A librarian with whom the Loon is glancingly acquainted defied the usual expectations regarding silent exit to excoriate a hypothetical library publicly. The librarian did it rather well, carefully keeping the account within the hypothetical so as to keep any particular library from taking public umbrage at the reveal of a despair-inducing state of being. (Private revenge is still hypothetically feasible; the Loon hopes the librarian can escape it.) The Loon will not link to the account, neither because she disbelieves it (indeed, she believes every word) nor because she disapproves of it (she does not), but because she doubts the librarian wants the added exposure.

One thought that occurred to the Loon on reading that librarian’s account is that there are worse ills than halfway-competent assessment. This is a considerable concession from the Loon, who has endured more than one ALA accreditation process and considers it at best a necessary evil. Still, it is worse for no one to care enough about what you do to bother assessing you. It is also worse for no one to know enough about what you do to assess you—and the Loon suspects quite strongly that is exactly what was happening at the abovementioned hypothetical library. If no one at the appropriate level to demand assessment understands what a library can be and do… how do they even know what to look for, or what to ask the library to improve on?

(The opaqueness of library operations to those outside libraries impacts more than assessment. What about leadership hiring? How can faculty and administrators with an impoverished sense of what a library does be prevented from hiring another Billington, or worse, considering the position a polite sinecure for doddering emeriti?)

Another thought that occurred to the Loon is that the librarian’s account was terrifyingly familiar, leading her to wonder how many academic libraries are this poorly managed, this poorly assessed (if assessed at all), this poorly run day-to-day? Merciful heavens, she hopes the number is smaller than she fears, nor does she envy Ithaka in trying to pick at parts of this question.

Now, to a perhaps more useful third thought: who has standing to do anything about this? Not the abovementioned hypothetical library—that seems a lost cause without a major reorganization and purge—or indeed any specific workplace, but the (allow the Loon to be polite and say) widely uneven quality and currency of service across academic libraries generally and research libraries in particular.

LibQUAL? LibQUAL is not going to fix this. In the Loon’s opinion, LibQUAL is far too narrowly-focused on traditionally-constituted public service—reference and instruction with a dollop of collection development—and too voluntary to be useful for ferreting out libraries that need major strategy and operations improvements. So much for LibQUAL.

Academic libraries have no accreditation body, so losing accredited status is not a realistic threat. The only extant analogue—essentially the only way to compare academic-library efficacy across libraries—is various statistics gathered by professional bodies such as ACRL and ARL. Of note: these benchmarks tend to be paywalled (are there even any open-access ones?), allowing derelict libraries to conceal their derelictions both from the public eye and (if they choose, as why would they not?) from their reporting lines. The criteria forming these assessments, while certainly covering more library work than LibQUAL does, are also—let the Loon try to be charitable again—not exactly aligned with the most current thought and praxis in academic libraries.

It so happens that ARL is about to change Executive Directors. This strikes the Loon as an opportunity to improve assessment of academic libraries: by overhauling the highly-suspect ARL Spec Kit process, by removing the paywall currently fencing ARL statistics, and by modernizing statistics-gathering criteria.

If, indeed, statistics-gathering is even the best way to approach this. The Loon suspects that ARL and ACRL gravitate to it because it is nicely objective-looking and relatively easy to implement. (For all the librarians laughing angrily because collecting ARL and ACRL statistics is not at all easy: the Loon did say “relatively.”) The illusion of objectivity is especially important to ARL because it is a voluntary membership organization—turning over too many rocks to expose the maggots beneath could endanger its funding and collective voice. ACRL has a little more leeway because its membership consists of librarians, not libraries.

In the Loon’s ideal world, what these bodies might do instead of or in addition to what they currently do is evaluate academic libraries’ strategic plans and their accomplishment of the goals listed therein. Doing this across the board is likely too resource-intensive as a regular thing, so the Loon might implement it as some sort of seal-of-quality certification program instead. She would then ask the meanest, most incisive and guano-intolerant folk available to conduct those evaluations, along with at least one editor who knows how to cover bad news in verbal honey. The evaluators would also be explicitly tasked with surfacing bad library smells such as Coordinator Syndrome, malinvestment, innovation shields, and the like.

(Yes, the Loon would delightedly participate in such evaluations, being herself the meanest and least guano-tolerant bird she knows. She also has a few names in mind as editors, folk who can cover trenchant critique with all necessary honeyed words.)

Feasible? Perhaps not. Likely? Not at all. But it is the closest the Loon can come to a plan to bring up the bottom tier of academic and research libraries, libraries so poorly run that they should not be permitted to continue with impunity as they are.

• ← In which Finland pantses Elsevier
• Reviving D-Lib →