Academic Libraries and the Academy: Strategies and Approaches to Demonstrate Your Value, Impact, and Return on Investment, Volume Two

Decreased student enrollments, diminished budgets, and the fiscal reality of declining state appropriations are forcing higher education administrators to closely examine the allocation of funds and resources across the institution. With increased expectations of accountability and transparency for budget expenditures, institutions scrambling to do more with less, and the emergence of new budgeting models that view units as either cost centers or profit centers, academic libraries are under new pressures and scrutiny. It’s become incredibly important and necessary for academic libraries to clearly articulate to their institutional administrators their contributions to institutional outcomes, short-term and long-term value, and in essence, their return-on-investment.

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. This second volume examines assessment activities that are more difficult to measure and generally more time- and resource-intensive: 23 case studies are divided into two sections. The first, Reachable Fruit, examines projects in academic libraries that may require more external and internal resources to measure. They demonstrate the replicability of projects that take six months to one year to collect and analyze. The second, Hard-to-Reach Fruit, includes seven studies that require long-term data collection and feature greater external partnerships, internal infrastructure, or additional resources to measure and analyze.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to demonstrating a library’s worth and value, so Academic Libraries and the Academy captures a range of successful approaches and strategies utilized in different types of academic libraries around the world. Each case study opens with a one-page summary presenting fourteen descriptors of the chapter’s content that will allow you to quickly ascertain if the case study is of immediate interest based on your individual needs, interests, and goals. This book is designed to provide guidance and support to many of you—librarians, library professionals, and others involved in library assessment—who struggle to find the best approach and strategy at the right time in your assessment journey, and help you successfully articulate your academic library’s value.