Liaison Program Assessment

Introduction

The survey indicates that faculty are generally well satisfied with the Liaison Program, but less than half responded that it is important to them. This has led us to begin an assessment of the Program, starting with how we communicate with faculty, to be followed by a review of the liaison roles and responsibilities.

Communication

To assess our communications, we needed more detail than MISO could provide. We spoke with our various faculty advisory groups, citing the MISO findings, and learned that faculty often don’t know the extent of the services liaisons supply. We also learned that faculty not only want to be told about new services but also want to be reminded of services they might have missed (for example, one professor suggested we keep spreading the word about Lynda.com tutorials, which we have had for over a year).

Because faculty want to learn not only about new services, but also want to be reminded of existing services they might have missed or forgotten about, we will experimenting with new ways to “spread the word” about some of the especially useful resources (new and otherwise) available to the College community.  One example is a series of “Wish I’d Known That!” post cards.  The 1st set will feature Lynda.com tutorials, along with 4 other useful but under-utilized services.

Roles and Responsibilities

To begin assessing our roles and responsibilities, we will be using the MISO data to compile a list of colleges whose liaison programs received highly positive faculty/student/staff satisfaction ratings. We expect to be contacting these peers in August and, hopefully, initiate some valuable discussions with them about their liaison programs’ structures and best practices.

Continual Feedback

We regularly invite faculty to meet with us for open-ended “How is LIS doing?” conversations, using, when necessary, MISO results as “prompts” to begin the conversations.  As an example, the survey indicated that many faculty don’t back up their work even though we offer backups through network storage. We also learned that faculty don’t feel confident regarding issues of copyright and fair use. These have both provided a springboard for wide-ranging conversations, and also remind our constituents of the broad range of resources and services LIS can provide.