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ACADEMIC LIBRARIES ANDCOMMUNITYSusan Taylor aa Ball State UniversityPublished online: 17 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Susan Taylor (2002) ACADEMIC LIBRARIES AND COMMUNITY, PublicServices Quarterly, 1:1, 3-6, DOI: 10.1300/J295v01n01_02

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ACADEMIC LIBRARIES ANDCOMMUNITY:

MAKING THE CONNECTION

Susan Taylor, Column Editor

Libraries exist within a community and thrive when they are fully anintegral part of that community. Sarah Ann Long (ALA President,1999-2000) chose as the theme of her presidency “Libraries BuildCommunity” in an effort to encourage libraries to step up their commu-nity building efforts. When the topic of community is discussed relatedto libraries, clearly public libraries lead the way, by their very nature.Their patrons are citizens of the towns or counties that support themwith tax dollars, so public libraries are inexorably linked to the citizen-ship of their communities. And ultimately, public libraries were the fo-cus of Long’s attention during her year as President.

For academic libraries, several communities should be served–notonly the community of students, faculty and staff who are part of thatuniversity or college, but also the community made up of the citizens ofthe wider town or city where that school is located. Indeed, for many in-stitutions wholly or partially supported by tax dollars, the town commu-nity cannot be overlooked, as it likewise makes up our patron base.

There are many ways in which libraries can provide services to andbe involved in their community. This can take many forms from simply

Susan Taylor was formerly Instruction Librarian at Ball State University.

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2002 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. 3

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opening the library doors to community members, to taking moreproactive steps to connect with them.

In many towns, simply giving the community access to library re-sources is a service that is widely appreciated. Borrowing privilegesmay be made available, and interlibrary loan services may be extendedto community members. Another effective means of increasing the li-brary’s stature within the community is to offer specialized workshopsthat any community member can attend. Press releases can be an effec-tive means of promoting such events and routine services available.

Other community-building activities respond to a need within thecommunity. For example, at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana,librarians responded to a need of K-12 teachers in the state for increasedinstruction in the searching and evaluating of Internet resources andother computer-related skills. To meet this need they teamed up with aunit on campus to provide workshops for K-12 teachers. The workshopswere tailored to meet the needs of that particular group of teachers, andusually an end-product, such as a Web page, provided incentive for theteachers to gain real skills. The workshops were a good example of howan institution can make effective use of its resources to support goalswith broader implications for the larger community.

The University of Waterloo Library in Ontario set up a Librarians Liai-son Committee to work cooperatively with area high schools and publiclibraries to respond to the need of high school students in town to have ac-cess to more research-oriented sources. As a result many valuable part-nerships were formed and all involved felt they benefited. Beyond justhelping high school students gain skills in using different types of librar-ies, Margaret Hendley writes, “Communication between the librarians inthese different institutions has improved and insight [was] gained into therealities of librarianship in other institutions” (Hendley 1991, 196).

Ideally, service for and involvement with the community should alsobe composed of proactive outreach activities and projects. These cantake many creative forms.

For example, the University of Arizona and Pima Community College inTucson, Arizona joined together to create a World Wide Web project enti-tled Through Our Parents’ Eyes: Tucson’s Diverse Community, a series ofonline exhibits sharing the history and experiences of the different communi-ties that make up Tucson. Far from being a service simply delivered to theTucson community by these academic libraries, many individuals and orga-nizations within the community were enlisted to work on this project andprovided their memories, personal photographs, and expertise. Yet, as Lou-ise and Stuart Glogoff wrote, the nature of the project was one which could

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call on the strengths of the libraries–as “custodians of the culture”–and ex-tend them to be disseminators of the culture (Glogoff and Glogoff 1998, 25).

Many libraries cite the resulting goodwill and higher profile within thecommunity as reasons to become involved in such projects. Althoughsuch positive publicity is clearly a plus, involvement in our library com-munities goes beyond that, ultimately making our institutions more re-sponsive to the needs of the patrons we serve. It is a changing communitywhich faces us all. Populations are shifting, and the effect of technologyon our society has been profound. Kathleen de la Peña McCook writesthat librarians must work to ensure that a community’s vision is reflectedin the services provided by the libraries in that community. But, asMcCook continues, “It is important to remember that the most traditionalof librarianship’s activities–providing books to readers–continues to beessential to building community” (McCook 2000, 108-109).

The purpose of this column will be to explore the theme of academic li-braries serving and reaching out to the broader community. I plan to high-light interesting projects reported on in the literature (such as the ThroughOur Parents’ Eyes project) and to report on others that I learn about. I willlook at challenges to community partnerships and recommendations formaking them succeed. Though in this issue’s column I’ve focused on linkswith the broader community, I will also look at methods for increasing coop-eration among various units on campus, so that the needs of campus commu-nity groups–such as distance education students or disabled students–areeffectively addressed. Though academic libraries will be my focus, we canlearn a lot from the community-building efforts of public libraries.

I would like to invite anyone involved in such a community-buildingproject to contact me. I know there are many of you involved in such ac-tivities who don’t have the time to submit articles on the topic, and Ihope this column can be a forum for the exchange of ideas on this wholesubject of connecting academic libraries with their communities. Pleasewrite me at: staylor3@gw.bsu.edu.

NOTES

Glogoff, Louise G. and Stuart Glogoff. 1998. “Using the World Wide Web for Com-munity Outreach: Enriching Library Service to the Community.” Internet Refer-ence Services Quarterly 3: 15-26.

Hendley, Margaret. 1991. “Community Cooperation in Reference Service via a Librar-ians’ Liaison Committee.” The Reference Librarian 33: 191-205.

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McCook, Kathleen de la Peña. 2000. A Place at the Table: Participating in CommunityBuilding. Chicago: American Library Association.

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