Literature Review on Library Assessment

Jon R. Hufford, “A Review of the Literature on Assessment in Academic and Research Libraries, 2005 to August 2011,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 13:1 (2013): 5-35.

One of my favorite topics is library assessment, so I was pleased to see this article in a recent portal issue. While the article is very thorough and interesting, I’ll say right off the bat that I was disappointed that the author excluded the assessment of acquisitions and technical services from his review.

This is, however, a prodigious review of the literature of assessment as it relates to libraries. Hufford reviews both monographic and journal literature, including some important works published before 2005. He describes the greater emphasis placed on assessment of higher education in recent years, much of it generated by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education’s 2006 report A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of United States Higher Education. There have been many efforts by a number of organizations, such as the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and others to develop and encourage ways in which libraries could conduct assessment of their activities, services, and physical spaces.

I would like to have seen technical services activities represented in this literature review, but that may have made the project too big or the resulting paper too long. Because assessment is such a hot topic in the area of technical services, it would make a great project for someone!