MISO Survey News

Introducing MISO Associate Director Katherine Furlong

January 3, 2023

This is the second in our series of news items focusing on several long-term members of MISO Survey leadership. Associate Director Katherine Furlong has been a member of MISO leadership since 2011, when she first met David Consiglio at the Frye Leadership Institute. Since then, she has been part of MISO leadership during her service at three different institutions: Lafayette College, Susquehanna University, and Bucknell University (her current institution).

In her present role as Executive Director, Research Services and Digital Scholarship at Bucknell, Katherine provides strategic leadership for academic library and digital scholarship services. Her longtime participation in the MISO survey, first as a CSA, and later as part of MISO leadership, allows her to be a full thought partner for Param Bedi (Vice President, Library and Information Technology at Bucknell University) in his data-informed leadership while working to deepen her organization’s existing culture of assessment. She also uses her detailed understanding of survey results, and the insights they offer, to effectively guide Bucknell’s digital scholarship and research services.

Katherine began working with MISO as a CSA at Lafayette College, where she enjoyed exploring the joint assessment of library and IT in a recently-merged organization. MISO helped Katherine build bridges across the two merging organizations and prepared her to join her organization’s leadership a few years later. In this new role, Katherine engaged in deep assessment. This expertise became an important part of her success at Susquehanna University, where she became University Librarian. At Susquehanna, Katherine’s involvement with MISO leadership also provided opportunities for her staff to get involved with assessment and data-informed decision making.

Looking ahead, Katherine is excited to advance the exploration of diversity and inclusion in IT and libraries as part of MISO’s research agenda in the coming years.

From MISO Survey Workshops
for Campus Survey Administrators:
“Which items should we
include in our survey?”

November 30, 2022

Over the course of each survey cycle, the MISO team holds three distinct workshops for the individuals on each campus responsible for administering the survey, the CSA’s. While the content of each is different, the second workshop is my favorite and most unique among the academic surveys about which I am aware. While the MISO team hopes that all the workshops will be interactive with active participation of CSA’s, the first and third workshops also have significant components where the team provides large “data dumps” to the CSA’s. The second workshop is at the point in the survey cycle where the CSAs are undertaking two critical tasks: picking items to include on the survey and getting IRB approval. Therefore, this workshop is intended to be more interactive, with questions asked and answered as the majority of the content.

In this year’s second workshop a very typical question came up, “With so many items to choose from on the survey, how do I decide what to ask without making the survey too long?” This question gets raised every year, and there is no right or wrong answer, but rather a continuum of possibilities. Experienced CSAs shared great advice with their peers, including “have an assessment plan,” and use it as a touchstone for picking questions; “use the decision spreadsheet time calculator to demonstrate to your internal team that the survey is getting too long.” Both approaches are sound ways to approach the challenge of keeping the survey short enough to encourage high response rates.

These interactions are a large part of what makes MISO unique. These workshops are attended by several members of the MISO leadership team as well as a mix of CSAs – some more experienced than others – , so the opportunities to build a community and learn from each other are substantial. This learning continues throughout each survey cycle and beyond, as each year a mix of new and returning CSAs create knowledge spanning multiple years of institutional participation.

Introducing MISO Director David Consiglio

October 7, 2022

Here’s the first in our series of news items focusing on several long-term members of the MISO leadership team – starting with MISO Survey Director David Consiglio of Bryn Mawr College. MISO’s relevance over nearly 20 years since its 2004 inception is due in large part to Dave’s three decades of experience with quantitative and qualitative social science research methods, deep expertise with statistical analysis, magic touch at telling stories with data, and wide breadth of experience at Bryn Mawr in IT, libraries, and across campus.

In his two decades of service at Bryn Mawr College, he has led librarians and technologists, taught credit-bearing courses in the social sciences, lent his expertise to institutional research and marketing efforts, served on three different building renovation committees, built a makerspace, and more.

