What the Heart Does: Making the Strategic Case for the Library

[Author's note: Although “university” is used throughout this post, the “heart” metaphor is used equally in all types of institutions of higher education, colleges, community colleges, and universities. “University” in this context, therefore, refers to all these institutions.]

In my last post, I argued that if we are going to keep calling the library the heart of the university, we ought to treat it like one: with constancy, with care, and with the kind of long-term investment a vital organ deserves. I closed with a statement that I will spend some time on here because I think it is perhaps the most critical part of the argument. The case for supporting the library, I wrote, is not a sentimental one. It is a strategic one. And the best time to make it is not when the cuts are already on the table. It is now, in the ongoing life of the university, in the everyday conversations about what kind of institution we want to be. A few people who read that post asked a fair question: fine, but what is the strategic case? What does the heart actually do? It is one thing to insist that the library matters. It is another to lay out, concretely and with evidence, how it matters to the work the university most wants to be known for. So what I will do here is not a sentimental appeal, but an accounting. What follows is my attempt to unpack the strategic case point by point and to direct you to some of the research that supports it. I write this as someone with an obvious stake in this. I am a library leader, and I believe in its value. But the argument below does not rest on my belief. It rests on what scholars and students actually do with what the library provides, and on a body of research that has tried to measure it.

Collections Are the Raw Material of New Knowledge

Let’s start with the most basic function, the one so fundamental that it can be easy to overlook. The collections we curate, license, preserve, and make discoverable are the raw material of research and scholarship. A historian cannot interpret a manuscript he cannot access. A chemist cannot build on a finding she cannot read. A doctoral student cannot situate her contribution within a field whose literature is locked behind a paywall that the university has declined to pay. This is not a metaphor. New knowledge is created by building on existing knowledge, and existing knowledge lives in the journals, databases, books, datasets, archives, and digital collections that libraries assemble and sustain. When a faculty member publishes a breakthrough, the citations at the end of the article are, in a real sense, a map of the collection that made it possible. Cut the collection, and you do not simply inconvenience scholars. You constrain what they are able to discover because you have narrowed the body of work they can stand on. The library is not adjacent to the research enterprise. It is one of its preconditions.

The Library Helps Researchers Win, and Keep, Grants

Here is a connection that deserves to be made far more explicitly than it usually is: library resources and library expertise are part of how researchers secure external funding, and part of how they remain compliant once they have it. Consider what a competitive grant application now requires. Federal agencies and major foundations increasingly mandate data management and sharing plans, public-access deposit of resulting publications, and credible strategies for preserving and disseminating research products. These are not afterthoughts; they are scored and enforced. Libraries are frequently the unit on campus with the deepest expertise in exactly these areas. Many academic libraries now provide direct consultation on data management plans, identify appropriate repositories, advise on persistent identifiers and dataset citation, and help researchers meet funder requirements that would otherwise consume hours of faculty time. This is not trivial. Research is a major source of institutional revenue (depending on the institution, of course), and the administrative burden on individual investigators has grown accordingly; one survey found that a large majority of researchers now spend a substantial share of their time on administrative tasks rather than on the research itself (Library Journal, 2022). Every hour a librarian can absorb of that burden is an hour returned to discovery. And in some cases, the value is even more concrete: certain library-provided resources and services can be documented as cost share or, in some cases, as direct costs within a grant budget. The library, in other words, is not only a place researchers go after they win funding. It is part of the apparatus that helps them win it in the first place.

We Are Partners Across the Whole Research Lifecycle

The phrase "the library helps with research" can sound vague, so I’ll be specific about what that help actually looks like across the arc of a project. At the front end, librarians help scholars scope a research question, conduct comprehensive literature searches, identify funding opportunities, and design data management plans that meet funder mandates. In the middle, we provide the licensed collections, specialized databases, computing tools, and research data services that the work depends on day-to-day. We advise on managing, organizing, and documenting data so that it remains usable and reproducible. At the back end, we offer expertise in scholarly communication and publishing: navigating author rights and licensing, understanding journal quality and predatory practices, depositing work in institutional or disciplinary repositories, complying with open-access and public-access policies, and increasing the visibility and impact of published scholarship. We help authors with persistent identifiers, research impact metrics, and ensuring their institutional affiliation is correctly attributed, which, as I note below, has consequences well beyond the individual scholar. This lifecycle framing matters because it reveals how much of the modern research enterprise the library actually touches. We are not a warehouse that scholars visit occasionally. We are a service partner woven through the entire process, from the first literature search to the final deposit of the published article and its underlying data.

