Academic Librarians' Roles In Attracting & Recruiting Students To Their University

This paper reviews the literature on academic libraries’ active efforts to help their institutions recruit students. It concludes that very few libraries have focused on recruitment as such, but that more explicit attention needs to be paid to this function in order to keep the libraries’ mission relevant to an increasingly competitive academic environment. The experience of University of Maryland librarians is described, and typical classes given from 2001-2009 for K-12 students are discussed. Out of 9224 total instruction sessions, 151 were for K-12 students. Thirty one of those were devoted strictly to Engineering and science; the others were general library orientations that often included some science and technology resources.