Research Consultation Service

An illustrative, fictional program — not based on any specific institution's service or data. This is the input a client brings to EvalSmart, not an EvalSmart output.

What makes a program description "evaluation-ready." You don't need standards, metrics, or a methodology — that's EvalSmart's job. You need to describe your program clearly. A strong description, like the one below, covers:

What the program is and where it runs (its setting)
Who it serves
What it actually does — the activities or services
What it's trying to achieve — the intended outcomes
How it's currently assessed — the data and instruments you already have
Why you're evaluating it, who the audience is, and the specific questions or concerns driving this cycle

Overview

The Research Consultation Service is a by-appointment, one-on-one research assistance program offered by the university library. A student, faculty member, or staff researcher requests a session with a subject librarian to get help with a specific research need — locating and evaluating sources, developing a search strategy, managing citations, or navigating data and specialized databases. Consultations run 30–60 minutes and are offered both in person at the library and online over video chat. About a dozen subject librarians across the disciplines provide the consultations alongside their other duties.

Who it's for

The service is open to the whole campus, but the core audience is undergraduates working on major research assignments and capstones, and graduate students at the proposal and literature-review stage. Faculty and staff also request sessions, usually for grant or data support.

What happens in a consultation

A patron books through an online appointment form that asks briefly what they need help with. The librarian meets with them, works through the research question, demonstrates search techniques and tools, and points them to relevant resources. Librarians keep a short record of each consultation in a shared appointment-tracking system — the patron's role, department, and topic — though the level of detail recorded varies from one librarian to the next.

What the service is trying to achieve

The service's stated goals are for patrons to leave better able to find and evaluate sources on their own, more confident in their research process, and aware of library resources and people they can return to. For students, the librarians also hope consultations build durable information-literacy skills, not just a fix for the assignment in front of them.

How the service is currently assessed

A few sources of information are collected:

A short voluntary satisfaction survey emailed after the consultation, asking whether the session was helpful and whether the patron would recommend it.
Consultation counts and basic categories (role, department, modality) pulled from the appointment-tracking system.
Occasional unsolicited thank-you emails the librarians save.

Response to the post-consultation survey is low, and the librarians suspect the people who answer are the most satisfied ones. The team has discussed adopting a standardized outcome survey and has heard of ACRL's Project Outcome but has not implemented it. They are also drafting a logic model for the service and would like to run focus groups with students.

Why we want to evaluate the service

The library is preparing for its program review and wants to demonstrate the value and impact of the consultation service, not just how many sessions it delivers. The head of research services and the library's assessment librarian are the primary audiences, and they will use the evaluation to decide where to invest librarian time and how to strengthen the service.

Leadership's specific concerns this cycle:

Do consultations actually improve patrons' research outcomes and information-literacy skills, or do we only know that the people who answer the survey liked them?
Is the experience consistent across librarians? Sessions are run quite differently from one subject librarian to the next, and we are not sure whether that variation matters for outcomes.
Are we reaching the campus equitably — across disciplines, between undergraduate and graduate students, and across in-person versus online sessions — or are some groups underserved?
How can we strengthen our assessment so it produces defensible evidence of impact for the program review?

We are bringing this to an evaluator to help turn these concerns into a sound, defensible evaluation plan for the service.

See what EvalSmart produces from this description: the case study · a short sample of the plan

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