Academic Libraries Need a New Value Proposition

Nine months ago, the news that Western Illinois University (WIU) was eliminating its entire library faculty sent shockwaves through the library community. Whether or not the “adequate coverage” the university administration promises (Palmer, 2024) turns out to be any kind of replacement for the terminated library faculty remains to be seen. But the decision portends turbulence ahead.

After the shock of their arrival, decisions like this give us opportunity to pause and reflect. In this case, a question we seldom stop to ask but that keeps coming up for me is: Do we have any right to be surprised? Or was the near wholesale slaughter of academic library positions at a regional public institution a possibility we willfully dismissed, knowing deep down that parent academic institutions might not value academic libraries in the same way those of us in the library do?

To be clear: our colleagues at WIU are not to blame for what happened there; but the situation should lead all of us at small- and medium-sized institutions to ask whether we too might be vulnerable and whether there is anything we can do about it. Some questions to consider:

• Have we failed to communicate our value up the hierarchy? Is our service model sufficiently antiquated that others perceive it as stale and expired? How do our collections, databases, and journals, as well as their usage, fit into others’ perceptions of our value?
• When and where will the next cuts occur? How will repeated such cuts affect the profession? What are their implications for future personnel models? And where does artificial intelligence fit in?
• Moving forward, what do we have to do differently to stave off the dark clouds gathering about our collective heads? What role does greater and qualitatively different social engagement of the communities we serve have to play in making a stronger case for ourselves?
• What anticipated and unforeseen consequences are likely to greet those remaining in the WIU library and administration?

I’ll explore each of these questions in hopes of identifying a possible way forward.

Higher Perceived Value: Communication, Service Model, and Collections

An enlightening exercise in the wake of the WIU decision is to peruse the various media pieces describing the damage the cuts will do. The arguments put forward by those decrying the decision are both reasonable and impassioned. Common points include:

• Reducing library faculty diminishes the library’s role as the intellectual heart of campus.
• The loss of faculty implies an equal loss in the realm of scholarly communications, which librarians understand better than anyone on campus.
• Library faculty are critical in supporting first-generation and underrepresented students and connect the campus to essential resources.
• The library plays an integral role in the mission of social mobility by equipping students with information and research skills.
• The loss of library faculty not only diminishes service to vital aspects of campus intellectual life, but also undercuts future efforts to restore lost library knowledge, services, collections, and systems.

While the remaining staff at WIU will face the daunting challenge of reassembling a portfolio of services shorthanded, they will also be asked to maintain and improve complex specialist systems, like the integrated library system (ILS) and digital repository, as well as keep subscriptions and collections in economic and efficient order. The loss of institutional knowledge will make this work doubly difficult even as it falls on fewer individuals who may lack the necessary technical skills. In short, the task is nigh impossible; the WIU community will likely face compromises in library services, especially given collective bargaining nuances that may require administrative finesse to avoid reassigning explicit types of “librarian” work. Addressing these issues could require developing an entirely new model that eschews legacy systems, services, and collections, despite the administration’s assurances that they will prioritize these functions.

Where does this leave similar academic libraries? Is any effectual defense against similar cuts even possible, given financial and personnel constraints?

And yet, a defense must be made lest the unthinkable become a trend. The necessary defense would require a radical departure from the status quo:

• We need to communicate our value differently: Academic libraries should synthesize the language we use to communicate our value with the more direct discourses of student success. For example, there is simply too large a gap between the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) career-readiness competencies and our actual contributions to student success. Closing this gap would require the library to identify and communicate a value proposition that a plurality, even majority, of stakeholders see as manifestly worthwhile.
• The actual value communicated would be a reconfigured service model, which the library could choose from a variety of emerging options, from a digital innovation hub to a community-engaged library (Mathews, 2025). To implement this new service model, the library would likely have to reallocate time and resources from organizational focuses that have been and often still are our mainstay. These include legacy systems and procedures like ILS, discovery layers, acquisitions, cataloging, physical collections, and serials.
• Where the university administration sees personnel as the easiest target for cost savings, we might consider our collections a preferable sacrifice. This tactic has been tried before, but not at the scale our present circumstances call for. A negotiation toward sustainability should include not only book acquisitions but also many subscriptions.

I recognize that these suggestions represent a significant departure from business as usual. But in today’s climate for smaller academic libraries, this strategy is worthy of discussion. It prioritizes human capital while focusing on areas of higher perceived value. Likewise, it reframes library operations in ways that align with the human-centered mission of academic libraries while recognizing the need to radically restructure in response to other stakeholders who might soon be weighing our value in their scales.

Steep Hills and Radical Departures: The Implications of Future Cuts and AI

Such a strategy implies the need for stronger emphasis on open access (OA), not only as a central pillar of collection development, but also as an endeavor to which smaller institutions’ faculty will need to contribute. Larger institutions’ advance towards open is steadier and more resourced than that of smaller institutions, but our contributions are required for a fuller pivot to OA (despite being more difficult to muster owing to constrained resources, reliance on read over publish, and diminished economies of scale). The path toward open is also one that advances the library’s role as a knowledge partner and strengthens local scholarship and institutional output. That is, the open movement invites smaller institutions to build expertise and capacity on their campuses around this imperfect emerging future for academic libraries. Successful endeavors in this direction will bolster institutional commitments to scholarship while elevating the library and its faculty as important collaborative players in bringing local institutions into the OA ecosystem as readers and publishers, all the while helping to ensure the sustainability of that same ecosystem.

