Professional ethics and values are key aspects of assessment for practitioners to cultivate and strengthen. In practice, values can be highly contextual and idiosyncratic according to a variety of local factors. As a result, library assessment values are not universally understood or applied within our professional community, nor are resolutions to ethical dilemmas and values-in-conflict clear or consistent. I developed this research project because I wanted to know more about the ethical challenges that we face in library assessment, as well as the practices that our community has developed for implementing values-based assessment. In this talk, I discuss the background to this problem, and then present five main ethical approaches to library assessment, along with a set of characteristics for defining an ethical assessment practice.
Slides
Related Resources
- Upcoming book publication with Library Juice Press: Knowing our Value and our Values: Toward An Ethical Practice of Library Assessment
- Research dataset and methods: doi.org/10.5064/F6ORSLQF
- Ethical decision-aid: the Values-Sensitive Library Assessment Toolkit