Academic Library Advocacy Toolkit: A-Z Resources

Academic Librarian Faculty Status: CLIPP #47 contains a thorough literature review and bibliography, analysis and discussion of survey results, and sample criteria, policies, and guidelines for appointment, promotion, and tenure for librarians with and without faculty status.

No other group of employees in higher education has occupied quite the same ambivalent status on campus as librarians. The debate over granting librarians the same rights and responsibilities as faculty has generated a substantial body of literature over the years. Most of this research has tended to focus on either a mix of institutional sizes or on large universities, with a surprising dearth of studies of smaller institutions. The results of the survey reported in CLIPP #47 fills this gap, as well as offering practical information and sample tenure and promotion documents and policies.

Intended for use by both librarians and students in LIS programs, Academic Librarianship Today is the most current, comprehensive overview of the field available today. Topics include open access, copyright, digital curation and preservation, emerging technologies, new roles for academic librarians, cooperative collection development and resource sharing, and patron-driven acquisitions are explored in depth.

Academic Libraries and the Academy is a thorough collection of best practices, lessons learned, approaches, and strategies of how librarians, library professionals, and others in academic libraries around the world are successfully providing evidence of their contributions to student academic success and effectively demonstrating their library’s value and worth to institutional administrators and stakeholders. Forty-two case studies over two volumes—Volume One and Volume Two—are divided into four sections, from beginning assessment work through assessment activities that are more difficult to measure and generally more time- and resource-intensive. Each study provides practicable ideas and effective strategies for all levels of experience, assessment skills, stages of implementation, and access to resources.

Academic Libraries and Collaborative Research Services offers case studies and content across library unit areas for faculty, such as open access, data services, and the development of new liaison roles in forming new levels of research partnerships. It also provides insight for university and research administrators in working with the library to enhance the research ecosystem on campus.

Developed for ACRL by OCLC Research, this valuable resource investigates how libraries can increase student learning and success and effectively communicate their value to higher education stakeholders. It demonstrates how libraries are now measuring library contributions to student learning and success, and recommends where more research is needed in areas critical to the higher education sector such as accreditation, student retention, and academic achievement.

It’s up to you to measure the value of your academic library and how it delivers on your institution’s goals. The question is how to do it efficiently and effectively. This resource from Megan Oakleaf, who wrote a benchmark 2010 ACRL report on library value, will help you apply value and impact concepts to your own library. It includes 52 activities designed as part of professional development workshops and in consultation with libraries.

Higher education institutions of all types are facing intensified attention to assessment and accountability issues. Academic libraries are increasingly connecting with colleagues and campus stakeholders to design and implement assessment that documents their contributions to institutional priorities. In this day-long workshop on strategic and sustainable assessment, participants will identify institutional priorities and campus partners, design an assessment project grounded in action research, and prepare a plan for communicating the project results. This workshop is based on the highly successful ACRL Assessment in Action program curriculum.

The tool for data-driven planning and advocacy in academic libraries. Launched by ACRL in late 2021, Benchmark provides enhanced access to ACRL annual survey data dating back to 1998.

The toolkit, created by the ACRL Community and Junior College Libraries Section (CJCLS), was developed to connect librarians with active OER Communities and resources that reflect the value of the work of academic librarians.

ACRL Consulting Services, including strategic planning, external reviews, and facilitative support to library leaders.

The ACRL Diversity Alliance program unites academic libraries committed to increasing the hiring pipeline of qualified and talented individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. By working together and thinking more broadly, ACRL Diversity Alliance institutions will help diversify and thereby enrich the profession.

ACRL is dedicated to creating diverse and inclusive communities in the Association and in academic and research libraries. This core commitment permeates the work of the Association, cutting across all ACRL sections, committees, interest and discussion groups, and communities of practice. The Association will acknowledge and address historical racial inequities; challenge oppressive systems within academic libraries; value different ways of knowing; and identify and work to eliminate barriers to equitable services, spaces, resources, and scholarship.

