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General Information

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Scott Walter, Associate Dean of Libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Guest Speaker: Dr. Annie Payton, Director of the Library, Fort Valley State University, Georgia Date: Wed., September 30, 2009 Time: 10:45am - 5:00pm (schedule below) ACRL-LA Business Meeting at 9:00am (All are invited!) Location: State Library of Louisiana, Baton Rouge Directions: Google Maps, Baton Rouge Visitor Info With the Kind Support of:

Does your institution know your library’s true value? If you can express it in pecuniary terms that administrators and legislators understand, they might see the light. A well-thought out Return-On-Investment (ROI) Analysis could illustrate that it is not only short-sighted to believe that library funding is expendable, but it should be unacceptable. ROI, with its traditional focus on identifying "income generated from investment of resources," must become part of the broader strategy used by an academic library to demonstrate its "value" to the academic community and to administration.

Scott Walter, a pioneer in ROI analysis for academic libraries, will review the results of the University of Illinois Return-on-Investment (ROI) study as a means of introducing not only the tools available to libraries wishing to pursue the “value” question on their own campuses, but also as a means of consulting with you, as a librarian and a campus leader, to determine a “value” statement that will support your efforts to advocate for the resources you need for your library. Annie Payton, Director of the Library, Fort Valley State University in Fort Valley, Georgia, will be discussing the relationship between the Information Literacy program in academic libraries and Return-On-Investment advocacy.

Scott Walter

Scott Walter's Presentation Slides Dr. Scott Walter is Associate University Librarian for Services and Associate Dean of Libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Most recently the co-author of Public Engagement Programs (ARL SPEC Kit No. 312) (2009) and editor of The Teaching Library: Approaches to Assessing Information Literacy Instruction (2007), his work has appeared in journals such as Reference Services Review, College & Undergraduate Libraries, College & Research Libraries, and Information Technology & Libraries. He has served as Chair of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Research Coordinating Committee (2007-09) and as Chair of the ACRL Education and Behavioral Sciences Section (EBSS) (2003-04). He is serving currently as a member of the editorial board of College & Research Libraries and as Associate Editor of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. As Associate University Librarian for Services, Walter has served as Library liaison to strategic planning and budgeting programs at Illinois and has been responsible for the identification of metrics and other mechanisms for communicating the contribution made by the Library to campus priorities focused on teaching, learning, research, and public engagement. He has engaged the “value” question from a number of perspectives and has led discussions of new approaches to the quantitative and qualitative assessment of the impact of Library services on campus priorities and the arguments to be made from such assessment for continued support for Library funding. Walter will review the results of the Illinois Return-on-Investment (ROI) study as a means of introducing not only the tools available to libraries wishing to pursue the “value” question on their own campuses, but also as a means of consulting with you, as a librarian and a campus leader, to determine a “value” statement that will support your efforts to advocate for the resources you need for your library. The “value” statement that will work for your library is tied to the mission, vision, values, and strategic concerns of your campus and one size will not fit all; together, participants will discuss how the tools available to them and the approach taken by Illinois, as part of a broader change program that has focused on the strategic re-allocation of available resources, may help to inform efforts on individual campuses to plan for the sea changes coming to campus (and library) budgets in the coming year(s). Walter received his M.L.S. and his M.S. in the History & Philosophy of Education from Indiana University, and his Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration from Washington State University.

