Fred Heath, Jim Self,
Joan Stein (left to right)
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the University of Washington Libraries, and the Library Assessment Conference Planning Committee have selected the recipients of the 2014 Library Assessment Career Achievement Awards. These awards recognize individuals with substantial contributions to effective, sustainable, and practical library assessment as evidenced through presentations, publications, methods, service, advocacy, and other work. The 2014 awardees are Brinley Franklin, Fred Heath, Jim Self, and Joan Stein.
Brinley Franklin served as vice provost for university libraries at the University of Connecticut from 2005 to 2013 and as library director from 1999 to 2005. Throughout his career, he has advanced library assessment nationally and internationally. His leadership roles have included chair of the ARL Statistics and Assessment Committee and service on the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Academic Library Committee and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Statistics Advisory Committee. Brinley served as president of ARL in 2009–2010. He has conducted considerable research in the field of library administration and assessment, publishing more than 30 articles and book chapters, and he has strongly supported international efforts, conferences, and meetings in this field, acting as a role model, mentor, and thought leader. As co-developer of MINES for Libraries®, Brinley has brought a valid and reliable method for assessing electronic-resource usage to more than 50 North American libraries.
Fred Heath will retire in August 2014 as vice provost and director of the University of Texas Libraries, a position he has held since 2003. His career has been characterized by a search for understanding library service from the user perspective. While dean of libraries at Texas A&M University, Fred was the principal driver behind developing a pilot implementation of the SERVQUAL service quality model in the academic and research library community. That successful pilot quickly grew into the development of the LibQUAL+ program, funded through a multi-year grant to ARL from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. LibQUAL+ remains the only total-market survey in the academic library community allowing benchmarking against peer institutions over time. Through 2013, there have been 2,663 institutional surveys implemented across 1,295 institutions in over 29 countries, 21 language translations, and over 1.8 million respondents. Fred has published extensively on library service quality assessment and LibQUAL+, has served on the editorial boards of several library journals, and has held leadership roles with the Center for Research Libraries, Coalition for Networked Information, Digital Library Federation, and ARL, including a term as ARL president in 2003–2004.
Jim Self is also due to retire in August 2014, as director of library assessment at the University of Virginia (UVa) Library. He previously served as director of the Clemons Library at UVa and as head of the Undergraduate Library at Indiana University. Jim was instrumental in creating and building the assessment program at the UVa Library in the 1990s, one of the earliest library assessment programs in the country. He introduced the balanced scorecard at UVa in 2001, pioneering its development as a library assessment tool that reflects an organization’s goals and strategies; uses specific, measurable goals; and integrates diverse data into a single system. Through his work as a consultant and ARL visiting program officer, Jim has helped more than 40 academic libraries develop effective, sustainable, and practical assessment programs that demonstrate the libraries’ contributions to teaching, learning, and research. However, it is his role as co-founder and co-chair of the Library Assessment Conference that has made him the face of library assessment for many people throughout the world.
Joan Stein now holds the position of principal librarian for assessment, marketing, and training, after 29 years as head of access services at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Throughout her career, Joan has been guided by understanding user needs and developing services—based on data and evidence—that provide real value to users. She has been among the earliest adopters of new methods to assess service quality. She has served on the editorial board of Performance Measurement and Metrics since 1998 and has chaired the American Library Association’s Library Research Round Table. Joan’s most significant contribution to library assessment has been her active participation in the Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services, as a presenter, keynote speaker, and member of the editorial board. Her role as a host in helping to bring the Fourth Northumbria Conference to the United States in 2001 was a catalyst for developing the library assessment community in North America. Joan will retire from CMU in October 2014.
The Library Assessment Career Achievement Awards are offered in conjunction with the biennial Library Assessment Conference organized by the Association of Research Libraries and the University of Washington. The awards will be presented on Tuesday, August 5, 2014, prior to the conference reception in Seattle. Information about awardees from earlier years can be found on the conference website.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s 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 https://www.arl.org/.