A 12-week program designed for teams from institutions planning any type of organizational change.

The ACRL Impactful Scholarship and Metrics Task Force was formed primarily to create a framework for the measurement and evaluation of academic librarian scholarship. The framework is designed to address gaps between current scholarly evaluation practices and impactful scholarly activities within academic librarianship, including ways to measure and evaluate the impact of a wide range of research outputs.

This statement was prepared by the Joint Committee on College Library Problems, a national committee representing the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of American Colleges (now the Association of American Colleges and Universities), and the American Association of University Professors. (Reaffirmed April 2018)

This toolkit is meant to assist academic librarians as they consider responsibly engaging with campus learning analytics at their respective institutions.

ACRL’s Open Educational Resources (OER) and Affordability RoadShow will help you understand the basics of OER and how libraries can be involved in affordability initiatives at your institution. This day-long, introductory workshop is intended for academic librarians and library staff interested in learning about OER and/or developing OER initiatives. The workshop begins with a morning of foundational knowledge about OER: What are OER? How do they impact faculty and students? Throughout the day, we also discuss examples of and opportunities for library involvement in affordability initiatives, analyze stakeholders and institutional context, and determine appropriate strategies and goals for real-world application.

A free online toolkit designed to help academic libraries assess and communicate the impact of essential library programs and services

Libraries in higher education are increasingly required to demonstrate their value and document their contributions to overall institutional effectiveness. The Standards for Libraries in Higher Education is a framework for library planning and assessment that can be used for a variety of circumstances including annual planning, program review, and accreditation self-study. Through presentation, discussion, and group activities, learn how to use the Standards to communicate your library’s impact.

Academic Librarian status varies widely within community colleges, baccalaureate, masters and doctoral granting institutions. ACRL supports faculty rank, status, and tenure for librarians but recognizes that not all academic institutions provide faculty status to their librarians. This document seeks to unify standards and guidelines for the faculty status of academic librarians, affirming ACRL’s commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion, regardless of the type of institution employing librarians. Faculty status may be recognized either within the library or across the institution.

Standards for Libraries in Higher Education are designed to guide academic libraries in advancing and sustaining their role as partners in educating students, achieving their institutions’ missions, and positioning libraries as leaders in assessment and continuous improvement on their campuses.

ACRL Standards for Libraries in Higher Education RoadShow - Resource Guide: Libraries in higher education are increasingly required to demonstrate their value and document their contributions to overall institutional effectiveness. The Standards for Libraries in Higher Education is a framework for library planning and assessment that can be used for a variety of circumstances including annual planning, program review, and accreditation self-study. Through presentation, discussion, and group activities, learn how to use the Standards to communicate your library’s impact.

This comprehensive virtual symposium includes various sessions ranging from training on software and database research impact tools to a discussion of potential roles for librarians in research impact and related topics on gender disparities and funder perspectives within the research metrics and assessment landscape.

Building Teaching and Learning Communities is an entry into some of the most interesting conversations in higher education and offers ways for librarians to socialize in learning theory and begin “thinking together” with faculty. It proposes questions, challenges assumptions, provides examples to be used and adapted, and can help you better prepare as teachers and pursue the essential role of conversation and collaboration with faculty and students.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a host of newsletters including Academe Today, Afternoon Update, Breaking News, the Edge, and more to help you stay up-to-date with the latest trends in higher education, including libraries. NOTE: Some of the content and newsletters may require a subscription or login privileges available through your institution.

Classroom Assessment Techniques for Librarians provides the tools librarians need to quickly and meaningfully assess student knowledge in the classroom. The authors, Melissa Bowles-Terry and Cassandra Kvenild, share 24 tried and true assessment tools, along with library-specific examples, to help librarians assess students ability to recall, analyze, and apply new knowledge. The assessment tools in this book actively engage students by asking them to think, write, and reflect. Librarians can use results of these assessments as a starting point to define and measure information literacy learning outcomes as well as to improve their teaching skills and instructional design. This collection of assessment techniques can be adapted to multiple learning environments, including traditional one-shot library instruction, online instruction, and for-credit courses. This book is essential for academic libraries, and will prove useful to school libraries with strong information literacy programs, as well as library and information school collections.

