Working with What We've Got: Small-Scale Assessment of Library Impact on Student Success

Working with What We've Got: Small-Scale Assessment of Library Impact on Student Success

Harford Community College Library has been working on illustrating the impact the Library has on student success. Working in a community college library, librarians often have to wear many hats, helping patrons with everything from printing and finding their way around campus to troubleshooting devices and navigating their courses in the LMS, in addition to our primary duties of helping students with research, teaching information literacy sessions, creating online guides and tutorials, maintaining our print collection, participating in outreach activities, and much more. It can often be challenging to find time to synthesize the various data and statistics we collect, and to analyze and reflect on how all of the things we do have an impact on student success. In this presentation, we will describe how we as a community college library have prioritized assessment of library impact on student success, including by redesigning a librarian position, adding targeted questions related to student success in library surveys, collaborating with faculty to incorporate students’ use of the Library in their own assessments, connecting library events to student learning, and working with our institutional research office to connect library usage data to student success metrics such as GPA and retention.