Renewing Our Value: The Library’s Role with Online Faculty Evaluations

Annual evaluation processes for faculty are not new to most college and university campuses; however, more and more institutions are exploring the use of campus-wide, online review systems to facilitate their faculty evaluation processes. Use of these systems allows for more consistent reporting to campus administration, allows for the capture of data elements useful for program and accreditation reporting, and greatly enhances the ability to make the work of all faculty on campus more visible. At first glance, these review systems can appear quite simple. However, behind the user interface the systems are quite complex, ingesting and integrating information from campus data systems into a single interface that summarizes and co-mingles known faculty activities with self-reported activities. Some systems also provide a workflow interface used for recording a faculty member’s evaluation and performance rating(s) against the department, college and/ or campus criteria. This comprehensive summary of a faculty member’s activities is a wealth of information that, for years in the print world, departments and colleges mined to develop statistics and data that could be used to showcase faculty accomplishments to campus and the community at large. These same print reports also provided information that was often compiled for program and accreditation reviews. Moving to an online system to capture this information provides opportunities to generate automated reports for these same purposes using faculty activities in the system. These systems often provide department heads, deans and campus administration with reporting dashboards that repurpose the data for use in completing academic program reviews and accreditation documentation. The data in these systems may also be used for purposes such as demonstrating university impacts to the community or providing faculty search tools that can assist with matching inquiries from the local media to appropriate faculty on campus. Because the data can be easily queried and searched, these tools become natural tools for finding collaborators, serving to connect faculty across research areas. Other benefits to these systems include push-button CV generation, including templates for special CV formatting such as the NSF and NIH biosketches needed for grant applications. In addition, the systems can serve as a repository for faculty member artifacts, such as course syllabi and evaluations, presentation materials, examples of student work and any number of other types of support documentation that may be useful to the faculty member in context of documenting their faculty activities and contributions to campus. Data reported through these review processes and systems is a hot commodity for some vendors, especially those who know the information market. Over the past few years, vendors, including Elsevier and Thomson-Reuters, have made large investments