From Deficit to Dialogue: Reassessing the Role of Institutional Data in Library Resource Deployment

Universities increasingly foreground institutional research (IR) dashboards to steer ‘student success’ agendas, yet much of the library’s contribution operates through relationships that IR cannot readily capture. As a result, the library’s engagement with IR efforts remains underexplored in library and information science scholarship. Drawing on descriptive survey data from 66 academic librarians and library administrators, together with nine semi-structured interviews conducted across the California State University system, this study examines how library resources are allocated at course level and whether IR data inform those decisions. Findings indicate that librarians rely far more on local relationships, timing within the academic calendar and instructors’ requests than on system dashboards. Although instructional collaborations are often effective in supporting student learning, they are difficult to represent in institutional metrics and remain structurally fragile, depending heavily on individual personalities, staffing continuity and supportive leadership. Participants also identified practices associated with more consistent outcomes, particularly internal information sharing and active engagement in university-wide conversations. These findings suggest that partnerships should be stewarded as networks rather than treated as a series of one-off liaison activities. This study therefore reframes the contribution libraries provide as relational, human-centred and context-sensitive, and argues for university structures that recognise and sustain this qualitative work alongside traditional quantitative analytics.