The Library Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 1 (January 2011)

Library Quarterly, a well-known scholarly journal in the field, presents the essays written by the five keynote speakers from the 2010 Library Assessment Conference, held in Baltimore on October 25-27, 2010. These papers emphasize the strategic approaches to issues of service quality, library as space, learning outcomes, performance measures and scorecards, and articulation of value and impact and are written by leaders in the growing field of library assessment and performance measurement: Fred Heath – Library Assessment: The Way We Have Grown Danuta A. Nitecki – Space Assessment as a Venue for Defining the Academic Library Megan Oakleaf – Are They Learning? Are We? Learning Outcomes and the Academic Library Joseph R. Matthews – Assessing Organizational Effectiveness: The Role of Performance Measures J. Stephen Town – Value, Impact, and the Transcendent Library: Progress and Pressures in Performance Measurement and Evaluation This special issue is guest edited by the conference co-chairs: Martha Kyrillidou, Senior Director for Service Quality Programs at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL); Steve Hiller, Director of Planning and Assessment at the University of Washington Libraries; and Jim Self, Director of Management Information Services at the University of Virginia Library. The guest editors introduce the keynote essays, providing a touch of library assessment history. John Carlo Bertot, editor of Library Quarterly, bookends the issue with a look at what the near future may hold for library assessment. The 2010 conference, the third in its series, marked an opportunity for the Association of Research Libraries to reflect on the service quality assessment journey it embarked upon ten years ago. This special issue of Library Quarterly is simultaneously a retrospective, a current state of library assessment across a range of service areas, and a look toward the future of library evaluation. Complementing the five keynote essays are 64 contributed papers and 80 posters that demonstrate the wide range of assessment activities taking place in our libraries. The presentations of the papers and posters are available on the conference Web site: http://libraryassessment.org/ and the proceedings are forthcoming. We look forward to seeing everyone and learning from their unique experiences at the 2012 Library Assessment Conference in Charlottesville, VA. For more on Library Quarterly, visit: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/lq/home.html.