Association of College and Research Libraries

INTRODUCTION The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is the higher education association for librarians. Representing more than 10,200 academic and research librarians and interested individuals, ACRL (the largest division of the American Library Association) is the only individual membership organization in North America that develops programs, products and services to help academic and research librarians learn, innovate, and lead within the academic community. Founded in 1940, ACRL is committed to advancing learning and transforming scholarship. ACRL represents librarians working with all types of academic libraries—community and junior college, college, and university —as well as comprehensive and specialized research libraries and their professional staffs. In August 2018, ACRL had a total of 10,260 members (accounting for 17.7% of ALA’s membership): 9,608 personal members, 634 organizational members, and 18 corporate members. Approximately 48% of the personal members work in research/doctoral granting institutions, 20% in comprehensive institutions, 12% in 4-year colleges, 9% in 2-year/technical institutions, 1% in independent research libraries, 1% in information-related organizations. ACRL activities are guided by the core values, vision, and goals in ACRL’s strategic plan, the Plan for Excellence. The core purpose of ACRL is to lead academic and research librarians and libraries in advancing learning and transforming scholarship. ACRL advances its work by serving as a channel of communication among academic librarians, faculty, students, administrators, other information professionals, higher education organizations, federal, state, and local governments, and the larger society. It is the leading professional organization of choice for promoting, supporting, and advancing the values of academic libraries to the higher education community. ACRL and, indeed, the American Library Association itself, were founded to establish regular channels for communication among librarians. Today ACRL is a dynamic, inclusive organization that has grown from its early origins of college and reference librarians to a large association encompassing all types of positions in all types of academic and research libraries. ACRL members hold a variety of positions and responsibilities in the areas of management, public and information services, technical services, online services, assessment, information literacy, data curation and management, collection development, rare books and special collections, non-print media, and distributed education. ORIGINS OF ACRL Since the late nineteenth century, conferences and meetings of professional groups have been an American institution. They reflect our penchant for association and our passion for professional self-improvement. In 1853, American librarians held their first convention in New York City. About one-fifth of the 81 librarians who attended the meeting were college librarians. Not until a generation had passed, however, and the crisis surrounding the Civil War was over, did American librarians hold a second national meeting. In the spring of 1876, Melvil Dewey and Frederick Leypoldt sent out their famous call for a conference of librarians to promote "efficiency and economy in library work." Of the 103 librarians present when the conference convened in Philadelphia in September,10 were college librarians. The focal point of the 1876 meeting was the reading of papers on practical library subjects such as cooperative cataloging, indexing, and public relations. The response to the program was apparently positive because the conference participants voted on the final day of the meeting to establish the American Library Association and to hold Annual Conferences. From the beginning, the American Library Association was a predominantly public library organization. But, the areas of common interest between public and academic libraries are extensive, and for the first dozen years of the association's existence the college librarians attending ALA conferences did not hold separate meetings. Finally, in 1889, a group of thirteen college librarians caucused at the Annual Conference in St. Louis and recommended that a college library section be formed. The following year, at the 1890 Annual Conference in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, fifteen librarians representing most of the major colleges of the Eastern Seaboard, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Brown, held the first meeting of the College Library Section. The new section was a small, relatively informal discussion group attended for the most part by administrators who could afford long distance travel. The annual meetings of the section provided a forum for the presentation and discussion of papers on such topics as reference work, cataloging, departmental collections, union lists, and the like. In 1897, the section acquired a new name, the College and Reference Library Section (to recognize the participation of reference librarians) and, after the turn of the century, began to select officers to plan annual meetings. Not until 1923, however, did the section adopt its own bylaws and thereby cross the line that separates a discussion group from a section within ACRL today. The 1923 bylaws regularized the existence of the section by establishing a Board of Management with three officers to conduct the business of the section between conferences and provided for the levying of annual membership dues of fifty cents. During the 1920s, attendance at section meetings grew from ninety in 1923 to 240 in 1926 and peaked at eight hundred in 1928 before dropping off to six hundred in 1929. The meeting program of the section during the twenties and thirties included general sessions for the whole section, as well as separate roundtables for college and reference librarians. The topics discussed at the early section meetings are issues that still confront academic librarians today: faculty status and personnel classification, teaching students, interlibrary loan, library standards, etc. From 1890 to 1938, the College and Reference Library Section served primarily as a forum for discussion. But, beginning in the 1920s, pressure began to build in the academic library profession for the creation of a stronger professional organization capable of undertaking a broad range of activities, programs, research, and publications. The occasion for a radical restructuring of the section came in the mid-1930s when ALA roundtables representing teachers, college librarians, and junior college librarians expressed the desire to affiliate with the College and Reference Library Section. In 1936, the chair of the section appointed a Committee on Reorganization to develop plans for restructuring the section. The final report of the committee in 1938 recommended the adoption of new bylaws that would transform the section into an Association of College and Reference Libraries with full autonomy over its own affairs. The new bylaws provided for the creation of subsections within the association for college libraries, junior college libraries, teachers college libraries, university libraries, and other groups that might wish to affiliate. ACRL BECOMES A DIVISION The section approved the proposed bylaws in June 1938 and officially became the Association of College and Reference Libraries (ACRL) by the end of the year. The ALA Council responded by ratifying a new ALA constitution that made provision for the creation of self-governing divisions within ALA, entitled to receive a share of ALA dues.