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Library Assessments & Statistics: National Library Surveys

The Harriet K. and Philip Pumerantz library conducts surveys to assess the engagement of the WesternU Community with the library's resources, services, and staff. This guide will act as a repository of past survey reports.

ACRL - Association of College and Research Libraries

The ACRL Annual Survey is administered by the ACRL Academic Library Trends and Statistics Survey Editorial Board and is designed to gather information at the national levels from all types of academic libraries.  

The ACRL Academic Library Trends and Statistics Survey has three objectives.

  • The first objective is to offer participants the opportunity to provide one response for two surveys. Completing this survey will provide responses required for the IPEDS Academic Library (AL) component including Section I for institutions with library expenditures over $0, and Section II for institutions with library expenditures exceeding $100,000. Survey participants may download a file which can then be used to upload the required IPEDS responses by the institutional key holder or the library if designated by the institutional key holder as an IPEDS user.

  • A second objective is timeliness: the responses to this survey will be available for use within months of the closing date.  A third objective is to restore measures once formerly collected through the biennial NCES Academic Library Survey (discontinued 2012) that have proved over the years to facilitate benchmarking and best practices studies.

IPEDS - Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System

An academic library is the library associated with a degree-granting institution of higher education. Academic libraries are identified by the post-secondary institution of which they are a part and provide all of the following:

  1. An organized collection of printed or other materials or a combination thereof;

  2. A staff trained to provide and interpret such materials as required to meet the informational, cultural, recreational, or educational needs of clientele;

  3. An established schedule in which services of the staff are available to clientele; and

  4. The physical facilities necessary to support such a collection, staff, and schedule.

AAHSL - Association of Academic and Health Science Libraries

The Annual Statistics of Medical School Libraries in the United States and Canada is a publication of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries. Published since 1978, the Annual Statistics provides comparative data on significant characteristics of collections, expenditures, personnel and services in medical school libraries in the United States and Canada.