not limited to, North American academic libraries. This conference builds on the success of the first two conferences held in Charlottesville (2006) and Seattle (2008).



We are pleased to announce that the conference's five keynote speakers are confirmed:

Fred Heath: Library Assessment: The Way We Have Grown
Megan Oakleaf: Are They Learning? Are We? Learning Outcomes & the Academic Library
Danuta Nitecki: Space Assessment as a Venue for Defining the Academic Library
Stephen Town: Value, Impact and the Transcendent Library: Progress and Pressures in Performance Measurement and Evaluation
Joe Matthews: Assessing Organizational Effectiveness: The Role of Frameworks


Proposals have been submitted on the five topics on which the keynote speakers will speak, in addition to the topics below:


2010 Conference Topics
Library assessment in the following areas:
Digital libraries
Information resources and collections
Learning and teaching
Management information
Methods and tools
Organizational issues
Performance measurement and measures
Return on investment (ROI)
Services
Space planning and utilization
Usability
Usage and e-metrics
User needs
Value and impact

To join our ongoing discussion on library assessment issues, visit the library assessment blog or subscribe to arl-assess@arl.org



We look forward to seeing you in Baltimore!


Conference co-chairs:
Steve Hiller, University of Washington Libraries
Martha Kyrillidou, Association of Research Libraries
Jim Self, University of Virginia


2010 Conference Planning Committee:
John Bertot, University of Maryland
Sam Kalb, Queen's University
Liz Mengel, Johns Hopkins University
Megan Oakleaf, Syracuse University
Kathy Perry, VIVA Consortium
Bill Potter, University of Georgia
Roberta Shaffer, Library of Congress
Agnes Tatarka, University of Chicago
Stephen Town, University of York (UK)


E-mail laconf@arl.org for more information.

Library Assessment Conference: Building Effective, Sustainable, Practical Assessment

The Chronicle of Higher Education: How to Help Students Complete a Degree on Time

http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Help-Students-Complete/124839/

October 6, 2010
By Jennifer Gonzalez
Baltimore


Speakers at a conference that opened here on Wednesday discussed policies and practices that states and colleges are using or considering to help more students complete an undergraduate degree or credential in a timely way.


The conference, "Time to Completion: How States and Systems Are Tackling the Time Dilemma," was organized by two nonprofit organizations, Jobs for the Future and the Southern Regional Education Board, whose goals include broadening college access and making higher education more affordable.


At the opening of the two-day event on Wednesday, officials with the Southern Regional Educational Board said they planned to start tracking the length of time it takes students in the organization's 16 member states to earn credits toward graduation.


Officials with Jobs for the Future announced new online tools the group is putting together to help institutions, system officers, and policy makers better understand different aspects of time-to-completion issues.


At one session, "Completion and Time: Research, Policy, and Politics," an economist presented findings from a study of national data showing that over all, students are taking longer to complete a four-year degree.


From the 1970s to the 1990s, the proportion of students who completed a bachelor's degree in four years shrank by 13 percentage points, said Sarah Turner, a professor of economics and education at the University of Virginia and the author of the research.


These days earning a bachelor's degree takes at least five years, Ms. Turner said.


The decline, however, was found mostly at public four-year universities that are not flagship institutions, she said. In fact, at highly selective private institutions, the number of students completing their degrees in four years increased by 8 percent between 1972 and 1992.


"This is very much a story of stratification," Ms. Turner said.


One explanation for the decline at public colleges, Ms. Turner suggested, is that students today often find it hard to finance their educations and have to work during college. Work is crowding students' time to take courses.


She offered a few policy suggestions, such as encouraging colleges to use early-assessment programs that provide students with information on how to complete their degrees on time.


At the same session, Stan Jones, president of Complete College America, a nonprofit group that works with states to increase college access and the number of degree earners, said institutions were not designed for working students, a group he called the "emerging new majority."


Working students tend not to have strong high-school backgrounds and usually attend college part time rather than full time, he said. "Yet we put them into the same system as other students and are disappointed that we don't get good results."


Mr. Jones advocates scheduling classes in a convenient block of time to make it easier for students with work and family commitments to attend and help them graduate faster.


"Time is really the enemy," he said.


Research shows that it now takes part-time students five years to complete a two-year degree, he said. The longer it takes students to complete their degrees, he said, the more likely it is that they will lose the motivation to do so.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: How to Help Students Complete a Degree on Time