Alumna of the Year Speech at Kent State University, School of Library and Information Science, April 11, 2007

By Martha Kyrillidou

It is indeed a great pleasure and an honor to be here today in front of you as the 2007 Alumna of the Year. There are so many memories that come back to me when I recall my graduate school years here at Kent State that it will be impossible to make justice to all of them through my brief remarks, so I ask your forgiveness in advance for all that is left unsaid and I hope you will be happy with the shortness of these remarks!

KentState became a home away from home when in 1988 I left Thessaloniki, Greece, to come and study here for my library science degree for the noble purpose of changing Greek libraries. My mother still remembers the day when I left and told her ‘Don’t worry, mom, I will be back in a year.’

That first year was one of the richest learning experiences in my whole life -- learning a new country, new people, a new university, a new profession. In my experience KentState is the finest example of expanding educational horizons, ‘excellence in action’ as the welcoming billboard at ClevelandInternationalAirport announces to the newcomers. The Kent State School of Library and Information Science is offering a wealth of learning opportunities, and provides the best that the US higher education can offer to a student, and to the international student a sense of the uniquely warm Midwestern set of values and culture.

The ways of the new country I did find peculiar in some ways – living in a graduate dorm on campus as it was still possible for graduate students at that time, I still remember my first day in that dorm when I was cooking in the kitchen enjoying a glass of winewhile the resident advisor stopped by and quietly wrote a ‘pink slip.’ He handed it over to me saying nothing wishing to show his reprimand with his silent posture. The poor resident advisor was faced with the ignorant eyes of a foreign graduate student who comes from a country where a glass of wine is part of the essential elements of the food pyramid! And, the poor foreign student did not quite know what this was all about, so she found a resident citizen, who eventually became her dear husband, to guide her through the ways of the new country.

The new country had so much to offer and it was going to make possible a dream -- the dream of changing libraries for the better. I benefited from using libraries, I wanted others to enjoy the benefits of using libraries, I felt the barriers of using libraries, I knew libraries could be better if they dealt more effectively with these barriers. And, what better way to change libraries than tapping on the psychological needs of the library user by actively seeking user input and acting upon this information with the professional insights that a responsible librarian can bring together.

I read and read and read and read and read almost everything the KentState library had on user needs assessment, on the social role of the libraries, on the professional responsibilities of the librarian. I found a brave advisor in Rick Rubin, newly hired assistant professor at that time. He waseager to see more original research take place in the professionand trusted my judgment to carry forward a ‘User Survey of the Library of the English Department at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.’ Indeed, I went back to Greece after a year, as I promised to my mother, to collect the data for my thesis.

Coming back the following year, I had a pile of surveys and little knowledge of how I need to deal with them. It took me a year to master the intricacies of the mainframe VMD IMB systems that were available at that time, to learn enough statistics and SPSS to code my surveys and analyze my data. While learning all this, I was intrigued by the methodological rigor of the research process and decided to get a second Master’s degree in Evaluation and Measurement at the Department of Education, and I enjoyed the benefits of a wonderful research assistantship in the Bureau of Education Research that offered more intellectual stimulation to my never ending hunger for more knowledge.

In the meantime, I am truly happy to report that my thesis work on the English Department Library at the AristotleUniversity indeed changed that library! Can I take full credit for all the changes that happened there? Nancy Birk, KSU’s archivist at that time and the coordinator of the Aristotle/KSU Greek Exchange Program, can easily call me a liar if I did!

Indeed, the libraries at AristotleUniversity were changing thanks to the good work of many people that were going back and forth through an active exchange program, sharing experiences, collaborating across borders, and actively engaging in research, teaching and learning between the KentStateUniversity and the AristotleUniversity libraries. Even before coming to the US I was the beneficiary of working closely with a KentState visiting librarianwho successfully brought the first OCLC live connection to Greece at AristotleUniversity -- Evelina Smith, Director of the Trumbull Campus Library at that time. The librarians of the English Department and the Central library, among them Athena Salaba currently an assistant professor at KentState, were among my best friends.

The impact of the libraries exchange program between the two universities is still legendary and active. Susan Weaver, director of library services at East Liverpool,was the most recent KSU faculty visiting Aristotle. As recently as last year, she trained librarians in Greece on assessment methods. Her work as an ARLVisiting Program Officer was supported by Mark Weber, KentState library director and by the Association of Research Libraries Statistics and Measurement Program.

