The Association of College and Research Libraries invites proposals for monographs and collections of essays that address significant issues facing our profession and its role in higher education.
ACRL Publications in Librarianship (PIL) is a series of monographic and edited volumes that has reported on scholarly thinking in academic and research librarianship since 1951. The series encompasses single-authored or co-authored monographs as well as edited volumes, and books are peer reviewed and indexed. Books in this series typically run 200 to 400 pages, and many of them have grown out of discussions and conversations among colleagues, or from conference programs, resulting in multiple authors contributing to one book. While it currently has a number of projects under consideration, the PIL Editorial Board is always interested in proposals and manuscripts. To aid potential authors in planning and to ensure the timely review of proposals, a rolling review process is used. Proposals are encouraged by Nov. 1st, Feb. 1st, and June 1st, although proposals will be accepted on a continuous basis throughout the year.
The Editorial Board will consider any topic of broad interest that demonstrates commitment to PIL's core values, especially through scholarship and the combination of theory and practice for all types of academic libraries. Recent works in the series include Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community: Academic Libraries and Museums in Collaboration (PIL #80), Intersections of Open Educational Resources and Information Literacy (PIL #79), and The Rise of AI: Implications and Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Academic Libraries (PIL #78).
Below is a sampling of potentially significant topics. Each one is open to broad interpretation.
Academic Libraries as an Organization and Place
- The evolving place of physical collections in library spaces.
- Sacred Spaces in Libraries—dedicated spaces in society/dedicated spaces in support of scholarship, adding sacred spaces.
- Staffing academic libraries to support changing services, needs, and academic communities.
- Beyond diversity to inclusion: how libraries can provide a diverse workforce with a responsible, productive, and equitable workplace; or how libraries can provide a welcoming and inclusive environment for users.
- Lessons learned (case studies) from and longer-term consequences of changes made to academic libraries during the pandemic (organizational culture changes).
- The diverse types and roles libraries play as organizations on an academic campus.
Academic Libraries and Collections
- Collections and collection development and DEI issues.
- Controlled digital lending and new areas of resource sharing.
- Special collections, archives and other unique collections, and academic libraries’ role in both preservation and promotion of cultural heritage.
- Changing collection descriptions / evolving access: metadata, cataloging, and subject descriptions.
Academic Libraries, Instruction, and Student Support
- Social justice, critical librarianship, and critical digital pedagogy.
- Beyond Information: Inter- and Intra-institutional collaborations in support of student success and well-being.
- The library’s role in battling misinformation, communicating the importance of science and research.
Academic Libraries in Higher Education and Society
- Politics in libraries, within, as part of, and support for staff and their academic community.
- New services, new spaces, new engagement in support of and connected to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
- The library’s role in the culture wars.
Academic Libraries and Technology
- Support for big data as both a resource and a service.
- Economics and impacts of mergers and acquisitions among systems and information services on academic libraries.
- Digital scholarship and digital humanities, creating an environment of support for creative and innovative digital academic work.
- Digital publishing in libraries (sustainability, marketing, outreach, OER, open access); the library’s role in publishing or its support of publishing.
Interdisciplinarity
- Supporting multi-disciplinarity in a single library space—STEM, arts, humanities, social sciences collections, services, and liaison work.
- Assessment and evaluation of library services and collections.
- Adopting best practices from other professions and disciplines, including the corporate world.
This list is merely suggestive—contemporary academic librarianship involves an indefinitely large range of significant topics.
This series has fairly short turnaround times for manuscript reviews and for getting successful proposals to press. It pays attention to the marketing of titles. Its books have a large automatic audience: Libraries have blanket ACRL acquisition orders, and many librarians order their own copies, or buy them at conferences.
For more information about Publications in Librarianship, please contact Series Editor Mark Shelton at mshelton@holycross.edu.
The publication proposal and process can be found at https://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/publishing.