Category: Feature

Stephanie Mikitish is co-author, along with Lynn Silipigni Connaway, William Harvey, and Vanessa Kitzie, of “Academic Library Impact: Improving Practice and Essential Areas to Research,” a new report from The Association of College and Research Libraries. We asked her to provide an overview of the findings and what might be most applicable to Rutgers University Libraries. Enjoy!

Educational stakeholders are increasingly calling upon academic libraries to document their impact, especially in the areas of student learning and success. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) commissioned OCLC to investigate how librarians and other library employees can define, measure, and communicate their contributions to these areas. As Rutgers University Libraries continue to adapt to responsibility centered management (RCM) with the rest of the university, librarians and other employees can utilize the report and tools developed by the project team and add to research on library contributions to student learning and success.

RCM has remapped stakeholder groups into more defined units. The deans of the university’s schools now control more of their budget, and they will likely be more willing to fund resources and services that clearly and directly benefit their faculty and students. Currently, library faculty and staff collect and report numbers for entire groups of users, such as the number of books checked out by undergraduate students for the entire university, or for library location, such as the number of exits at Alexander Library or the number of reference questions answered at the Robeson Library reference desk. Some data are more school- and even department-centered, such as the number of bibliographic instruction classes taught for the Newark College of Arts & Sciences. Studies of student learning and success conducted at other RCM institutions can suggest future directions for the Libraries’ research in these areas. However, the quality of data collected is an important factor that librarians and other library employees must address.

To facilitate future studies and reporting, library faculty and staff may need to rethink strategies for collecting relevant data in a more consistent manner with concern to individual user privacy. While some data, such as the exit gate count, is consistently taken at each library, other data, such as reference statistics, may be recorded using different units of measurement (e.g., time required to answer a question), even at the same location. Standardizing data collection is a large task, but research that documents and informs other librarians on how to go about this and how to use the data may be eligible for funding from ACRL.

In order to promote research, ACRL will be offering grants to conduct and/or present research in the following 6 areas.

1. Communicate the library’s contributions
2. Match library assessment to institution’s mission
3. Include library data in institutional data collection
4. Quantify the library’s impact on student success
5. Enhance teaching and learning
6. Collaborate with educational stakeholders

The project team identified the above areas based on literature on academic library impact on student learning and success and from interviews with librarians and provosts. Given the scope of the Libraries’ collections, spaces, and services, any work done to demonstrate our contribution to student learning and success would fall into one or more of the categories above. The components of the ACRL/OCLC project, which include a research agenda to guide future work on the topic and a literature search/visualization, can suggest what aspects of the Libraries’ resources are most relevant to Rutgers stakeholders, ways to measure reach and impact, and how to effectively communicate the results of such work.