This Work Shapes Institutional Reputation and Ranking

It may seem like a long way from a data management consultation to a university’s position in the national and international rankings. But it is not as far as it looks. Academic reputation and research output carry significant weight in major global ranking systems; in the QS World University Rankings, for example, the academic reputation indicator alone accounts for roughly 30% of the overall score (QS, 2026). Those reputation and research indicators are built, in large part, on bibliometric data: publications, citations, and the correct attribution of scholarly output to the institution. Libraries are often the unit best positioned to improve the accuracy of that data by resolving author-affiliation issues, correcting name variants, and helping faculty increase the visibility and discoverability of their work. Where libraries have partnered with their institutions on exactly this kind of bibliometric work, they have contributed directly to the data that rankings rely on (Bernal, 2019). The point is not that the library single-handedly determines the institution's ranking. No single unit does. The point is that the strength of the knowledge infrastructure and the accuracy with which scholarly output is captured and attributed feed directly into the metrics by which institutional reputation is judged. The heart's condition shows up in the body's overall vitality.

Strong Libraries Help Attract Faculty and Graduate Students

Ambitious scholars choose where to build their careers, and they pay attention to whether a university can support the work they want to do. A faculty recruit weighing two offers will ask, perhaps not always out loud, whether she will be able to get the materials she needs, whether the data services exist to support her grants, and whether the digital infrastructure will keep pace with her field. A prospective doctoral student choosing among programs is making, in part, a judgment about whether the scholarly resources will sustain a multi-year dissertation endeavor. A well-resourced library is a recruiting asset. A library that has been hollowed out, with canceled journal packages and unfilled expert positions, becomes a quiet liability, the kind of thing a recruit discovers only after arriving, and remembers when a colleague at a peer institution asks how things are going. In a competitive talent market, the depth of collections and the strength of research support staff are part of what a university truly offers. They are part of the pitch, whether or not anyone names them in the recruitment brochure.

For Undergraduates, Library Use Tracks With Success

The case so far has centered on research and reputation. But the library's strategic value reaches students just as directly, and here the evidence is especially worth knowing, because it is more robust than many people assume. A substantial and growing body of research has documented positive, statistically significant correlations between students' use of the library and their academic success, measured in the ways institutions care about most: grades, persistence, and time-to-graduation. In an influential study at the University of Minnesota, Soria, Fransen, and Nackerud (2013) found that first-time, first-year students who used the library earned a higher first-semester GPA and were retained from fall to spring at higher rates than students who did not use it (Soria, Fransen, & Nackerud, 2013). Subsequent work by the same team found that using the library even once in the first year was associated with significantly greater odds of graduating within four years or remaining enrolled. Importantly, a number of these studies reach their conclusions while controlling for prior characteristics such as high school GPA, demographic factors, and first-generation or Pell-eligible status, which strengthens the case that the relationship is not simply an artifact of which students were already likely to succeed. The pattern is not confined to a single campus. A broad review prepared for the Association of College and Research Libraries synthesized evidence linking library resources, instruction, and services to student learning and outcomes (Oakleaf, 2010), and subsequent multi-institution, multi-year studies have continued to find positive associations between library use and retention, GPA, and degree completion. The research is honest about its limits: these are correlations, and the strength of the relationship varies by service, discipline, and year of study. But the consistency of the finding across institutions, methods, and decades is striking. Students who engage with the library tend to do better. For an institution worried about retention and graduation rates, which is to say nearly every university, this is not a soft benefit. It is a direct line to the outcomes that drive enrollment revenue, accreditation, and public accountability.

