Needs Assessment

in the Media Center

LIB 610 Collection Management Summer 2009

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Needs assessment?What is needs assessment?

Needs assessment is about identifying the needs of the local population, so that services can be planned and delivered to meet those needs. Local needs assessment will help to establish the extent and nature of the drug problem in an area, describe the socio-demographic profile of users and examine the common referral routes. This will help build up a picture of the needs of the population. Needs assessment is an integral part of other strategic initiatives, such as reducing waiting times.

• Effective Interventions Unit Guide to Needs Assessment Summary

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A library-related definitionassessment

Quantitative and qualitative measurement of the degree to which a library’s collections, services, and programs meet the needs of its users, usually undertaken with the aim of improving performance. Assessment is accomplished by various methods, including direct observation, analysis of feedback obtained through interviews, user surveys, testing, etc. When conducted by the library, rather than an outside agency, the process is known as self-assessment. See also: Measurement, Assessment, and Evaluation Section; outcomes assessment; and quality of service.

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Needs Assessment in LMC?

What is needs assessment?

Needs assessment is the process of collecting and analyzing information that can then be used in decision making. It’s likely that you’ll want to conduct needs assessments in many areas of your program.

You can conduct a formal or informal needs assessment.• Library Media Program: Program Analysis

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Informal assessmentWhat’s an informal needs assessment?

Library media specialists are constantly doing simple needs assessment when they identify a problem, establish a goal, and develop a solution to fill in the gap. • What’s the situation? - Where are you now? What does

the situation (i.e., event, collection, staffing) look like? • Where do I want to be? - Where do you want to be (i.e.,

successful event, quality collection, productive staff)? • What’s the solution to fill the gap? - Where are the gaps

and the priorities? Is there a difference between where you are and where you’d like to be?

– Library Media Program: Program Analysis

Consider the age of the collection!

Age of materials important In a small school library or a small public

library, materials are usually evaluated on their current usefulness and their level of circulation.  The mission of such libraries is typically to provide up-to-date, popular materials.  Except for a few classics, books that no longer reflect up-to-date facts or the current thinking about a subject do not fit into the mission of such a library.  In most cases, books that have not circulated in five years also may not fit the mission.• Collection Assessment and the Collection Development Policy

Alternative Basic Library Education (ABLE) Course 2: Collection Assessment

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Remembering the LMC context

Curriculum

Clients

Community

Carol L. Tilley, Syllabus for L595 Collection Analysis for School Library Media Specialists

(Web-Based Workshop)

From Beyond Proficiency Program Evaluation Rubric

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Collection Development Concerns

Criteria for concerns: Content

Curricular correlation

Community

Cost and container• Alice Yucht, Collection Development Concerns

republished from Teacher-Librarian, December 2000 in Alice in InfoLand

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Curricular Concerns

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Curriculum and Collection

Curricular Correlation:  Does this material complement, enrich, and extend

the educational goals, philosophies, and curriculum of the school and the district?   Do you know what new topics are being covered in your classrooms, and do you have materials to support those topics?  Are you communicating with your teachers about current and future resource requirements? Don’t wait for the teachers to tell you what they will need: sometimes they haven’t had time to think that far ahead.  • Alice Yucht, Collection Development Concerns

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Curriculum mapping

curriculum mapping

Comparing the quality and quantity of materials in a school library’s collection with the content of the school’s curriculum at all grade levels to reveal strengths and weaknesses, facilitate collection development, and identify areas that need weeding.

Advice on curriculum mapping

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Step one in collection development

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A vital collection/curriculum link

No Child Left Behind

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Beth Yoke, Executive Director, YALSA

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Karen R. Lowe Library/Media

Consultant

What is the shelf list?

shelflist A nonpublic catalog of a library collection

containing a single bibliographic record for each item, filed in the order in which the items are arranged on the shelf (usually by call number), used for inventory because it contains the most current information on copy and volume holdings. Card shelflists are being phased out by libraries that have converted their catalogs to machine-readable records.

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What Is Resource Alignment? There are six major steps in the resource alignment process:1. assessing library media center resources;2. discarding materials no longer useful or supportive of

the curriculum;3. identifying curriculum gaps in the remaining resources;4. preparing a prioritized list of needed curriculum

resources; 5. writing a three- to five-year resource development plan

to address present and projected resource needs; 6. defining a budgetary process to acquire the needed

resources. Karen R. Lowe, Resource Alignment: Providing

Curriculum Support in the School Library Media Center (no longer available on the web)

Sources for analysis?

Use the library software Most library software programs have built-in

collection tools that measure the number of books and average age of the collection by Dewey classification. School libraries can also export collection records to TitleWise, a free collection analysis service provided by Follett Library Products and Services.• Kirsten L. Marie, “

From theory to practice: a new teacher-librarian tackles 1ibrary assessment.” Teacher Librarian 33, no. 2 (2005).

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Titlewise?TitleWise®

TitleWise takes the guesswork out of collection development. It is the quickest, easiest, and most comprehensive online collection analysis tool available! This service is available at no charge to all Follett Library Resources customers. Within minutes of sending us your data, you’ll receive reports detailing the make-up of your collection (paying special attention to those age-sensitive Dewey ranges), comparing your collection to other grade-appropriate recommended school library collections, and detailing incomplete records.• TITLEWAVE, TitleWise, TitleCheck & QuizCheck

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Paper Sculptures

Using the Titlewise toolCollection Mapping

. . . select your automation system under “Circulation System Export Instructions.” You are instructed to pull up all your holdings (or the section you want analyzed), select “all,” name your file, and save to a disk or even the desktop (which is probably the easiest way to do it). Once that step is complete, you export the file you saved.

