For immediate release:
July 30, 2008

For more information, contact:
Kristina Justh
Association of Research Libraries
202-296-2296 ext. 136
kristina@arl.org

Library Assessment Career Achievement Awards to Honor Three Pioneers in the Field

Washington DC—The first Library Assessment Career Achievement Awards will be presented at the 2008 Library Assessment Conference to three pioneers in the field: Amos Lakos, Shelley Phipps, and Duane Webster.

The conference—cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the University of Virginia Library, and the University of Washington Libraries—will convene in Seattle, August 4–7, 2008. With more than 375 registrants, this is the largest gathering to date of professionals interested in library assessment. The Career Achievement Awards will be presented at the conference reception in the Olympic Sculpture Park, August 5.

Throughout their careers, Lakos, Phipps, and Webster have made significant and far-reaching contributions to the field of library assessment by providing vision and leadership:

Amos Lakos and Shelley Phipps led the groundbreaking effort to articulate the critical role that organizational culture plays in library performance and assessment. Working together for the past decade—Lakos at the University of Waterloo Library and later UCLA Library and Phipps at the University of Arizona Library—they defined and promoted a “culture of assessment” within libraries, which ultimately expanded the concepts and practices of performance measurement beyond metrics. In their seminal article “Creating a Culture of Assessment: A Catalyst for Organizational Change” (portal: Libraries and the Academy, July 2004), they counseled: “Assessment should become part of the everyday work process. It needs to become part of the decision-making loop in the organization, a normal part of evaluating internal processes…. If we are to create a culture of assessment, an amalgam of committed leadership, repeated articulation of purpose and external focus, time for group learning, and the creation of supportive organizational systems must be deliberately developed. Without this amalgam there is little chance of achieving true culture change, and there is a high probability of becoming irrelevant and unable to communicate the value and the worth of libraries in the information society.” The now-universal acknowledgement that a culture of assessment is integral to effective, sustainable, and practical library assessment is due largely to the contributions of Lakos and Phipps.

Duane Webster played a vital role in making library assessment an integral part of the 21st-century library. As ARL Executive Director, he had the vision to grow the capability of the ARL Statistics & Measurement program. He understood early on that, in an age of accountability, libraries would need to provide data explaining their worth to their parent institutions and to society. In his welcoming remarks at the 2006 Library Assessment Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia, Webster defined assessment “as a means of articulating the value that libraries add to a research institution. By doing so, we demonstrate accountability for investing in the library to provide effective services, to steward the resources entrusted to us, and to chart new library roles in support of…education and research.” He also committed the Association to finding “new measures” of the library’s value and he actively supported the development of a suite of assessment tools.

The 2008 Library Assessment Conference Planning Committee is delighted to recognize these three individuals for their strong commitment to, and success in, library assessment. The research library community is indebted to their essential contributions, and the committee encourages others to follow the lead of these pioneers.

For more information about the Library Assessment Conference, visit http://libraryassessment.org/.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 123 research libraries in North America. 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, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/.