Education Commons^™

Academic Library Regional Accreditation, Mary F. Casserly

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

The self-study documents of four academic libraries whose experiences with the regional accreditation self-study process ranged from unsuccessful to successful were analyzed. All four reports were predominantly descriptive and focused on processes. The successful sites employed user or expert opinion as types of assessments in their reports. No relationships were found between success and the resources, capabilities, products, services, and classes of evaluation addressed, the number of assessment measures included, or the extent to which association standards were addressed. The libraries' annual reports were found to contain more quantitative assessments of processes and outputs than the self-study reports.