Practitioner Perspectives on the Values and Ethics of Library Assessment

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Project Summary This project asks: “How can library assessment be practiced ethically?” It includes data from a survey and a set of individual interviews. The survey targeted library assessment practitioners across North America, asking respondents to share the values that are relevant for their work. The survey data were analyzed via grounded theory to produce a set of codes that describe the values and practices of ethical library assessment. These codes were transformed into a toolkit of value cards, to aid practitioners in working with values. The interviews focused on the design and functionality of the toolkit, which produced discussion about ethical dilemmas and values-in-conflict. Data Collection and Description Overview Survey In order to more fully understand the ethical dilemmas and ethical decision-making of library assessment practitioners, I conducted a survey of assessment practitioners that prompted ethical reflection and response. Respondents were recruited via a number of professional email listservs in November 2020. The survey opened on November 11, 2020, and closed on December 11, 2020. The survey recorded 239 responses; of those responses, 166 were partially complete and 73 were complete. In Part 1, the survey design was based around the ALA Statement on Core Values. In Part 2, the survey focused on practitioner responses to ethical dilemmas presented in the form of six vignettes. This number was chosen as it allowed a full range of dilemmas to be represented across the vignettes; the vignettes were each crafted to reflect the main themes related to ethical dilemmas: Value and Impact, Information Technologies, Data, and Privacy, Learning Analytics and Student Success, Social Responsibility and Neutrality, Information Literacy, and Cataloging and Classification. These ethical topics areas were distributed across the vignettes, with the aim of achieving a balance of topics that could represent a variety of real-world situations. The survey design then prompted participants to produce the values that are relevant to those ethical topics. Interviews Interviewees were 12 survey respondents who expressed interest in further discussion. For the semi-structured intensive interviews, I also applied a visual elicitation method. Interviewees provided feedback on the value and exercise cards (values toolkit) created on the basis of the survey responses. The purpose of incorporating the visual elicitation at this stage of the research was to test the values toolkit, which is itself designed to elicit visual materials, as the toolkit will contain exercises that produce drawings and visual depictions. Selection and Organization of Shared Data This data deposit shares the following documentation and data collected from the project: survey documentation, survey text, summary results, codes, and analysis, interview protocol, recruitment documentation, informed consent, and the value and exercise cards used as stimuli to generate the interview data. This version of the data project does not include the full transcripts of the interviews since no explicit consent for data-sharing was obtained at the time.