Purpose & Goals

Like many US Higher Education institutions, the University of Louisville seeks to use a data-driven approach to improving student retention and performance. In support of these initiatives, campus units including the libraries are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the impact of our services on these outcomes. For this project, we are comparing outcomes between students who did and did not access library e-resources in hopes to demonstrate a relationship between e-resource usage and key retention metrics that support our university's strategic goals.

Design & Methodology

This pilot study combines data from the University of Louisville's EZProxy logs with student data in our Campus Information System to compare retention and academic performance for students in two of our largest online-only undergraduate programs, Psychology and Nursing. Data from these two systems was matched on unique identifiers, deidentified, and then processed with Microsoft PowerBI. As this is a short-term pilot study we are not expecting to find evidence of statistical significance, only to identify and compare relationships between e-resource usage and outcomes in order to shape future, larger-scale research.

Action & Impact

We hope to use these findings to advocate for additional library support for analytics work to enhance our understand of the library's impact on student success. We also hope that these findings will allow our library administration to advocate for increased resources from the university to support key initiatives. The online nursing degree in particular is a major priority for the university as our state is suffering from a shortage of nurses, and significant funding is currently being dedicated to enrolling and retaining students in this program. We intend to expand this pilot study into a larger examination of library impact on student success for other key programs at the University of Louisville.

Practical Implications & Value

We envision this work contributing to the growing body of research on library impacts on student success, as well as library analytics research more generally. Others who are interested in embarking on this type of work may find a pilot project of this scale to be approachable and manageable within their organizations.