In partnership with the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), and the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL), ARL strongly opposes the proposed removal of the Academic Libraries component from the annual National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS survey.
IPEDS—the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System—is a critically important open and transparent dataset for higher education. ARL and ACRL have consulted on the library component of IPEDS for many years to help sustain its value to our community and to higher education broadly, and we are eager to continue that consultation with the US Department of Education to ensure ongoing data collection and integrity.
The Academic Libraries (AL) component of IPEDS reflects the key educational role of libraries and their centrality to the mission of higher education. Academic libraries hold a unique position as the heart of their institutions: No other unit supports all other parts of the institution and its educational mission as libraries do.
Our comments demonstrate that:
- The AL component of IPEDS supports the agency mission and statutory obligation, as well as a higher education ecosystem that relies on this data.
- Data from the AL component of IPEDS is critical to understanding the value libraries provide to the institutional mission.
- Removal of the AL component from IPEDS—a mandatory and therefore comprehensive reporting system—will deprive institutions of the ability to effectively benchmark with peers for purposes of investment and resource allocation, particularly with respect to student enrollment and success.
- With the inclusion of academic library data, IPEDS is a unique longitudinal dataset that enables the higher education sector to understand the cost of information over time, as well as the correlation between research expenditures and the cost of information.
- The AL burden is both lower than other components of IPEDS and willingly met by libraries themselves.
About the Association of Research Libraries
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of research libraries in Canada and the US whose vision is to create a trusted, equitable, and inclusive research and learning ecosystem and prepare library leaders to advance this work in strategic partnership with member libraries and other organizations worldwide. ARL’s mission is to empower and advocate for research libraries and archives to shape, influence, and implement institutional, national, and international policy. ARL develops the next generation of leaders and enables strategic cooperation among partner institutions to benefit scholarship and society. ARL is on the web at ARL.org.