An eighteen-page analysis is returned in minutes. The cover sheet declares it to be a Title Wise Collection Analysis with your school’s name printed on it.

The complete analysis is ideal to share with your administration along with a suggested plan for how to bring the collection up to date.• From School Librarian’s Workshop June 2004.

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Sample Curriculum Mapping Template

Curriculum-Collection Map Template Word (296 Kb) Library media specialists are encouraged to use

this form to create a curriculum map, which will provide a snapshot of the implemented curriculum in their school, and a collection map which will provide a snapshot of how the current library resource collection can support the school 's curriculum. LMS Word format (155 Kb) 

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Clients

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Step 2 in collection development

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Alice Yucht on Client Needs

Content:  Is this material appropriate for the age, emotional

development, ability levels, learning styles, and social development of the students in *this* school, at *this* time?   Keep in mind that we are being paid to provide relevant resources, not administer an archive.  One particular middle school’s book collection had some glaring gaps as well as aging artifacts – the  building had been a Junior/Senior (gr. 7-12) high for many years; . . . and nothing had ever been weeded! 

Have you carefully checked the age-appropriateness and relevancy of those URL’s, AND posted a disclaimer on your website, just in case? • Collection Development Concerns

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Considering student needs and interests

Makes sense Including children’s preferences in the building of school

library collections makes sense because children are the actual consumers of the resources.

An important part of becoming an effective reader is to be able to select reading materials with relative ease and facility. Regrettably, what children prefer to read is often not available in schools.

Thus, every effort should be made to purchase materials that children will actually read and enjoy.• Joseph Sanacore, Teacher-librarians, Teachers, and Children as

Cobuilders of School Library Collections. Teacher Librarian 33, 5 (June 2006).

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How do you discover student interests/needs?

Ask them! Informally:

• Learners . . . benefit from meeting with their teacher or teacher-librarian to talk about books they are currently reading or just finished reading. These conferences help educators gain insights about children’s decoding and meaning-making strategies through such activities as conducting running records, encouraging retellings, and motivating personal responses. These immediate connections to children’s self-selected materials are important venues for determining children's reading interests.

– Joseph Sanacore, Teacher-librarians, Teachers, and Children as Cobuilders of School Library Collections.

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Asking formally

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Evidence of student interests/needs

Circulation records Through circulation analysis, I could identify

strengths and weaknesses from patterns of use, with the goal of making the collection more relevant and responsive to the needs of its users. I could also identify little-used items that could be discarded completely.•

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Collecting controversial subjects

Example: Homosexuality . . . according to the 2003 National School Climate

Survey, a biannual study by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (see “Out and lgnored,” pp. 46-50) . . . nearly 50 percent of the high school students surveyed say they have no access to gay-related resources in their media centers.•

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Considering teacher needsCreating a professional collection

The professional collection in a school library should be carefully selected to meet the demands of the teachers, administrators, counselors and teacher-librarians who are to use them. The hallmark of an outstanding professional collection in library resource centers is heavy usage of the resources by faculty members (Wilson, 2000).

In order to have an outstanding professional collection, the teacher-librarian must identify the needs of the instructional curriculum and identify the teachers’ characteristics, preferred teaching methods, instructional needs and information needs (Van Orden, 1995).

• Jordan, J. The Professional Collection: The Teachers’ Professional Collection Materials: Stimulating Use. Teacher Librarian [serial online]. December 2001;29(2):18.

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The Community

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But what is the (a) community?

What is a Community? In the physical world, communities are

typically groups of people (a town, for instance) held together by some common identity or interest.

Coming from two Latin words meaning “with gifts,” the term community suggests a general sense of altruism, reciprocity, and beneficence that comes from working together. Communities help generate a shared language, rituals and customers, and collective memory of those that join the group.

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Community includes parents

Parents can also be clients

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Considering community valuesReflecting community values or diversity?

The librarian’s value judgments must be kept secondary to what the community of patrons wants and demands. It is the community’s values which are primary. • Apponequet Regional High School Library.

Collection Development and Mission Statements.

If education is to be founded on the principle of exposure to diverse ideas, then it is almost mandatory that exposure to controversial material is possible. However, if schools should be a place for transmitting community values, then censorship becomes almost compulsory. Many parents choose schools precisely for the latter purpose.• Amanda Credaro©2001. Double Jeopardy:

Censorship in School Libraries

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A Community Service

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Collection Development Humor From Warrior Librarian

Original Library Humour: In Dewey (Shelf) Order 025.2 Collection Development

• Fictional Titles: Books Not Yet Written New Book Titles (Covers) Math For the Masses: Fiction and Non-fiction More New Books for Realistic Libraries Serials with Popular Appeal Thin Books for Busy Librarians

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A Vital Latin Phrase for collection development

In response to patron evaluation of a book: “This book sucks” Your response: “Nullus est liber tam malus ut non

aliqua parte prosit.”• Translation: “There is no book so bad that it is

not profitable in part.” (Pliny the Younger).– Biblia’s Warrior Librarian, “

Vital Latin Phrases for Librarians.”

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