Trying Something New: Developing New Tools for Educational Resources Assessment

While the Georgia Southern University Libraries have undertaken numerous resource assessment projects over the years, past initiatives have had mixed results and few true successes. Librarians have a tendency to overload departmental faculty with information about library resources when reaching out to stakeholders for their input regarding the merit of those resources. On the other hand, communication going in the opposite direction from departmental faculty to library faculty is often underwhelming as faculty do not always respond to requests for feedback until after their favorite library resource has already been canceled. Library faculty have consistently struggled to present information about library resources in a comprehensive yet easy to understand manner that encourages departmental faculty participation.
In response to yet another round of impending budget cuts, the Georgia Southern University Libraries had to make some cuts to the library collection for 2022. However, in light of previous experience, library faculty decided to scrap the old way of collecting feedback and to instead develop a new process to present data to faculty in a clear, easy to understand format. Librarians created new methods to compile the data needed to determine which resources should be included in the assessment, new templates to communicate the resource data compiled with faculty outside of the library, and a new method of compiling and analyzing feedback to make final decisions about renewals. Throughout this process, library faculty strove to balance usage data and other metrics with faculty input to make decisions that help meet financial goals while balancing the scholarly needs of faculty and students.
This presentation will showcase the new tools and templates GS librarians developed during this assessment and highlight what we learned during the process.