ACRL Publications in Librarianship Call for Book Proposals

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 and emerging theories and research 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. 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, Mar. 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. Proposals that emphasize research-based and methodologically strong projects will be prioritized. Recent works in the series include Predatory Publishing and Global Scholarly Communications (PIL #81), 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) and longer-term consequences to academic libraries during significant organizational culture changes.
  • The diverse types and roles libraries play as organizations on an academic campus.
  • The application of leadership theories or frameworks to library organizations, education, or culture.

Academic Libraries and Collections

  • 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.
  • Leveraging emerging technologies (broadcasting, gamification, AR, VR, 3D and 4D printing) to foster immersive and interactive learning experiences.

Academic Libraries in Higher Education and Society

  • Politics in libraries, within, as part of, and support for staff and their academic community.
  • Evolving services, spaces, collections, and training that supports and sustains an environment of inclusive excellence.
  • The library’s role in the culture wars.

Academic Libraries and Technology

  • Evolving technological practices, policies, platforms, and software that impacts academic libraries.
  • 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.

The publication proposal process can be found at https://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/publishing.