A change of tack at the team Journal Club with a paper on impact assessment
Christine Urquhart, (2018) “Principles and practice in impact assessment for academic libraries”, Information and Learning Science, Vol. 119 Issue: 1/2, pp.121-134, https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-06-2017-0053
It was a different paper in that it was a literature review so was rather more general than some of the articles we have been using.
We found the idea of reciprocal value propositions worth exploring. What happens when these go wrong? There is a danger in both sides being willing but not always able to deliver on what they might wish for. Opportunities for using value co-creation could also be imagined. The idea of student reviews on the value of particular reading list choices could potentially lead to some tricky conversations but would only be providing a formal recognition of discussions that already take place amongst the students.
In many areas the literature points to the importance of strategic alignment with our organisations wider goals. This is not revolutionary but worth trying to do well.
Discussion on the time involved in qualitative data work along with more generally on gathering and managing feedback should help us in future to more carefully frame what we are trying to achieve. GDPR should also drive care over data collection and retention. Just because data might be available does not mean it is practically or ethically desirable to use it.
I found the referenced paper Mengel, E. and Lewis, V. (2012), “Collaborative assessment”, Library Management, Vol. 33 Nos 6/7, pp. 357–364. [Link] on developing a set of measures for a balanced score card particularly interesting given the difficulty of this task and passed it to relevant colleagues.
Overall we found a lot to discuss in the paper but I am not sure it worked as well as some of the research papers we have used previously. Too often we were left with too little information without going on to read the underlying papers.