Quality and impact evaluation

The aim set for the universities by the Ministry of Education on the audit of quality assurance systems by 2010 was one of the factors behind the initiation of the Quality and Impact Assessment project. In addition, the project was meant to facilitate the integration of quality and impact assessment as a part of the management of university libraries and the demonstration of the impact of the libraries. The project, funded by the Finnish Higher Education Evaluation Council, was launched in 2005 and it will end in 2008.

Several seminars have been organised during the project, and a handbook on quality assurance for higher education institutions (Laatu ratkaisee – laatutyön opas korkeakouluille) has been published with joint funding by the AMKIT Consortium, the Finnish Research Library Association and the Council.

Core and support processes

The core and support processes of university libraries have also been depicted. A network of quality evaluators was created and process descriptions were collected from different university libraries in order to create these descriptions.

The depicted core and support processes are: 1. Loans, Loan requests. 2. Information services/Information retrieval, Information retrieval training. 3. Acquisitions/periodicals, Acquisitions/books. 4. Cataloguing. 5. Publishing process (University of Kuopio process as an example). In addition, an annual calendar and an action calendar were depicted.

Seminars

- Process description seminar
- Quality and impact seminar
- Quality assessment seminar
- Quality handbook