Dr.Annie Payton

Dr. Annie Payton's Presentation Slides Dr. Annie M. Payton will be discussing the relationship between the Information Literacy program in academic libraries and Return-On-Investment advocacy. She is currently Director of the Library, Fort Valley State University in Fort Valley, Georgia, a position she has held since July of this year. She directs the operational management of the Henry A Hunt library, achieving fiscal accountability through planning, managing, training and evaluating staff; fostering relationships and cooperative agreements with students, faculty, staff, schools, libraries and agencies within the community; and writing grant proposals for the development and maintenance of the educational library programs; developing collections in support of the mission of the University. She has been a director of libraries for public and private universities since 2001, managing multi-million dollar budgets in support of teaching, research, and public service.  Throughout her career as Director at Mississippi Valley State University’s J. H. White Library and Assistant Dean at Dillard University’s Will W. Alexander Library, she networked with library constituencies to sustain funding and growth, while navigating internal and external political systems in program implementation, all for the purpose of helping students become independent and life-long users of library resources. While in Mississippi, she was a founding member of the Dancing Rabbit Library Consortium, composed of two public universities, three community colleges, and nine public library systems, and as such, she participated in planning and hosting legislative events involving Mississippi’s eight state-supported universities. A one-time member of Mississippi Library Directors consortium, Dr. Payton was also a member of the task force charged with developing a plan for libraries affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. As Director, she emphasizes strengthening the funding base by personalizing services and promoting the idea that “supporting the library means supporting both students and faculty,” as well as developing partnerships with deans and department chairs that help to build and strengthen library programs. She has participated in The HBCU Alliance Leadership Institute in Georgia (August 2007) and  The Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians, Harvard Graduate School of Education (August 2006), and has presented on Strategic Planning at the Mississippi Valley State University Athletic Retreat (2005) and on the Dancing Rabbit Library Consortium at  the Mississippi Library Association’s 2002 conference.

9:00-10:30 ACRL-LA Business Meeting (All ACRL-LA Members Invited!)
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45-10:55 Welcome address
10:55-11:00 Introduction of Annie Payton
11:00-12:00 Guest Speaker: Annie Payton
12:00-1:15 Lunch from Roly-Poly
12:00-12:15 Various Announcements
1:15-1:20 Introduction of Keynote Speaker
1:20-2:45 Keynote Speaker: Scott Walter
2:45-3:00 Break
3:00-4:30 Concurrent Breakout Sessions/Workshop
4:30-5:00 Wrap-up and Panel Discussion

In a June/July State News (Council of State Governments) article, Mikel Chavers notes that Louisiana may be following states like Colorado if it addresses its $1.3 billion revenue shortfall (and the subsequent $219 million dollar cut in education) with one-time funding, like rainy day fund money or stimulus money. Chavers argues that this makes prospects for 2011-2012 bleak. Starting with the next fiscal year, the Louisiana Board of Regents will change the way it distributes existing funds to higher education. The long and short of this is that by FY 2011-2012 institutions will watch their budgets shrink by some 30 percent. To make matters worse, the new funding allocation is based on NIH / NSF grants funded research, which means that undergraduate universities that emphasize teaching and student engagement, and by extension their libraries, may be left in the cold.

Academic librarians would be remiss not to meet this challenge head on, by realizing that when money is tight, it is essential to translate the mission of the academic library into terminology that both upper administrators and state legislators both understand and respect; hence, Louisiana’s academic librarians need to begin expressing the function of the academic library in business terms, by developing working, feasible models to show the Return-On-Investment (ROI) of their organizations. In an interview with Reference Services Review, Paula Kaufman (University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), one of the few librarians nationally who has seriously attempted an ROI translation for an academic library, succinctly points out the changes that academic librarians need to make in how they present their funding needs to administrators: “From the point of view of a university provost … a reliable ROI would answer the question of how much quantifiable value the University received for every dollar it invested in the library.”

ACRL-LA is solidly behind every effort to help Louisiana’s academic libraries in this endeavor. The 2009 Pre-LUC Mini-conference will feature Scott Walter, Associate University Librarian for Services and Associate Dean of Libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Walter, along with Kaufman, is the driving forces behind creating a ROI model for Research I universities. As keynote speaker for ACRL-LA’s October 2009 event, he will be giving practical assistance to participants to better enable them to articulate their library’s value, as well as their own, in both bottom line financial terms, even for those aspects of librarianship that are in the public service sector. Our hope is that Louisiana’s academic librarians, especially the library deans and directors within our ranks, will better be able to express their libraries’ worth to their parent institutions by establishing a final monetary value that expresses the return earned for every dollar of institutional investment.