All of this was recently unthinkable, but open access availability continues to increase. At the same time, cuts are likely with us for the foreseeable future. If the future of academic libraries’ publishing and collections efforts is increasingly driven by open access and open science, then cuts to librarians and library faculty will threaten not only existing workflows and systems but also the library’s potential to evolve as a knowledge partner active in the production of the open scholarly record. It is not hard to imagine a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop that condemns smaller libraries that have experienced cuts to an ever-diminishing future in which they are denied, partially or wholly, the ability to evolve with emerging trends, regardless of the cost. At the same time, legacy commitments won’t simply go away.

Add to all this the impact of AI. The pros and cons of AI have been debated extensively in the library literature, and I won’t delve into them here. Consider instead the perceived impact on library operations of library faculty and staff, as well as teaching faculty and students, embracing AI tools. As AI helps librarians automate lower-level tasks and transforms research, administration will expect the work academic librarians perform to shift beyond information provision in ways that are difficult to predict. These considerations, nonetheless, could exceed in scope the question of whether a library can stop doing basic reference. Simultaneously, we are called to place our trust in larger institutional policies around AI (which the library can and should contribute to).

The strategy I am proposing recognizes a values-driven need for libraries to advocate for and educate our communities about equitable resource distribution, user and institutional privacy, and intellectual property. Such advocacy is already occurring, amidst a broader shift in institutional priorities that would benefit from informed human judgment that grows out of a larger dialogue on campus in which the library should play a central role.

This future represents a steep hill to climb and a radical departure from business as usual. Smaller libraries should shift toward participating more actively in the open access ecosystem while emphasizing collaboration and community building. In evolving beyond legacy systems and services in two directions at once, libraries would reposition themselves as knowledge partners with a reconceived value proposition that leverages the increasing relevance of open access publishing and artificial intelligence even as budgets shrink.

Doing Things Differently: Degree of Change and Social Engagement

Undergraduate education is the heart of the academic mission at many smaller institutions; in discussions at those institutions about the future of the library as a viable and vibrant campus unit whose mission and supporting staff are worthy of continued funding discussions, “student success” is the framework emphasized by administration. But this is where libraries often struggle to explain our relevance and importance as powerfully as other units on campus.

The challenge is not just to make sure every position in the library can be justified through student learning, but that we bring the total cost of our legacy systems into view and interrogate it ruthlessly through the litmus test of student success. Our systems are highly complex and difficult to explain to those outside the library. Moreover, we often end up talking about a broad commitment to access and an equitable distribution of resources that, when taken together with our systems and subscriptions, amount to a stable and predictable business-as-usual value bundle that is difficult to unpack or move beyond. Likewise, we often have a poor understanding of the larger stakeholder map we serve and struggle to explain in direct terms how the value of the resources coming into the library is distributed across the institution (Schlak & Macklin, 2024).

Our approach could include redoubling efforts to improve college affordability via open educational resources and other available levers; positioning the local library (and, therefore, the institution) at the forefront of the complex scholarly communications landscape in novel ways that challenge local promotion and tenure practices and perhaps even reposition students at the nexus of the university’s intellectual and research life; and increasing our values-driven social engagement and communication with faculty, students, and the broader university community. Through these and other efforts, we can surface and champion information and stories that deliver to decision-makers a more potent and compelling value message.

Conclusion

At many academic institutions in the United States, the libraries we know and love face the potential for ruin. The future may arrive suddenly through a precedent-setting decision that unsettles all of library land. Or it may happen gradually and silently, through vacancies that go unreplaced and a slow but steady ebbing of institutional support for databases and systems.

It may ultimately be the case that there’s little we can do to save our own hides. That we have no recourse, either years or days out, to add ballast to the listing institutional ship. But cuts to resources and even personnel need not be anticipated with undue fear. Somewhere between denial and acceptance is a position of relative empowerment.

Libraries must respect the complexity that surrounds the decision-making process, which we can do little about other than trusting that it is as fair and thoughtful as circumstances permit. And we must simultaneously exhibit some boldness in reprioritizing our staffing, systems, and service models in the direction of greater external impact, stronger communication, and demonstrable streamlining.

This moment of overwhelming complexity and uncertainty presents a unique opportunity to take stock and ensure that we are doing all we can to make the most compelling possible case for our continued relevance and existence. Nothing short of strategic realignment, wholesale reinvention, and new paradigms of communication is required. The path ahead summons us to be creative, innovative, and even daring. Buckle up for safety, prepare for impact, reinvent the playbook, and pilot the ship, all at the same time!

References

Mathews, B. (2025). A Cambrian Moment for Libraries: Shaping Futures through Evolution and Leadership. portal: Libraries and the Academy25(2), 231-250. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pla.2025.a955944

Palmer, K. (2024, August 20). Library faculty eliminated amid ‘Fiscal Insanity’ at Western Illinois. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/cost-cutting/2024/08/20/library-faculty-eliminated-western-illinois-university

Schlak, T., & Macklin, A. (2022). Open Access overtaking academic library leadership: Staying ahead of the organisational dynamics an increasingly open future may bring. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 28(2), 117–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2022.2079539