February and March are the months in which faculty and staff performance reviews are completed. This is the first year that library faculty performance reviews will have ratings from 1-5 (low to high). Preliminary indications are that library faculty overall performed very well in their various responsibilities and had high achievements in publications and presentations regionally, nationally and internationally. This is an important component toward achieving ARL membership. Staff evaluations will not be completed until March.

February 1 and 2 the Deans held their annual retreat, this time at Butler State Park. Under discussion were faculty recruitment issues, promotion and tenure criteria, technology infrastructure for the campus, support services and fund raising. It was a productive session for sharing ideas, problems, practices and common goals. It also helped the Deans learn from each other and work more closely together for the good of the University.

From February 16-18 I attended the second ARL/OCLC (Association of Research Libraries) Strategic Issues Forum, held in Tempe, Arizona. The theme was “Toward Rethinking Academic Library Performance in the Digital Age.” More than 100 representatives from ARL and selected special academic libraries attended. The meeting began with presentations from Carla Stoffle, Dean of Libraries at the University of Arizona, about the ARL/OCLC Strategic Issues Forum held in 1998 in Keystone, Colorado, which resulted in the Keystone Principles for Libraries:

• Access to information as a public good
• Need for bias-free systems and for libraries to create these new systems
• Affirmation of the idea of the library as a nexus for learning and sharing of knowledge.

Carla then presented the team organization model at the University of Arizona, explaining how the model developed and how its major goal is to serve library users in the most effective and efficient manner. Shelley Phipps from the University of Arizona libraries presented information on the current status of their organizational performance in terms of measurable user outcomes. The remainder of the meeting addressed the use of scorecards for planning and measuring outcomes in university and research library settings, as well as rethinking academic library performance from the view of accreditation.

Suggested library competencies to be measured are:

• Accessing, storing, manipulating, transforming, managing and integrating information
• Consulting and instructing in the information environment
• Measuring what matters to the institution
• Measuring quality of online digital reference services
• Best practices to save and reallocate resources
• Rethinking service in terms of user needs and learning outcomes
• Planning library additions in terms of the new information environment.

The meeting was most illuminating in terms of what other research libraries are doing related to evaluation and measurement. I left the conference realizing that the University Libraries are certainly on top of these issues and perhaps somewhat ahead of these processes.

--Hannelore Rader, University Librarian