For Media Specialists, a New Way to Assess Libraries

Staff -- School Library Journal, 9/1/1999

The American Association for School Librarians (AASL) has come up with a tool to help media specialists assess their programs and promote them to administrators. Designed over the last two years, the school library "assessment rubric" is a set of criteria that tells you-and your principal-whether your media center is at the basic, proficient, or exemplary level.

The rubric is the first national assessment tool for school libraries, says Carol Kroll, who chaired the AASL task force in charge of the project. It was designed to correspond to the association's new guidelines for high-quality school libraries, contained in Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning (ALA, 1998).

Kroll and her task force will present a program on the assessment rubric at AASL's National Conference in Birmingham, AL, in November.