1. Why Collect Data? November 2, 2007 Colleen Cook, Dean of Libraries, Texas A&M University NISO Usage Data ForumDallas, TX

2. Why do I do assessment at Texas A&M?

3. Spending millions wiselyLearn from mistakesQuality managementAccreditationGood citizens of associationsThe right thing to doIn the end….a Culture of Assessment

4. What do I assess? …just about everything I can

5. What are the characteristics of qualitative methods? • The observer/researcher inseparable from the study • Consists of a set of interpretive practices that try to make sense of a cultural context • Data sources: field notes, interviews, conversations, photographs, recordings, and memos to the self • Study a natural setting, attempting to make sense of, or to interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them

6. How do I assess at Texas A&M?

7. Multiple Methodsof Listening to Customers • Transactional surveys* • Mystery shopping • New, declining, and lost-customer surveys • Focus group interviews • Customer advisory panels • Service reviews • Customer complaint, comment, and inquiry capture • Total market surveys* • Employee field reporting • Employee surveys • Service operating data capture Note. A. Parasuraman. The SERVQUAL Model: Its Evolution And Current Status. (2000). Paper presented at ARL Symposium on Measuring Service Quality, Washington, D.C.

22. Total Circulation Note. M. Kyrillidou and M. Young. (2005). ARL Statistics 2003-04. Washington, D.C.: ARL, p.6.

31. Climate for Customer Service

32. Leadership Climate

33. Leadership Climate

34. Climate for Interpersonal Treatment

35. Climate for Interpersonal Treatment

36. The End woof

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39. How did qualitative methods evolve? • Beginnings in Sociology: 1920s and 30s in the “Chicago School;” in Anthropology: in the studies by Boas, Mead, Benedict, Bateson, Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Browne, and Malinowski • Through seven moments (Denzin & Lincoln, 2001) • Today: influences of poststructuralism and postmodernism from textual studies

40. How do qualitative and quantitative methods differ? • Multiple realities, not a single one “out there” to be discovered • Value laden, subjective rather than objective • Seeks closeness with the investigated through interviewing and observation rather than abstract relationships • Inductive rather than deductive • Purposeful sampling chosen for diversity rather than random sampling

41. Thick descriptions rather than crisp and terse background information • Comfort with contradictions, ambiguity • Representations include ethnographic prose, historical narratives, first-person accounts, still photographs, life histories, biographical and graphs, third-person narratives autobiographical materials rather than mathematical models, statistical tables

42. What data are collected by the qualitative researcher(researcher as bricoleur, montage maker)? • Case studies, personal experience, introspection, life story, interview, artifacts, cultural texts and productions, observational, historical, interactional, and visual texts, statistics that describe routine and problematic moments and meanings in individuals’ lives. • Inherently multimethod in focus: triangulation

43. What fields of study are included in qualitative methods? • Ethnomethodology, phenomenology, hermeneutics, feminism, deconstructionism, ethnography, interviews, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, survey research, participant observation

44. Qualitative research: the method of choice

45. LibQUAL+ as a research example

46. Purposeful sampling • Unstructured interviews - “conversations with a purpose” • Peer review • Immediate and continuous analysis informing further exploration • Journal • Member checks • Audit review

47. Establishing Trustworthiness: A Comparisonof Conventional and Naturalistic Inquiry Adapted from Lincoln & Guba, 1985.

48. The Audit Trail Excerpted from Skipper, 1989.

49. Affect of Service “I want to be treated with respect. I want you to be courteous, to look like you know what you are doing and enjoy what you are doing. … Don’t get into personal conversations when I am at the desk.” Faculty member

50. Library as Place “One of the cherished rituals is going up the steps and through the gorgeous doors of the library and heading up to the fifth floor to my study. … I have my books and I have six million volumes downstairs that are readily available to me in an open stack library.” Faculty member