View article

The article presents the results of a 2016 multi-institutional, international research and scoping study to define the nature and feasibility of a library assessment executive dashboard and toolkit to enable libraries to centralize diverse collection, usage, administrative, and financial data, and to more easily visualize, analyze, and utilize the data. The study investigated the need and high-level requirements for a toolkit to enable library administrators to utilize commonly shared performance indicators and formulas to create their own dashboards, and the ability to customize indicators and formulas as needed. The article discusses research methodology and library management questions that might be more easily answered with a shared framework for key library performance indicators and library data sources, and an analysis of the current technology landscape and commercial and open source tools to support such a dashboard. Study findings and recommendations for next steps to develop a library assessment dashboard and toolkit are contextualized within the current library assessment and technology landscapes.