The Library Quarterly , Vol. 81, No. 1 (January 2011)

Washington DC— Library Quarterly , a well-known scholarly journal in the field, presents the essays written by the five keynote speakers from the 2010 Library Assessment Conference, held in Baltimore on October 25-27, 2010. These papers emphasize the strategic approaches to issues of service quality, library as space, learning outcomes, performance measures and scorecards, and articulation of value and impact and are written by leaders in the growing field of library assessment and performance measurement:

Fred Heath – Library Assessment: The Way We Have Grown
Danuta A. Nitecki – Space Assessment as a Venue for Defining the Academic Library
Megan Oakleaf – Are They Learning? Are We? Learning Outcomes and the Academic Library
Joseph R. Matthews – Assessing Organizational Effectiveness: The Role of Performance Measures
J. Stephen Town – Value, Impact, and the Transcendent Library: Progress and Pressures in Performance Measurement and Evaluation

This special issue is guest edited by the conference co-chairs: Martha Kyrillidou, Senior Director for Service Quality Programs at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL); Steve Hiller, Director of Planning and Assessment at the University of Washington Libraries; and Jim Self, Director of Management Information Services at the University of Virginia Library. The guest editors introduce the keynote essays, providing a touch of library assessment history. John Carlo Bertot, editor of Library Quarterly , bookends the issue with a look at what the near future may hold for library assessment.

The 2010 conference, the third in its series, marked an opportunity for the Association of Research Libraries to reflect on the service quality assessment journey it embarked upon ten years ago. This special issue of Library Quarterly is simultaneously a retrospective, a current state of library assessment across a range of service areas, and a look toward the future of library evaluation.

Complementing the five keynote essays are 64 contributed papers and 80 posters that demonstrate the wide range of assessment activities taking place in our libraries. The presentations of the papers and posters are available on the conference Web site: http://libraryassessment.org/ and the proceedings are forthcoming. We look forward to seeing everyone and learning from their unique experiences at the 2012 Library Assessment Conference in Charlottesville, VA.

For more on Library Quarterly , visit: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/lq/home.html .

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 126 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at http://www.arl.org/ .

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