Fifteen articles about a range of assessment activities in academic libraries are featured in the latest issue of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP vol. 8, no. 2). An editorial by Martha Kyrillidou and Damon Jaggars summarizes the themes of these papers selected from the 2010 Library Assessment Conference proceedings.
The third biennial Library Assessment Conference was hosted by ARL, University of Washington Libraries, and University of Virginia Library in Baltimore, Maryland, in October 2010. The event attracted more than 450 participants and featured almost 70 peer-reviewed papers and keynote presentations. The Library Assessment Conference series builds upon ARL’s rich history of describing research libraries with the ARL Statistics collection and, more recently, the qualitative ARL Profiles. The conference advances the cause of data-driven decision making by engaging the academic and research library community in active discussion of strategic issues that demonstrate the value of the library.
The next Library Assessment Conference will be hosted by ARL and University of Washington Libraries August 4–6, 2014, in Seattle. Visit the Library Assessment Conference website for information about the conference.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.
