Standards and Best Practices for Florida Academic Libraries

External Relations: Libraries engage the campus and broader community through multiple strategies in order to advocate, educate, and promote their value.

9.1 The library contributes to external relations through communications, publications, events, and donor cultivation and stewardship.

9.2 The library communicates with the campus community in a timely way using a variety of methods and evaluates the communication for effectiveness.

9.3 Library personnel convey a consistent message about the library to expand user awareness of resources, services, and expertise.

"The Standards include performance indicators, which are intentionally library-centric. Outcomes, however, should be user-centric, preferably focusing on a specific population and articulating specifically what the user is able to do as an outcome of the performance indicator. "
- ACRL Standards for Libraries in Higher Education

Performance Indicator 9.1 The library contributes to external relations through communications, publications, events, and donor cultivation and stewardship.

Sample Outcomes

• The community demonstrates its appreciation of the library.
• The community demonstrates active use of the library.

"Many academic institutions use benchmarks to identify their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to similar institutions. For example, benchmarking can be used to demonstrate whether an institution or its library is funded or staffed at levels comparable to similar institutions in a geographic area, with a similar enrollment, or with other related characteristics."
- ACRL Standards for Libraries in Higher Education

Principle 9: External Relations

• Giving to the library. E.g.: Annual gifts as percentage of total giving.
• Number of community user library cards.
• Ratio of community attendees per public relations events conducted.
• Social media. E.g.: Follower growth on Twitter. Number of interactions per Facebook post.

All ACRL information taken from:

Association of College and Research Libraries. (2018). Standards for libraries in higher education.

       Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/standards/slhe.pdf