For this assignment, create a brief needs assessment study that uses a survey or questionnaire as its methodology. The needs assessment study must be performed on a small sample (at least ONE) of users of the library that you have chosen to study. The sample population does not have to be actual users. A discussion forum has been created for students to share surveys so students can participate in each other’s surveys. When designing your survey or questionnaire, keep in mind that you MUST be able to chart/graph the results.
The narrative portion should be no more than 15 pages in length.
Please look at the list of actual Needs Assessment reports posted in the Lesson 2 module to get ideas. These should give you a better idea of how a final report should look. Yours will be much simpler than these. An outline will be provided for you to follow. This assessment is more about the process of creating and administering a needs assessment than it is about getting statistically significant data. For this assignment, I will look at the thought put into the process.
Lesson 2: Needs Assessment Outline
(Please include a cover page and don’t forget to double space!)
***If students do not use the following outline, the assignment will be returned to the student for correction.***
Introduction
Previous Library Assessments
Begin this section by discussing how needs assessments are typically approached in your library. Assessments can be informal or formal and may include the use of suggestion boxes, feedback forms on the web, circulation statistics, evaluation forms after programs, reference question logs, or even something as simple as regular conversations with patrons. You must demonstrate that you have been to the library’s website.
Previous assessments can be used to help identify and fine-tune the focus and objective of your assessment. If the library has recently conducted a formal assessment, you can discuss the results here and mention how they will inform your assessment. (Do NOT repeat something that has already been done! This assessment is something that you are going to create and administer and it should be unique.)
Special Permissions & Stakeholders
You need to identify potential stakeholders that may be involved in this assessment or may be impacted by this assessment. This can include the library staff, the library director, the library board, the city council, the dean of libraries, local business members, or anybody else that may somehow be involved in the creation, completion, or distribution of said needs assessment. If you are going to look at the services for a specific population, then you can identify that specific population and identify places that may be targeted. For example, if the assessment is going to focus on the elderly populations, then senior activities and senior centers may be identified.
Interacting with library patrons for reasons other than normal library business often requires special permissions. In public libraries, one may need to get special permissions from the library director, library board, or other official entity. If conducting a survey or other user-centered method, the survey or other communications often require special review and special permissions. Institutions do not want random people asking their users random questions. There are issues of privacy that must be considered and addressed whether you are using a patron-centered method or a document-centered method. Many academic institutions do not allow surveys, focus groups, or other user-centered methods without a review from special committees. You need to discuss any special permissions that are needed when interacting with library patrons for the purpose of this needs assessment.
Getting Focused
Focus
When conducting a needs assessment, you need to have a focus. Is the focus going to be on a particular collection? Is it going to be on a particular service? Is it going to be on patron satisfaction? What is the focus of this assessment? Not only do you need to discuss the focus, but you also need to explain why this focus is important. Why does the library need to know if patrons are satisfied? Why does the library need to know if a particular program is meeting the needs of patrons?
Example 1: The community profile of ABC Library is undergoing change and growth. An assisted living facility opened within walking distance of the library. The library wants to identify whether or not it has collections and services that will meet the needs of this growing population. As a result, ABC library plans to conduct a needs assessment that is focused on collections and services for elderly populations.
Example 2: Due to Covid 19, ABC Library has had to close its doors to the public and move all of its services online. The library serves a large population that does not have access to the Internet at home and recognizes that many people are cut off from library services. The library is conducting a needs assessment to identify how it can provide services to those without Internet at home.
Example 3: Due to Covid 19, all library programming has had to move online. The library wants to assess whether or not the online programming is meeting the needs of the community.
Objective
You need to clearly state the objective for your needs assessment.
This is where you will need to clearly state the reason for this study. Look at the actual needs assessment reports that were provided earlier in the lesson to get an idea of how objectives are stated as part of a needs assessment study. When you state the reason, it should clearly answer the question, “Why are you conducting this study?”
(Note: Because my professor said so is NOT a valid reason. If that is given as a reason, you will receive an automatic zero on this assignment.)
Example: ABC Library is conducting this needs assessment study to determine whether or not it has sufficient collections and services to meet the needs of elderly patrons.
When stating an objective, it usually involves an action verb. Notice the objective given in the sample is “to determine”. It is usually one sentence. There is no need to go into further detail with the objective.
Sample objective statements:
ABC Library is collecting circulation data for the historical fiction collection to analyze circulation trends.
ABC library is surveying parents after storytime to determine whether or not they are satisfied with the children’s programming provided.
ABC library is surveying patrons to determine whether or not they use ebooks.
ABC library is conducting a needs assessment to identify weaknesses in the library’s collections.
ABC library is collecting data to justify increasing the budget for children’s materials.
ABC library is conducting a phone survey to identify services needed by patrons without Internet access.
ABC library is conducting an online survey to identify users’ satisfaction with online programming.
Methods and Instruments
Methodology
Clearly state that a survey will be used to meet the stated objectives of the study. Discuss how a survey will achieve the stated objective. Address why a survey is the best method for this assessment. (Because my teacher said so is NOT valid and will result in a failing grade on the assignment.) The purpose of this assignment is to get students to think about the process of creating and administering a needs assessment. Think about the reasons why a survey would be the best method. Be sure to mention current events and that one must rely on methods that allow social distancing and take into account that usage statistics will likely be skewed due to libraries being closed or operating under altered conditions. With that in mind, the survey will need to be administered online, via phone, or other methods that will allow social distancing.