Dave conceived of MISO when confronted in the early 2000s with the need to measure the combined effectiveness of Bryn Mawr’s IT and library services. There was no comparable assessment for both sets of services at the time (and there still isn’t!). IT and library leaders at peer institutions quickly perceived MISO as a solution to their similar needs, especially with its ability to compare service effectiveness across institutions and over time. MISO’s adoption grew rapidly, with a wide variety of liberal arts colleges, research institutions (both public and private), and community colleges participating over the years. Many elite institutions have participated repeatedly.

The MISO instrument continues to evolve, as every 2 years the MISO Team adds new, tested questions to measure emerging areas of service or deepen its measurement in existing areas. MISO is unusual among higher education survey instruments due to the rigorous program of testing and iteration that spurs its ongoing evolution. (Dave wouldn’t have it any other way.)

In recent years, MISO has shed light on issues of diversity and inclusion in IT and libraries, as the MISO Team’s research agenda deepens and matures. Under Dave’s leadership, MISO continues to steer toward areas in IT and libraries where data and analysis might usefully guide what comes next.

Reporting your MISO results:
an example from Connecticut College

September 16, 2022

Institutions that participate in the MISO Survey find many different ways to report their findings to campus constituents. Over time, we’ll spotlight a few of these as inspiration for the entire MISO community.

Connecticut College has been a MISO participant roughly every other year since 2007. Starting in 2014, they began a pattern of publishing a report (in their institutional repository and on their Information Services website ) that offers a summary of key findings for their campus community, including:

• Satisfaction with IT and Library services, most recently and over time

• Perceived effectiveness (locally named “trait ratings”) of staff at select IT and Library service points

• Other key findings, sometimes drawing upon locally created questions and items

After publishing the report, author Ariela McCaffrey shares an executive summary of the report with the Information Services advisory committee at Connecticut College. Then, she notes, “our VP writes an article for the IS newsletter highlighting data from the survey. We share the positive feedback and work to address any issues throughout the year.”

Ariela offers these tips for other institutions seeking to leverage their MISO results to improve IT and library services:

• “Try to keep the questions consistent from year to year because it's critical to show trends upward or to manage problems as they come up.”

• “Look at positive trends and try to highlight those.”

• “Look at the highest ratings, something really exemplary, and highlight that.”

Welcome to new team member
Alexandrea Glenn!

September 1, 2022

Welcome to Alexandrea Glenn, who joined the MISO Survey’s leadership team in July 2022.

Alex began a new role in July 2022 at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries as the Student Engagement Librarian. She served previously as the Student Success Librarian at the University of Florida. Before that, she was the Research and Instruction Librarian at Susquehanna University, where she was deeply involved in library assessment. She is passionate about creating events and programs that encourage undergraduates to use the university library in ways she couldn’t imagine when she was a student.

Alex brings a fascination, and significant skills, with data visualization and analysis to her service on the MISO Team. She’s excited to be part of the team’s efforts to conduct novel analysis of MISO Survey data and promote MISO research findings via publication and presentation.

Welcome to new team member
Wesley Ng-A-Fook!

August 16, 2022

Welcome to Wesley Ng-A-Fook, who joined the MISO Survey’s leadership team in July 2022. Wesley served in a variety of IT technical and leadership roles at south Florida’s Barry University since 1998 before becoming the inaugural Director of the University's Project Management Office in 2013. He began in that role by successfully executing a high-stakes Workday ERP implementation! More recently, his growing team has left its mark on several new construction and renovation projects by organizing IT’s contributions to best effect.

Wesley has been involved with Barry’s MISO Survey preparations each year since 2013, serving as the sole Campus Survey Administrator for many of those years. Over time, he’s become fascinated with the question of how MISO results can be used to evaluate the success of IT’s major initiatives. He’s a self-taught analyst of Barry’s MISO results, and seeks to further hone his data analysis skills as a member of the MISO Team. He’s also excited to launch programs to help other CSAs make best use of their valuable MISO Survey results.