108 Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses We are in transition this year with regard to assessing our activities. A new Middle States requirement for all administrative units on campus (including the library) to conduct an administrative assessment as part of accreditation requirements every five years has caused us to be more methodical about how we assess all of our activities, including outreach. We will be collecting much more data going forward as part of this requirement. We believe we have a fairly robust outreach program here, supported by a dedicated department, a cross-functional strategic steering team for outreach & communication, and individual outreach by librarian subject liaisons. We have a specific librarian with the title of community and outreach librarian, which includes outreach and promotion of library services and resources. She is charged with leading outreach planning and activities. She is also a member of our user experience team, which works on marketing and the libraries’ online presence. For the purpose of this survey, we defined this particular librarian as the library event planner and the librarian responsible for communication and marketing. (She is on sabbatical, so was not able to provide input for this survey. Members of the UX team and our instruction coordinator participated in its completion.) We’ve just gone through a re-organization and advocated at the early stages for some people to have outreach in their job descriptions (as everything was voluntary except for student engagement and outreach librarian). This has happened. We feel that outreach is being recognized as valuable work. While our assessment for these activities is not as robust as it could be, we have developed a more robust, intentional program through the work of our outreach librarian for special collections, our student engagement librarian, and our outreach and marketing coordinator. We are in the process of formally defining the goals for our outreach program. With such a disparate organization (we have 21 library branches, including locations in Panama and New York) and serving so many different audiences (the general public, Smithsonian researchers, K-12) and so many levels of outreach, it’s hard to answer some of these questions on the whole. Though we have an outreach librarian to coordinate some of the bigger categories like social media and lectures, many different staff members may be involved in outreach on the branch level with different goals for their branch.
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