Last week, the Journal of Academic Librarianship published an article that I co-authored with Braddlee from Northern Virginia Community College on the Community College Libraries and Academic Support for Student Success (CCLASSS) project. The CCLASSS project is focused on understanding (1) how “student success” can be defined so that it is inclusive both of students’ own needs as well as important policy priorities, and (2) what services colleges and their academic libraries can offer to most effectively support students in their attainment of success. The first and completed phase of the project, discussed within the article, focused on understanding the practices, preferences, and needs of community college students from the student perspective. The pre-print version of the article, which provides a deep dive into our methodological approach, is available here.

Following this first phase of the CCLASSS project, we have developed new service concepts to meet these student-identified needs and are currently assessing these concepts via survey at each of the partner community colleges. We will publish a separate report of findings from the aggregate results from these surveys in 2019. We will also publish a toolkit that can be further adopted by both community colleges and community college systems to test these service concepts themselves or develop and assess additional service concepts specifically relevant to their populations.

Read the pre-print