Explanation of Assessment Instrument
When creating questions for your survey, you need to ask “Can the results be graphed?” In order for the study to be considered formal, it needs to be well planned out and the results must be able to be charted and/or graphed. If you cannot find a way to codify your results, then it is not considered a formal study. Think about how easy or difficult it would be to implement your study on hundreds or thousands of participants.
Discuss the process of creating the assessment instrument being used. Each question should have a clear rationale. If you cannot explain the rationale for each specific question, then you need to change the question or throw it out. When creating questions, think about how each question will help the researchers meet the objective of the assessment. If a question does not do anything to help meet the objective, then don’t use it. Having an objective in mind when creating a needs assessment will help the researcher stay focused. You need to include a blank copy of the assessment instrument in the appendix.
Refer your reader to the appendix to see a copy of the blank instrument. (For example, “Please see Appendix A for a blank copy of the survey.”)
Planning
Creating a Plan –Theory
In this section, you need to detail how you would go about implementing your assessment on a large scale. You were asked to identify stakeholders and special permissions earlier in the process. Now you can discuss how you would go about getting special permissions and identifying stakeholders. In the example mentioned earlier, part of the plan might be to contact the assisted living facility to see if a librarian can bring over some surveys and talk to residents. The researcher might need to get special permission from the library board, the library director, and the director of the facility. The plan might be to get the special permissions, distribute the survey over a 3 month period, collect and analyze the data, and then create a final report with recommendations. This section is purely hypothetical and should be based on what you have read in your textbook and in the lesson. It should also be based on actual procedures that are in place in the library or information center being studied.
Actual Implementation –Reality
You are required to conduct an actual assessment with at least one (preferably more) person. I have created a discussion forum for students to post surveys to gather data. In this section, you need to address what you actually did to get some kind of results for your needs assessment. The amount of time that you have been given to complete this assignment is not enough to conduct a large-scale assessment. It doesn’t matter if the participants are familiar with your library. The participants can be classmates, family members, or yourself. The goal is to get some kind of data to put into a chart or graph. Ideally, the data would come from actual library patrons.
Due to time constraints and access issues, you can get creative with the actual implementation portion. In this section, it is okay to say things like:
“The researcher sent a survey to parents to gather data.”
“The researcher posted a link to the survey on Facebook and the class discussion forum.”
The purpose of these two sections is to give you an idea of how much work is involved in creating and administering a needs assessment and how difficult it can be to get participation. This should help you to understand why many libraries rely on informal assessment methodologies. This section should illuminate how theory and practice do not always align due to constraints such as time and resources.
Results and Recommendations
In this section, discuss the results that you received. The results will not apply to your library since you may not be giving the survey to actual library users. State how the survey was administered and how many people responded. If posting the survey or a link to the survey in the discussion forum, clearly state that and then state how many results were received and give a narrative overview of the results. Explain why these results are not relevant to your library and ways that this assessment could be changed. Did the survey questions meet the stated objective?
The purpose of this section is for students to gain firsthand experience gathering and reporting data for a needs assessment. You will need to provide a summary of the results in narrative form as well as graphic form. The narrative description of your results should go here.
The actual charts and graphs belong in the appendix. Refer your reader to the appendix for the charts and graphs.
Lessons Learned
In this section, discuss anything that was learned during this process. This is where students can discuss frustrations and/or obstacles that arose while creating and administering the needs assessment. Since the focus of this assignment is the process of creating and administering a needs assessment, this section will be looked at more thoroughly than others and should address and explain any deficiencies in previous sections. For example, if you created a survey and sent it out to your friends only to have them come back and ask lots of questions because your questions were confusing, feel free to note that here. If you had trouble finding a focus, you can mention that here.
Be sure to address the following questions in this section:
What was the most difficult part of creating and administering this needs assessment?
Did you have any problems creating or administering the needs assessment?
Were there any surprises during this process?
Can you think of anything that would make this process easier?
I am looking for evidence that you put a lot of thought into this!
Works Cited/Bibliography
This is not figured in the point values listed in the outline. It is common for there to not be works cited for this assignment. If you use any of the templates or resources listed in the lesson, please be sure to cite the information correctly. If I see students using outside sources without proper citations, points will be deducted! Lack of proper documentation will result in a lowering of the grade!
Appendices
Appendix A. Assessment Instrument
You need to include a blank copy of the instrument that you used to conduct your assessment. If you are using an online survey tool, you can take screenshots of how the survey looks online. Please include a link as well as a copy of the survey itself.
Appendix B. Results
You can create your charts and graphs using Excel or you can use any of the free chart-making tools available on the internet. In some cases, if you use a tool like Survey Monkey, it will create charts/graphs for you. A table of the tabulated data is also acceptable. Since this is about the process, don’t get hung up on the math. The charts and graphs should be put in the Appendix. This is where you will include the charts and/or graphs. Your results must be codified.
