Assessing Patron Learning from an Online Library Tutorial

In the digital era online tutorials remain especially popular for providing information literacy instruction to undergraduates. This paper provides three approaches for assessing learning from a web-based tutorial. First, a general assessment focuses on patron surveys, usage statistics, and interlibrary loan requests for library-owned materials to determine the overall success of the tutorial. Second, individual assessment captures user's initial interests and skills and provides a mechanism for identifying patron abilities to locate library resources following instruction. Third, the tutorial's objectives, content and design, the institutional support, and user comments are considered in the program assessment. Ultimately these three perspectives offer a snapshot of learning through an online library tutorial.