Established in 1966, College & Research Libraries News (C&RL News) provides articles on the latest trends and practices affecting academic and research libraries and serves as the official newsmagazine and publication of record of the Association of College and Research Libraries. Monthly columns include Scholarly Communication, The Way I See It, Internet Resources, Internet Reviews, Washington Hotline, Grants and Acquisitions, and People in the News. Other regular features include ACRL TechConnect, Perspectives on the Framework, and International Insights. C&RL News is published 11 times per year.

The Community College Library: Assessment explores the research, comprehensive plans, and new approaches to assessment being created by community college librarians around the U.S. Chapters include sample activities and materials and cover topics including assessing student learning while shifting from Standards to Framework; investigating and communicating library instruction’s relationship to student retention; and building librarian assessment confidence through communities of research practice.

Higher education and academic libraries are in a period of rapid evolution. Technology, pedagogical shifts, and programmatic changes in education mean that libraries must continually evaluate and adjust their services to meet new needs. Research and learning across institutions is becoming more team-based, crossing disciplines and dependent on increasingly sophisticated and varied data. To provide valuable services in this shifting, diverse environment, libraries must think about new ways to support research on their campuses, including collaborating across library and departmental boundaries. This book is intended to enrich and expand your vision of research support in academic libraries by

- inspiring you to think creatively about new services;
- sparking ideas of potential collaborations within and outside the library, increasing awareness of functional areas that are potential key partners;
- providing specific examples of new services, as well as the decision-making and implementation process; and
- encouraging you to take a broad view of research support rather than thinking of research and instruction services, metadata creation and data services etc as separate initiatives.

Dynamic Research Support in Academic Libraries provides illustrative examples of emerging models of research support and is contributed to by library practitioners from across the world.

Emerging Human Resource Trends in Academic Libraries presents the collective wisdom of human resource librarians and administrators who have been in the forefront of practicing and applying the human resource principles in academic libraries.

The book is divided into five parts:
1. Part I focuses on the present academic library environment and the unique human resource challenges that can be found there.
2. Part II looks at the role of LIS education in preparing Masters level librarians to work within academic libraries and beyond.
3. Part III examines how human resource departments in organizations can continue education beyond the degree for professionals and other staff.
4. Part IV is concerned with how academic libraries show their value to the parent institution.

See also Chapter: Challenging Promotion and Tenure Traditions in Academic Libraries (https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/listing.aspx?styp=ti&id=37016)

The Engaged Library provides case studies, examples, and discussion of how academic libraries can create successful partnerships to contribute to the integration of high-impact practices on their campuses, and ways to execute these practices well. Each chapter addresses one of the ten original high-impact practices through the lens of library partnerships, contributions, and opportunities, and provides ideas for and examples of outcomes assessment.

As colleges educate a more diverse and global student population, there is increased need to ensure every student succeeds regardless of their differences. This paper explores the relationship between equity and assessment, addressing the question: how consequential can assessment be to learning when assessment approaches may not be inclusive of diverse learners? The paper argues that for assessment to meet the goal of improving student learning and authentically document what students know and can do, a culturally responsive approach to assessment is needed. In describing what culturally responsive assessment entails, this paper offers a rationale as to why change is necessary, proposes a way to conceptualize the place of students and culture in assessment, and introduces three ways to help make assessment culturally responsive.

A report released 4/12/22 looking at strategic alignment between research libraries and their institutions. The study uncovered four general strategic goals from university leaders: growth in STEM, engagement with the state, rectifying relationships with marginalized communities, and defending the residential experience. From this, the report suggests how libraries can align their own goals to match the university through new partnerships, collection strategies, and technology.

Faculty-Librarian Collaborations collects chapters, case studies, and lesson plans detailing why these collaborations are important, how to develop and execute them, specific lesson plans, and ideas for assessing their effectiveness.

