Guest editorial

Citation

Barnhart, A.C. and Stanfield, A. (2013), "Guest editorial", Reference Services Review, Vol. 41 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/rsr.2013.24041baa.002

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Reference Services Review, Volume 41, Issue 2

We first approached Reference Services Review co-editors Eleanor Mitchell and Sarah Barbara Watstein with the idea for this themed issue in June of 2012. The previous spring and fall semesters we had spent a great deal of time in campus committee meetings looking at retention and graduation rates and working on the Complete College Georgia action plan for our university. We had just finished an extensive redesign of our credit-bearing course to fit it into the new University of West Georgia (UWG) Summer Transition Program and were attending the LOEX of the West Conference (Burbank). Given that retention and graduation issues were occupying a fair amount of our professional time, we suspected that our experience was not unique and wanted to learn about and share what other academic libraries were doing. Eight of the articles in this issue report on a wide range of planning, programming and activities that academic libraries are pursuing in an effort to impact student success.

The spectrum of initiatives that comprise library involvement in campus recruitment and retention efforts can be seen in the results of the survey Hubbard and Loos sent to library directors. Their observation that libraries are more involved in retention than in recruitment is reflected by the emphasis seen in the articles in this special issue.?

These articles demonstrate that academic librarians are becoming more strategic about their contribution to recruitment and retention. One trend is toward tailoring presentations to particular audiences. This might seem obvious in an era of social media bubbles and customized news feeds, but for libraries it is a relatively new practice. With respect to recruiting, libraries are moving away from the standard one-size-fits-all library tour in favor of tailoring tours for specific audiences. Little and Price stress the importance of having a clearly-defined message to appeal to the parents of prospective students. Kopp describes how Brigham Young University highlights treasures from Special Collections to entice academically high-achieving prospective students. Clearly, libraries are using a multifaceted approach in presenting themselves as part of the recruitment effort.

Student retention has also come into focus as an area in which libraries may play a significant role. In our contribution to this issue (Barnhart and Stanfield), we discuss working with students transitioning from high school to college and describe efforts to redesign our credit-bearing course in order to fit their needs and that of the summer program. Similarly, Meyers-Martin and Lampert describe strategies used at the Oviatt Library at California State University – Northridge (CSUN) to tailor resources to the students of their Educational Opportunity Program.

Library staffing patterns and administrative structures can also have an effect on how the library participates in recruitment and retention. In Gremmels’ thoughtful discussion of staffing patterns, she notes that more paraprofessional and student workers are being trained to work at the reference desk while librarians’ time is focused elsewhere (often in the classroom). Information literacy training for student workers is another form of tailoring our services to specialized audiences. McCoy (2011) reports that student workers in the library have greater academic success than their peers. Mix focuses on the significance of administrative organizational structure in her piece on the importance of librarians as faculty as opposed to staff. She argues that the benefit of inclusion in collegial governance facilitates librarian success in campus-wide initiatives such as student retention. We also found this to be true in our own experience.

These articles demonstrate that libraries are actively engaged in efforts which promise to positively impact retention and graduation. Teske, DiCarlo, and Cahoy compare different library statistics (reference transactions, book expenditures, etc.) to retention and graduation rates and suggest that we are not always as effective as we would like to be. Their study shows that reference transactions and library instruction presentations have a low correlation to retention and graduation rates.

When we first conceived of this themed issue, we anticipated merely exploring the role of the library in recruitment and retention. However, as work on the issue progressed we came to recognize a broader underlying theme – measuring and communicating the value of the academic library with respect to the larger mission and goals of its parent institution. At the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Assessment Conference in October 2012 Jim Self, Director of Clemons Library at the University of Virginia observed that a significant problem with assessing the value of the library is that library statistics are all self-reported and therefore not externally validated (Self, 2012). Teske, Cahoy and DiCarlo’s results bring into focus a related problem – in addition to being self-reported, library statistics are inconsistently collected. While libraries fill in the same fields on statistics survey instruments submitted to ARL, ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries), NCES (National Center for Education Statistics) and other agencies, we do not know if we are counting the same way. Does “How do I print?” get logged as a reference transaction? Is a library tour in which the circulation desk is pointed out logged as a library instruction presentation? If libraries want to truly assess how different services impact student success (as measured by retention and graduation rates), we might benefit from the services of an outside agency to give our numbers reporting some consistency and validity.

The diverse efforts of the different universities and colleges represented here show that academic librarians are mindful of supporting the unique missions and the more universal goals of their institutions. More deliberate and consistent assessment measures will help us collect and present more accurate and helpful data to support and inform our future involvement in these areas.

Anne C. Barnhart, Andrea Stanfield