This afternoon started with more research on assessment. It looks like a lot of librares use house-made questionnaires when assessing the quality of services. The challenge is making a sruvey that gets the information that is needed without being cumbersome for the patrons to answer.

One "unobtrusive" method of assessment, taken from the retail world, is the use of secret shoppers. Students are trained to approach the reference staff, ask specific questions, and then evaluate the service they received. This method of assessment raises some issues, in my view. First, there are ethical issues in assessing staff without their knowledge. If one tells staff that they are going to be observed via secret shopper, then it defeats the purpose - staff know they're going to be assessed, so the assessment might as well take place out in the open.

I do have experience with secret shopping in a retail environment - part of my job was to make fake calls to employees, asking for certain information, and to report on whether or not I got good service and correct information. In this specific situation, employees knew that they were going to get the calls, they just didn't know when. Most of the employees really resented the practice - they viewed it as sneaky and hostile. After a while, they also learned how to spot the secret callers, and treated them disrespectfully.

Today I also got to sit in on an Academic Policy Committee (APC) meeting. Jill is ont his committee, and she invitied me to come observe so I could learn a little bit about how decisions are made on campus. APC is a subcommitte of University Senate, the shared governance body of UW-EC. The current purpose of APC right now is to examine and revise the liberal education core at UWEC. At the meeting,t he committee spoke about a review that took place of the Art department's cirruculum. They also spoke about the necessity of the math competency requirement for graduation, and how this requirement should be worded in the new LE core materials. It was interesting to see the decision-making process in action, especially seeing representation of the different departments (including the library), as well as the structure of the meeting (Robert's Rules, etc). Very different from meetings in my current private-sector job setting!