Measuring Your Impact by Michelle Kraft
Posted on October 21, 2014 by Caroline Marshall | No Comments
Michelle Kraft is a Senior Medical Librarian at Cleveland Clinic Alumni Library and is our Guest Blogger. She recently did a webinar on The Affordable Care Act and the Librarian’s role. Feel free to respond to and comment on Michelle’s blog.
Many librarians track the number of searches they have conducted and sometimes include the number as part of their annual report to administration. Similar to gate counts, circulation statistics, and e-journal usage, these numbers as a whole don’t tell the whole story. These statistics mean little to the non-librarian and really don’t illustrate how our professional expertise is being used. At best it tells administration that people used the library. In this era of shrinking budgets, spaces, and collections, simple usage of the library is not enough when people can also use Google.
We need to find ways to illustrate the impact of our library services, not just the numbers. The numbers are the outline of our story, we have to find ways to fill in the details. Librarians need to collect more information beyond our traditional numbers. The Health Science Information Consortium of Toronto Task Force on Evaluating Library Services has created a guide containing information and tools to help teaching and community hospitals, public health units, and other health care institutions to demonstrate the value of their library services and information knowledge to the supporting institution. The guide can be found at http://guides.hsict.library.utoronto.ca/libraryvaluetoolkit. While the guide is not the only place to find tools and information it is another great resource for medical librarians to illustrate the impact of the library services.
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