Library Contribution to Accreditation, by Holly Mercer and Michael Maciel

Holly Mercer and Michael Maciel. Library Contribution to Accreditation: A SPEC Kit. Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 2012. 184 pages. ISBN 9781594078859.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) conducts six surveys of its membership every year on topics of interest to its members. The survey results and accompanying documentation are published as a monograph, and are acquired by member libraries as well as other academic libraries that find their findings useful. Most SPEC kits include an executive summary, the survey questions and responses, a list of responding institutions, documentation supplied by the responding libraries, and a brief list of resources.

Library Contributions to Accreditation addresses library involvement in regional and programmatic accrediting activities. Response to this survey was on the low side, with 41 of the 115 academic ARL libraries responding. Ninety-five percent of respondents reported that they had been involved in accreditation activities within the last five years. There are six regional accrediting agencies in the U.S.; Canadian accreditation activities are conducted on the provincial level. I was surprised at the number and variety of programmatic accreditation agencies; there were 146 listed in the responses.

The types of data that responding libraries supplied for accreditation were collection holdings, facilities & equipment, financial data, instruction sessions, collections usage, staff qualifications & expertise, reference transactions, ILL transactions, digital projects & usage, scholarly communications activities, and "other data."

One of the survey questions asked respondents to describe what recommendations the accrediting agency had made to the library. In most cases, they had no recommendations, or simply stated that the library was meeting its goals and should continue doing what it's doing.

My interest in this topic came from an Association for Library Collections & Technical Services webinar that I gave November 20, 2013 on "Assessment Strategies for Cataloging Managers." (This webinar will be available free on or soon after May 20, 2014 at: http://www.ala.org/alcts/confevents/upcoming/webinar/112013.) One bit of feedback that I got included this statement: "The content of the material covered was specifically for internal improvement within cataloging/technical services divisions, and not to meet the external requirements of things like accreditation, which requires measurable ways to assess how cataloging contributes to the educational goals of the college." Although the webinar was not intended to address cataloging's contributions to accreditation requirements, this made me curious about whether there are expectations regarding this in our accreditation reports. According to Library Contributions to Accreditation, it doesn't appear that libraries are expected to report on cataloging data or outcomes in their accreditation reports, but I would like to look into this more closely.