Site Visitation.

It's been an interesting week. Tuesday morning, I flew down to Tennessee as part of an accreditation site visitation team. (That means, I was one of a group of 5 professionals from various schools that were reviewing a school seeking to renew their accreditation status.) This was my first time to be part of such a team.

After arriving Tuesday afternoon, we met as a team. In reality, it was two teams. One team was visiting the university (the team I was on) and the other team was visiting the seminary that shares some of the same resources and is supported by the same church. As part of the seminary team, another librarian, JE, was there who has been on several site visits. She was a tremendous encouragement and help to me--giving me tips for what to expect, tips on arranging, planning, and executing the interviews in the limited amount of time, and sharing some standard files she uses to help write the reports. We had a great time sharing library experiences and trading notes on what we found out about the library.

Tuesday evening, we had supper with a number of the faculty and members of the university's and seminary's administrations. JE and I were seated across from the librarian and surrounded by several different faculty. It was an enjoyable evening of casual conversation.

After supper, I stayed up preparing for the next day, based on tips that JE had shared with me.

Wednesday morning, I joined JE at breakfast to plan for our interview of the librarian. The rest of the day seemed to fly by. I went on a campus tour for the university. JE and I met up for our interview of the librarian. We were just finishing that interview up, when we got a call wondering where we were for our lunch with the university and seminary board members. After lunch, a short meeting of the university team was held for sharing of any initial concerns or problems. At the end of that, I was expected at an appointment by a faculty member, followed immediately by anther appointment with a couple more faculty members, followed by tracking down yet another faculty member for another interview, followed by interviewing the primary I.T. support member. I was VERY thankful for JE's tips, otherwise I never would have been able to move between the interviews so easily. After finishing all those interviews, it was time to meet up with the team for a meeting and supper.

After supper, JE and I met up to share a few more notes about the library. Then I spent the evening reviewing my notes from the interviews, beginning the writing on my reports, and preping for what I needed to follow-up on for the next day. Before I crashed into bed, I slid a copy of my library report under JE's door in hopes that she might give me some feedback.

Thursday dawned to find the team exhausted after the late night of writing. When we got to the university, I turned in the preliminary version of my library report, then spent the morning and early afternoon following up on remaining questions--checked on a grant question, talked to another faculty member, interviewed the library staff person (and picked up a few statistical reports for review), and asked the librarian a few more questions. By 2:00, I was working on finalizing my report for the library and getting my other Instructional Support reports completed. I finished them all by 4:00. About supper time, the university team met and reviewed the total team report and discussed any needed changes. 2-3 hours later, we went to a late supper, then headed back to the hotel.

I stayed up to make some final tweaks and editing to the team report, then left the disk under another member's door to be taken in early for printing.

Friday morning, though all still tired, found the team in a better mood, as the most demanding parts were over. Following the seminary's exit meeting at 9:00, the university held their exit meeting about 9:40, presenting our findings and report to the university board and administration.

One of the experienced team members commented that this was probably the hardest visitation he had ever been on. The university has been struggling with declining enrollment (and the accompanying problems) for about 20 years. The university does have a new president (6 weeks on the job) with vision and a track record for fund-raising, so there is much potential for change. However, the report has to be written to reflect the current state of the institution. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.