It’s clear that change, innovation, and leadership are central concerns for the profession, yet specific conversations about change tend to happen on the margins: over coffee with colleagues at a conference, in a private email conversation, Twitter threads on change gone wrong. With the publication of this guide, we hope to bring more of these processes, nitty-gritty decision-making, challenges, and successes out into the open, building a community of change agents in academic libraries through the people who engage with these materials.

Webinar (June 13, 2022) based on Chronicle of Higher Education publication, Future of Academic Libraries.

The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) is a cohort of colleges and universities committed to collective action to advance open scholarship within and across their campuses. Leaders from US colleges and universities have joined this community of practice, working together to promote a more transparent, inclusive, and trustworthy research ecosystem.

Inside Higher Ed provides the latest news, analysis and solutions for the entire higher education community. Inside Higher Ed is owned by Times Higher Education (THE),with five decades’ experience dedicated to the field of higher education. Inside Higher Ed offers free subscriptions to daily and weekly newsletters to help you stay abreast of current trends and and issues in higher education. (https://www.insidehighered.com/content/sign-inside-higher-eds-newsletters)

Research Data Management (RDM) is a broad concept that includes processes undertaken to create organized, documented, accessible, and reusable quality research data. The role of the librarian is to support researchers through the research data lifecycle.

Leading Change in Academic Libraries is a collection of 20 change stories authored by academic librarians from different types of four-year institutions. Librarians tell the story firsthand of how they managed major change in processes, functions, services, programs, or overall organizations using John Kotter’s Eight-Stage Process of Creating Major Change as a framework for examining change at their institutions, measuring their successes and areas for improvement, and determining progress.

Assessment examines how library services and resources impact and are perceived by users, and guides strategic planning discussions and development of future acquisitions and services. Assessment is fundamental to positioning your library within your organization and effectively demonstrating how it furthers your institution’s goals. And it can be more of an art than a science, using the qualitative and quantitative data available to you to show your library’s alignment with the needs and mission of your organization.

This book provides a compendium of useful information on research literature and best practices in assessment from an academic institutional point of view as well as an academic library perspective.

This report was published as part of the Library Integration in Institutional Learning Analytics (LIILA) project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The results of the project are detailed in this report and address the four project goals: (1) to increase librarian awareness and engagement in learning analytics; (2) to craft a plan for integrating academic libraries into learning analytics initiatives that support student learning and success; (3) to develop sustaining partnerships and collaborations among academic librarians and learning analytics lynchpins, institutional and library systems professionals, and library vendor communities; and (4) to explore, design, and develop library use cases and data profiles that can be used with learning analytics standards to integrate library data with institutional data stores.

How can the library be best positioned to continue enabling student and institutional success? The Community College Academic and Student Support Ecosystem research initiative seeks to examine how student-facing service departments—including academic libraries—are organized, funded, and staffed at community and technical colleges across the country.

Meaningful Metrics is a comprehensive look at research metrics and how librarians could integrate metrics content into faculty research services. It also includes how to leverage discussions about the significance and use cases of metrics across campus with various stakeholders, including university administration, deans, and associate deans of research.

The National Observer: Higher Education Edition newsletter provides a powerful look into the business of colleges, universities, and workforce development. Sign up for twice-weekly free newsletters.

The OER Adoption Impact Explorer helps you understand some of the impacts of adopting OER instead of commercial textbooks. Change the values below to match data from your institution to see how OER adoption can benefit your students and institution. Charts, graphs, and language will update in real time as you make changes.

The use of OER has tremendous potential to change education. Advocacy is a core process for addressing this change, bringing the issue to the forefront of the agenda for decision makers. This module will help both faculty and library staff to communicate the value of OER toward influencing decisions that will impact teaching and learning at their colleges and beyond.

