Academic Library Value: The Impact Starter Kit

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.
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. By using this book, you’ll learn how to identify your stakeholders, listen to them, take new approaches to addressing value, and ultimately position your library as an increasingly valued asset. The activities inside will guide you through such key issues as stakeholder views of library servicescapes; institutional communications audit; assessment fears, challenges, and barriers; impact on student retention; involving the entire library organization; and reporting the results.This kit will help academic libraries measure their existing value while also identifying ways to increase their value in the context of their institutional missions.
While helping individual libraries apply the principles she set out in her 2010 report The Value of Academic Libraries, Oakleaf developed an approach she called the Impact Starter Kit, and self-published a description of it as a companion workbook to the original report. This is that workbook with a new design and format. She defines academic library value in terms of overarching higher education institutions, and suggests how libraries can extend and improve their value. The workbook covers listening to stakeholders, planning for action, focusing on impact, getting to work, and communicating and decision making. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)