Towards a new kind of measurement webinar series
The webinars are free of charge, open to everyone interested in the matter and no previous knowledge of the subject matter is required to participate.
The primary target group of the webinar series is library managers and specialists.
The evaluation and development of a library’s activities requires reliable and diverse information to support management and decision-making.
When the reporting and evaluation of various activities produces a lot of data, it may become challenging to present it concisely to library stakeholders, for example. Time and space are limited and often presenting various indicators in budget or financial negotiation is not feasible. On the other hand, using a single indicator may provide incomplete information because often an individual indicator will only provide information regarding one specific part, related to a greater whole.
From many to one
One solution is to combine various partial indicators into one composite index. Instead of presenting many indicators that belong to the same group, they can be instead summed together to form an overall view of the monitored matter.
Where are we now?
Development of the composite index started in the Library Network Days event in the autumn of 2019, with discussions related to measuring user experience. An index for measuring user experience was developed on the basis of those conversations. The index was published in the autumn of 2021 in the open access journal Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries (QQML).10(3):375-387. The article is available for download as a PDF file. This is likely the first composite index of the library sector.
Join the development work
The development continues, and now we are working on a composite index to describe the performance of libraries’ core processes. That indicator is the topic of the “Core processes” seminar that will be held on 16 December 2021. Further information about the webinar and the registration link (Webinars language is Finnish).
There will be three additional seminars with this theme during the winter:
- Towards a new kind of measurement: Investment 14 January 2022 from 10 am until noon
- Towards a new kind of measurement: Use of services 28 January 2022 from 10 am until noon
- Towards a new kind of measurement: An overview of the library performance indicator 11 February 2022 from 10 am until noon