ACRL Public Community Board of Directors

At its January 2021 meeting, the ACRL Board of Directors approved a proposal to pause ACRL's awards program and appointed a task force to undertake a critical review of the program and make recommendations for its future. This pause presents an opportunity to ensure all ACRL awards align with the Association's Core Commitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, and for the awards program to emerge in a stronger position in both solid finances and inspired purpose.

The task force is charged with addressing the following questions:

• What value do members derive from the current awards program?
• Are current funding mechanisms sustainable to support awards into the future?
• Where is there overlap in awards?
• Are there professional gaps that the current awards program does not address?
• Do ACRL awards programs benefit ACRL's diverse group of members and do they further our Core Commitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)?
• Are there other models ACRL should consider adopting to recognize achievement that would provide value to members of the profession, their libraries, and the communities they serve?

To address these questions, the task force is soliciting feedback from a variety of stakeholders and members of the academic library community and has conducted an environmental scan of other associations to explore alternate models and benchmark effective practices for recognizing achievement. As part of its effort to understand how meaningful ACRL's awards program is to our communities and our libraries, the task force invites all ACRL members and non-member academic library workers to complete a brief survey by Friday, October 29.

Questions about the survey or the task force's work should be directed to the task force co-chairs, Merinda Kaye Hensley, mhensle1@illinois.edu, and Erin T. Smith, smithet@westminster.edu, or to Chase Ollis at collis@ala.org.