Academic Library Advocacy Toolkit: Strategic Goals

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.

We encourage you to use this document to start a conversation with your chief academic officer, provost, president, or your library’s advisory committee. At our request, Dr. Oakleaf wrote the executive summary with an external audience in mind. It is, we hope, a document that can stand alone, so that you can share it with administrators on campus in order to promote dialogue on the value of the academic library in higher education.

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.

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. Each chapter was commissioned specifically for this new book, and the authors are highly regarded academic librarians or library school faculty— or both. 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

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.

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.

Advocating for the library within your institution, with stakeholders, and across the system in a unified way is an evolving focus of consortia member leadership. Leading Together: Academic Library Consortia and Advocacy aims to fill the gap in LIS literature of models of consortia advocacy plans, actions, and assessments. It provides a look at the current landscape of consortia work, a consortium and other groups’ advocacy frameworks, a workshop curriculum which may be used to develop an advocacy plan, and thoughts for the future.

The second half of Leading Together is a curriculum for how to coalesce a group around strategic approaches to advocacy, no matter if it is a consortium, an individual institution, or a department.

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.

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.

ACRL fee-based consulting services, including strategic planning, external reviews, and facilitative support to library leaders.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.