Whether the library assessment is driven by external pressure or by an organizationally inspired desire to improve, library managers are expected to be able to plan and implement both comprehensive and targeted evaluations of their impact, services, resources, programs, virtual and physical spaces, and partnerships. Many librarians have been invited to serve on review teams for other academic libraries, either as part of a reaccreditation process or as part of a general cyclical program review process. At their own institutions, librarians have initiated reviews of their libraries or been asked to do so by a senior administrator. There are no blueprints for conducting external reviews and self-studies. In this volume, the reader will find essays by key thinkers and leaders that address the major aspects of the formal assessment and review of academic libraries. This volume offers practical and applicable information, contextualized through current theory and approaches.

This book makes the case for assessment of student learning as a vehicle for equity in higher education. The book proceeds through a framework of “why, what, how, and now what.” The opening chapters present the case for infusing equity into assessment, arguing that assessment professionals can and should be activists in advancing equity, given the historic and systemic use of assessment as an impediment to the educational access and attainment of historically marginalized populations.

Indigenous researchers are knowledge seekers who work to progress Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in a modern and constantly evolving context. This book describes a research paradigm shared by Indigenous scholars in Canada and Australia, and demonstrates how this paradigm can be put into practice. Relationships don’t just shape Indigenous reality, they are our reality. Indigenous researchers develop relationships with ideas in order to achieve enlightenment in the ceremony that is Indigenous research. Indigenous research is the ceremony of maintaining accountability to these relationships. For researchers to be accountable to all our relations, we must make careful choices in our selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis and finally in the way we present information. I’m an Opaskwayak Cree from northern Manitoba currently living in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales, Australia. I’m also a father of three boys, a researcher, son, uncle, teacher, world traveller, knowledge keeper and knowledge seeker. As an educated Indian, I’ve spent much of my life straddling the Indigenous and academic worlds. Most of my time these days is spent teaching other Indigenous knowledge seekers (and my kids) how to accomplish this balancing act while still keeping both feet on the ground.

Whether the library assessment is driven by external pressure or by an organizationally inspired desire to improve, library managers are expected to be able to plan and implement both comprehensive and targeted evaluations of their impact, services, resources, programs, virtual and physical spaces, and partnerships. Many librarians have been invited to serve on review teams for other academic libraries, either as part of a reaccreditation process or as part of a general cyclical program review process. At their own institutions, librarians have initiated reviews of their libraries or been asked to do so by a senior administrator. There are no blueprints for conducting external reviews and self-studies. In this volume, the reader will find essays by key thinkers and leaders that address the major aspects of the formal assessment and review of academic libraries. This volume offers practical and applicable information, contextualized through current theory and approaches.

Shaping the Campus Conversation on Student Learning and Experience serves anyone seeking to activate the results of the AiA program: academic librarians new to assessment; libraries that have ongoing assessment programs and are looking for new directions or ideas for expanding their efforts; librarians demonstrating to campus administrators the library’s impact on student learning and success; campus assessment officers and higher education administrators; and library and information science faculty and scholars.

This editorial in "New Review of Academic Librarianship" (Vol 28, Issue 1) includes sections outlining 10 years of trends, content and scholarly communications, students, leadership, and personal insight.

University Business offers a free subscription to keep you abreast of current issues and trends in higher education, curated around the topics of Administration, Enrollment, Academics, Wellness/Student Success, and Opinion/Special Content.

Efforts to increase equity, diversity, and inclusion have been a priority of most institutions of higher education for many years now. The ACRL Value of Academic Libraries Committee is charged with helping academic librarians participate in work that is aligned with the mission, vision, and values of their institutions, as well as providing evidence of the value they provide to these institutions. Through this spotlight series on practices of equity and social justice, the committee spotlights librarians from various corners of librarianship who discuss what it means to integrate equity and social justice into our practice and assessment, as well as how they are working toward that goal.

Value Added: A Case Study of Research Impact Services explores the launch of a research impact service program at Indiana University Bloomington, specifically incorporating content for humanities and social science researchers for whom metrics is not always a natural fit.

This document was created to help facilitate conversations and promote dialogue with your institution's chief academic officer, provost, president, or your library’s advisory committee on the value of the academic library in higher education.