5.6 PLA Elizabeth Szkirpan on quantifying library services for university success metrics

About this episode

Elizabeth Szkirpan discusses the challenges academic libraries face in justifying their value and developing metrics for institutional success.

On today’s episode we have an interview with Elizabeth Szkirpan, Collections and Discovery Specialist at Harvard Business School's Baker Library, who is in conversation with Katie O'Hara-Krebs, social media manager for our journal portal: Libraries and the Academy. Elizabeth Szkirpan's new article for portal is entitled "Library Services Contributing to Institutional Success at R1 Universities: An Exploratory Mixed-Source Quantitative Model." Her article, which is available open access through Project MUSE, takes a look at how academic libraries are challenged in justifying their value in the current business-oriented higher education environment, particularly as non-revenue generating units with increasing costs, and how academic libraries can develop metrics to translate library service into key institutional performance indicators. This article, along with rest of this issue of portal: Libraries and the Academy is open access, available to read for free, thanks to the Project MUSE Subscribe to Open initiative. Elizabeth Szkirpan is a library and information studies professional with a research focus on the history of library technical services and business-adjacent practices…

People in this episode

Host: Katie O'Hara-Krebs

Guest: Elizabeth Szkirpan

Topics covered

• library services
• institutional success metrics
• academic libraries
• quantitative model
• higher education
• value justification

Keywords

• library services
• institutional success
• quantitative metrics
• academic libraries
• higher education
• value justification
• Project MUSE

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Harvard Business School, Baker Library, Project MUSE, Libraries and the Academy

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