The Library Is the One Truly Interdisciplinary Space on Campus

There is one more strategic asset that is easy to undervalue precisely because it is so familiar: the space itself, and what it represents. Most spaces on a campus belong to someone. A department has its building. A university has its complex. A lab is the domain of a particular research group. The library is one of the few places that belongs to everyone, the genuinely interdisciplinary commons where a first-year engineering student, a doctoral candidate in history, a faculty member from the business school, and a visitor from the community can all occupy the same room with equal claim to it. It is welcoming to all, by design and by mission. That openness is not incidental; it is part of what makes the university a community rather than a collection of silos. This matters strategically in at least two ways. First, that sense of belonging is itself tied to student success; students who feel they have a place on campus are more likely to persist. Second, the interdisciplinary commons is where unplanned connections occur, where chance encounters and shared resources quietly hold an often-fractured university together. In an era when so much of academic life has dispersed into specialized and physically separate domains, the library remains a rare shared ground. That is not a small thing to sustain, and it is a very hard thing to rebuild once lost.

And a Few Things I Have Not Yet Named

The strategic case is broader still than the points above, and in the interest of completeness, a few more deserve at least a mention.

• Preservation and institutional memory. Libraries and archives now function as stewards of how an institution keeps its own records, protects unique and rare materials, and makes its distinctive holdings available to the world. This is reputational and irreplaceable; a canceled subscription can be restored, but a lost archive cannot.

• Information and AI literacy. As generative tools reshape how people find and evaluate information, the library's long expertise in teaching people to locate, assess, and use sources responsibly becomes more valuable, not less. This is workforce preparation as much as it is scholarship.

• Cost avoidance for the whole university. By licensing collectively, negotiating consortial agreements, and providing shared infrastructure, the library spares departments and individual researchers from duplicating expensive purchases. The centralized investment is almost always cheaper than the distributed alternative.

• Community engagement and public mission. For public institutions especially, the library is often the most visible and accessible expression of the university's commitment to the broader public good, which matters at a moment when higher education is being asked to justify itself.
  

The Through-Line

If there is a single thread connecting all of this, it is that the library's contributions are inputs to outcomes that the university already cares deeply about. Research productivity. Grant success. Reputation and ranking. The recruitment of talented faculty and students. Undergraduate retention and graduation. Community trust. None of these is a library outcome in some narrow, parochial sense. They are university outcomes, and the library is one of the mechanisms by which the institution achieves them. That is what I mean when I say the case is strategic rather than sentimental. You do not invest in the heart because it is endearing. You invest in it because the rest of the body cannot function without it. And the time to make that investment, to name these contributions out loud, to put them in the budget conversation, the strategic plan, and the everyday discussion of institutional priorities, is not the moment the cuts arrive. It is now, while the support can still compound, in the ongoing life of the university, in the everyday conversations about what kind of university we want to be. If the library is the heart of the university, let us not only say so. Let us show, with evidence, exactly what the heart does.

Recommended Readings

Bernal, A. (2019). Library impact with international rankings: One library’s continuous improvement journey. Library Assessment Conference. https://www.libraryassessment.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/17-Bernal-LibraryImpact.pdf

Murray, A., Ireland, A., & Hackathorn, J. (2016). The value of academic libraries: Library services as a predictor of student retention. College & Research Libraries, 77(5), 631–642. https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/download/16541/17987

Oakleaf, M. (2010). The value of academic libraries: A comprehensive research review and report. Association of College and Research Libraries. https://www.ala.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/val_report.pdf

QS Quacquarelli Symonds. (2026). Academic reputation (indicator). https://support.qs.com/hc/en-gb/articles/4405952675346-Academic-Reputation-Indicator

Soria, K. M., Fransen, J., & Nackerud, S. (2013). Library use and undergraduate student outcomes: New evidence for students’ retention and academic success. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 13(2), 147–164. https://hdl.handle.net/11299/143312

Soria, K. M., Fransen, J., & Nackerud, S. (2017). The impact of academic library resources on undergraduates’ degree completion. College & Research Libraries, 78(6), 812–823. https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16737/18250

Ex Libris (?) (2022, January 31). How academic libraries can support research offices more effectively. Library Journal. https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/libraries-support-research-offices

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