Trying Something New: Developing New Tools for Educational Resource Assessment

Abstract

In response to university-wide budget cuts, librarians at Georgia Southern University were charged with evaluating the libraries’ collections in preparation to make $300,000 in cuts for 2022. Past initiatives to assess the libraries’ collections have had mixed results and few true successes. The library faculty have struggled to present information about resources in a comprehensive yet easy to understand way that encourages participation by departmental faculty. In light of previous experiences, the library faculty decided to scrap the old way of collecting feedback and instead develop a new process to present data in a clear and precise manner. Throughout this process, the library faculty strove to balance usage data and other metrics with faculty input to make renewal decisions. This presentation showcased tools and templates that Georgia Southern librarians developed during this assessment and highlighted what we learned.