We hope that the following academic library advocacy success stories and suggestions shared by academic library administrators and library professionals will inspire you to advocate for the value, roles, and contributions of academic libraries in your own campus communities. Each story includes one or more tags that align with the pages of this toolkit: Student Success; Faculty Support; Employment Status; Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion; Affordability; and Strategic Goals.
Do you have a success story to share? Please complete the form below and a member of the Toolkit Team will follow-up with you.
BYU Library
Holt Zaugg, PhD, Assessment Librarian | email: holt_zaugg@byu.edu | phone: 801-422-4178
Working with a Social Psychology class we recently completed a "Secret Shopper" assessment of the primary reference desks in the library. Each desk was visited between 10 and 15 times by the students, who used questions provided by the reference desk along with acceptable answers. In addition, the student researchers accounted for typical service qualities (e.g., speed of service, friendliness, and asking if all needs were met). The students provided great information on the reference desks' value and opportunities for improvement. Additionally, students had a strong experiential learning opportunity where they could apply their learning to a real world situation.
Tags: Student Success, Faculty Support, Strategic Goals
J. Drake Edens Library
Laurel Whisler, MA, MLS, Director, Edens Library | email: lwhisler@columbiasc.edu | phone: 803-786-3337
At each meeting I attend with the Deans, and at every meeting of the college faculty, I make sure to say something or provide a report that includes information about the library. If we're in assessment season, I'll include some assessment data. I'll report on a new database or an initiative we are developing. This practice is a way of cultivating engagement with faculty and keeping the library’s needs and its value visible to the administration. At my previous institution, where the library was combined with tutoring and the writing center, I reported on a demographic analysis we did of our circulation, database, and tutoring usage broken down by demographic factors to show that the Library Learning Commons was supporting institutional DEI efforts. Our users were over-represented in comparison to the overall enrollment, and our users were more successful in their courses.
Tags: Student Success, Faculty Support, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Proctor Library
Brian Nesselrode, Director of Library Services | email: bness@flagler.edu | phone: 904-819-6206
Through our annual surveys of students and faculty (these are two different surveys), there is no better tool to show our administration the value of our library staff and services. The answers to our open-ended questions absolutely help to tell our story.
Tags: Student Success, Faculty Support, Strategic Goals
Oxford College Library
Jacob Lackner, Teaching and Learning Librarian | email: jlackne@emory.edu | phone: 303-257-1092
Reaching out to faculty to get opinions on potential book purchases has been very helpful. It promotes our collection as a resource and adds more voices to the conversation. It's a nice way to support faculty that don't have the time to schedule instruction sessions.
Tag: Faculty Support
J. Murrey Atkins Library
Anne Cooper Moore, MLIS, PhD, Dean | email: amoor168@uncc.edu | phone: 704-687-0145
Bring other co-curricular services (in addition to the library) into a group that shares individual-level transactional data into a repository that can be linked with demographic data and student success data (GPA, retention, time to graduation) to run reports that indicate which services are associated with student success. This information can be used to negotiate for increased resources for library/information literacy instruction, technology, and collections. Conduct surveys of those who borrow laptops, calculators, hotspots, and other technologies to find out why they use/need them and what other technologies they would like to borrow to be successful in their studies. Encourage all library employees to get involved in assessment by continuously thinking of how to improve services.
Tags: Student Success, Strategic Goals
Schaffer Library
Lindsay Bush, Reference and Instruction Librarian, M.S. | email: bushl@union.edu
After each of our library escape room sessions for First Year Inquiry courses, I have students fill out exit tickets. My prompt is: “write down a couple of things that you learned as well as a couple of questions that you still have.” For faculty that don’t attend the session with their students, I compile these tickets directly after the session and follow up with the faculty member letting them know what their students learned during the session. This has been a wonderful tool for advocacy, in that the faculty see the value of the session and are more likely to bring another class to the library, as well as making them aware of how much their students actually know about library resources and services (which is frequently less than they assumed).
Tags: Faculty Support, Student Success
University of South Florida Libraries
Chris Sturgeon, Assistant Librarian | email: csturgeo@usf.edu | phone: 813-396-2510
Like many institutions, USF is firmly committed to sustaining high-quality, impactful research and instruction services. Hiring five new faculty librarians in Fall 2022 is a clear investment in the library and confirms our dedication to academic excellence and success.
Tags: Student Success, Faculty Support, Strategic Goals
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