And You Thought It Would Be Boring

I really expected school reading to cramp my blogging momentum--look at last week's pathetic post count. I've spent most of my reading hours today (in between napping and playing Wii target practice) on a book called Evalution, Second Edition, by Carol H. Weiss.

Have I hooked you yet? Let me tell you about the class--it's called Evaluation of Information Services, and it's about undertaking assessments of library and reference services to determine process outcomes and successful fulfillment of user needs. This is a core course of the library and information science curriculum.

Really, it's somewhat more useful than it sounds. It's about using scientific method and standard research methodology to figure out how well you're doing as a library. This seems like a useful thing to think about, since, unlike a business, you don't have profits or sales to use as a shorthand for whether you're doing your job well in a library. While I'm not sure that a course that emphasizes meticulously designed long term studies is the best way to get me thinking about how to tell if I'm a good librarian, I appreciate the intention.

But anyway, I don't suppose all this has endeared you to a review of this book I'm reading, has it? And to tell you the truth, it's mostly a dry-as-dust academic manual on, as the title indicates, evaluation. Meaning how to design and run an evaluation of a program, mostly government or charitable organizations like homeless shelters and Head Start. The book is full of material like: "Another factor that influences the nature of the evaluation performed and the uses to which it can be put is the location of evaluation within the organizational structure."

But I have to say, I'm really feeling like I'm getting to know Carol H. Weiss, through little snippets of language. The book was first written in 1972, and the current edition is a 1998 revision, so the book wasn't born yesterday. This shows up in a footnote where she explains that, for the sake of continuity and simplicity in the text, she's going to refer to all evaluators as "she" and everyone else--the program management, personnel, government oversight, etc.--as "he." She explains that another researcher does something similar with the opposite gender choices, but "I like it better this way."

And here's the line I just read, the line that makes me think that Carol H. Weiss, despite being a professional evaluator, whatever that is, might be someone I'd like to know: "A worst case scenario would be the program whose negative side effects are so serious that they overwhelm the good it does. An evaluation that failed to take note of them would be a creature from cloud-cuckoo-land."

I'm going to try to find a way to raise my hand and ask a question about cloud cuckoo land in class tomorrow. Let's see if my instructor did the reading.