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Introduction
The publication by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) of its report The Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report in 2010 has proved to be of major relevance in the literature about the role of academic libraries within universities. The report acknowledged the main challenges libraries face, including increasing calls for accountability, economic constraints, high expectations from university stakeholders and users, and demands for libraries to demonstrate their value and contribution to student success and institutional missions.1 Based on a literature review that shows the long-standing concern of academic libraries to better understand and assess their performance and impact, the ACRL report by Megan Oakleaf made important recommendations to academic libraries aiming to demonstrate their value to external and internal stakeholders. Since then, there has been a noticeable surge in research using databases gathered in university repositories to carry out studies seeking to better understand how libraries are used and the impact they have on users.
In 2013, a multidisciplinary research team from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, or UC) in Santiago started to work on a project to investigate student library use. For the first time in the institution, the researchers analyzed the complete library student usage logs in combination with centralized student records. The aim was to examine the patterns of library use and their links to student characteristics and performance. In this article, we present and discuss the initial findings regarding library use patterns for book loans and access to digital resources by the students’ disciplines and years of study, and explore the relationship between them and student outcomes.
Literature Review
Since Oakleaf’s report, the literature researching the use of academic libraries has grown considerably and now offers a wide range of perspectives to analyze the value of libraries for universities. A number of these studies explore the contribution of library use to student learning, student success, or other related variables, such as graduation, grades, retention rates, and learning engagement. Such work offers evidence of a positive link between library use and student success. See, for example, Brian Cox and Margie Jantti’s 2012 study2 and Deborah Goodall and David Pattern’s 2011 research.3
Another interesting group of...