So much of the success of changing Greek libraries is a shared success, the benefits of a larger collaborative and community effort that brought forward positive social change.

Of course, having changed Greek libraries, I had to seek other professional goals for myself and by then it was clear to me that even libraries here in the US could use some positive organizational changes. Having been trained in good research methods, I had at my disposal the tools needed: systematic evidence gathering, use of that evidence in an effective way, and collaboration and community building. From KentState I did find my way to the University of Illinois and eventually to the Association of Research Libraries where since 1994 I have been blessed with the opportunity to work in bringing forward positive changes in libraries in more ways that one.

From the systematic gathering of the traditional input measures, we have been able to move forward into the systematic gathering of user perceptions and expectations with LibQUAL+®. LibQUAL+® is a service that offers a web-based user survey for libraries to gather feedback from their users. The service allows libraries to identify whether they are meeting user expectations, how they compare with other peer institutions, and how their performance trajectory moves through time. I ended up establishing an operation that can analyze hundreds of libraries’ and thousands of users’ survey data within a week – coming a long way since 1988 when I started analyzing my own thesis data. In 2007 we are celebrating 1,000 libraries that implemented LibQUAL+® and we have data from more than 1,000,000 library users.

And, if I were to take credit for all that has been accomplished, I am sure many more people would call me a liar or would be upset for the implied omissions and commissions. Much of what is accomplished is based on strong collaboration efforts with other researchers and practitioners. Such collaborations are effective when they build bridges between what is meaningful and what is practical, between rigorous research and effective practice, between individual accomplishments and community awareness.

Through the ARL Statistics and Measurement Program I have worked for more than a decade to bring to the profession an increased sense of the need to aggressively market the good work libraries and librarians are doing using evidence-based methods.

Libraries are among the good things in life! The good things in life can easily be taken for granted and neglected. I hope we can all share the responsibility of not being taken for granted, of actively engaging in demonstrating our value, of making sure that we COUNT!

To paraphrase a popular saying ‘I COUNT, therefore I am!’

Martha Kyrillidou’s Biosketch

Martha Kyrillidou left Greece to come to the US in 1988 to study librarianship hoping to gain knowledge for improving Greek libraries. In the process she stumbled into the need to improve libraries all over the globe. In the late 80s, while still in Greece she had worked with visiting US librarians from the KentState - AristotleUniversity exchange program to modernize the library system of the University of Aristotle by proposing the use of OCLC services, reviewing and evaluating reference services, and identifying library technological solutions. While pursing her Master's of Library Science at KentState supported by a Fulbright scholarship, Martha had the opportunity to establish strong mentoring relationships with all the visiting librarians who were part of the Kent-AristotleUniversity program during 1988-2001. She was also the co-founder of the Kent State ALA student chapter. She completed a second master's in Evaluation and Measurement at KentState through the Department of Education and embarked on her career in library assessment with her Master's thesis, "A User Survey of the Library of the English Library, AristotleUniversity, Thessaloniki, Greece."

She left KentState to pursue her doctoral degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she worked at the LibraryResearchCenter in assessment projects ranging from the ACRL Statistics, the ALA Salary Survey, marketing studies commissioned by publishers, and research projects ranging from bibliometric studies to evaluation studies of library education programs.

Martha was hired by the Association of Research Libraries in 1994 to establish a data analysis capability at ARL. From the institutional studies of ARL Statistics and the ARL Annual Salary Survey, she moved the ARL Statistics and Measurement Program into a service operation helping libraries demonstrate their value through the systematic collection of evidence and the application of rigorous evaluative methods. As one of the principal investigators in LibQUAL+®, she oversaw the establishment and expansion of this service which this year will collect library service quality data from the 1,000,000th library user from more than 1,000 libraries across the globe. She is actively engaged in developing the next generation of evaluation tools to help libraries improve service quality: Measuring the Impact of Networked Electronic Services (MINES for Libraries™) and measuring the value of digital services and collections (DigiQUAL™). She has co-chaired the first Library Assessment Conference held this past September at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. And, she is a strong believer that effective, sustainable and practical assessment can help libraries adapt in this increasingly competitive information environment.

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