Assessing the Ambivalent Liaison

摘要

The drumbeat of assessment has become the cadence of higher education. In libraries, as with any organization, the managerial drive for metrics is reflexive. How do we know if we're winning? How can we prove it to the boss? Nothing is as comforting as an upward-slanting trend line. But librarians have learned that data can be double-edged. For instance, how do we convince our stakeholders that declining circulation and reference numbers don't tell the full story of libraries today? Nevertheless, and no matter the pain they may bring us, we preserve our longitudinal statistics as fervently as anything in special collections. Lately, the liaison label has become a term of art in academic libraries. But measuring liaison activity is a lot more complicated than doing a gate count, especially when it comes to the relationships we nurture with faculty. A liaison librarian's success can't be judged by the number of faculty members who have accepted his invites on Linkedln. Still, we're told by our administrators, by our peers, and by our consciences that we live in a quantify-or-die world, so we find ourselves counting such things anyway.