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C&RL News October 2019 524

The ACRL Standards for Distance Learning Library Services are increasingly used 
by librarians who are striving to provide 
adequate and equitable services to their 
online learning populations. In an environ-
ment where more fully online programs are 
springing up, more campus-wide strategic 
plans include moving general education 
requirements online, and more students 
than ever are enrolled in distance or online 
classes,1 these Standards can be useful for 
advocacy, communication to stakeholders, 
and driving goals and direction both for your 
library as a whole and for your distance or 
online learning librarian. 

The worksheet
Anyone who has worked with these Stan-
dards knows just how useful they can be, 
but the lengthy document can be cumber-
some to use in practice. In 2017, Natalie 
Haber began working to create a spread-
sheet to map the University of Tennes-
see-Chattanooga’s distance and online 
learning services and resources to the 
Standards. Shortly after seeing her work 
in a webinar, Andrea Hebert from Loui-
siana State University and Melissa Corn-
well from Norwich University teamed up 
to flush out the initial spreadsheet. Their 
work, “But does it scale? Charting the new 
DLS standards across three institutions,” 
was presented at the Distance Library Ser-
vices Conference in 2018. From there, the 
chairs of the ACRL DLS Standards Commit-
tee reached out to officially approve and 
publish the worksheet onto the DLS website 
for all distance or online learning librarians 
to be able to use. 

The worksheet is a downloadable Excel 
spreadsheet located on the ACRL Standards 
for Distance Learning Library Services web-
site.2 This document is flexible and can work 
with any size institution. Fields may be re-
moved depending on an institutions’ needs. 
For example, there is a standard concerning 
globalization that may not apply to all insti-
tutions. Each standard has a comment field 
detailing the definition. There is a column to 
track how each standard is benchmarked, a 
column for any planned improvements as 
a way to track goals and initiatives, and a 
column for any additional notes. 

Mapping goals in this way accomplishes 
several things. Gaps in service and areas of 
improvement are readily apparent and can 
be used as a foundation for future projects 
and initiatives. Seeing the Standards visually 
makes information easier for stakeholders to 
understand, and the worksheet can be used 
as a talking point to advocate for support. 
The overview provided by mapping can stra-
tegically create direction for program growth, 
sustainability, and priorities. 

Drive goals
Distance and online learning librarians may 
find this worksheet particularly useful for 
creating goals for themselves. Mapping a 
library’s services and resources to the Stan-

Natalie Haber is online services librarian at University 
of Tennessee-Chattanooga, email: natalie-haber@utc.
edu, Melissa Cornwell is online learning and scholarship 
librarian at Norwich University, email: mcornwel@
norwich.edu, and Andrea Hebert is Human Sciences, 
Education, and Distance Learning librarian, Louisiana 
State University Libraries, ahebert@lsu.edu

© 2019 Natalie Haber, Melissa Cornwell, and Andrea Hebert

Natalie Haber, Melissa Cornwell, and Andrea Hebert

This worksheet works 
Making the DLS Standards work for you



October 2019 525 C&RL News

dards allows for the obvious questions to 
arise: What are we doing for this particular 
standard? And, Are we doing it as well as we 
can? With those answers, you can easily fill 
out the “Planned Improvement” column. 

Many individual goals and projects might 
arise from that improvement piece. For ex-
ample, the standard “Instruction” can easily 
be met. The definition of it states, 

The library must provide information 
and digital literacy instruction programs 
to the distance learning community in 
accordance with the ACRL standards 
and other ACRL documents relating to 
information literacy. The attainment of 
lifelong learning skills through gen-
eral bibliographic and information/
computer/digital literacy instruction in 
academic libraries is a primary outcome 
of higher education, and as such, must 
be provided to all students.3 

At the bare minimum, if your library provides 
any online tutorials, research or course guides, 
they could be listed here as a benchmark for 
meeting the Instruction standard, but the librar-
ian could go a step further and list courses or 
programs with embedded library instruction, or 
course pages created for specific online classes. 
A goal might be to engage targeted faculty or 
departments for expanded information literacy 
instruction in the online environment. Another 
might be to design or refresh self-paced or 
point-of-need tutorials for your website.

In a recent mapping exercise conducted at 
the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, the 
online services librarian created a goal from 
the standard under Library Requirements, 
“Availability for All Users”;4 this standard states, 

The library has primary responsibility 
for making its resources, services, and 
personnel available to its users regard-
less of their physical location. There-
fore, the library identifies, develops, 
coordinates, implements, and assesses 
these resources and services. The 
library’s programs must be designed to 

meet not only standard informational 
and skills development needs but 
also the unique needs of the distance 
learning community. The requirements 
and desired outcomes of academic 
programs should guide the library’s 
responses to defined needs. Innovative 
approaches to the design and evalua-
tion of special procedures or systems 
to meet these needs, both current and 
anticipated, are encouraged.5 

The online services librarian reached out 
to her colleagues across the library to add 
input to the worksheet, and several things 
were listed as benchmarks, among them: on-
line access to subscription-based e-resources, 
growing collections of e-books, and a web 
page specifically geared towards distance 
learners. This Distance Learning webpage 
is meeting the portion of this standard that 
speaks to the “unique needs of the distance 
learning community.”6 The worksheet spurred 
on a closer examination of the webpage, and 
while serviceable, the page is not laid out as 
well as it could be and focuses too heavily 
on borrowing privileges, leaving out valuable 
information about e-resources. Statistics were 
pulled analyzing the website’s performance 
which showed very little traffic. Now the 
online services librarian has a formal goal to 
rework the webpage’s content and layout and 
to try to get the page placed more strategically 
on other university websites to boost usage.

Advocate for support and resources 
The worksheet gives librarians and library 
administrators powerful information to use 
when advocating for support and resources 
for online and distance learning programs. 
Mapping is an objective process that can di-
rect your advocacy. A completed worksheet 
gives you an unbiased view of service areas 
and highlights those that need additional 
support. Requests backed by objective and 
documented data are more substantial than 
those based on a vague need and may be 
more likely to be given consideration by uni-
versity stakeholders. 



C&RL News October 2019 526

As noted in the “Institutional Require-
ments” section of the Standards,7 college and 
university administrators in the planning stages 
of increasing online offerings may overlook 
the impact online learning has on library 
services, staff, and budget. When Louisiana 
State University announced an ambitious 
plan to expand its online offerings,8 the dis-
tance learning librarian used the worksheet 
to map institutional requirements to create 
a comprehensive list of concerns to discuss 
with library administrators, including the cost 
of vendor licenses, the need for additional 
subject-specific resources, technology, per-
sonnel, planning, and promotion to support 
online and distance learners.

While the primary objective of mapping 
your library’s services to distance and online 
learners is to see if and how your library is 
meeting the Standards, mapping the services of 
peer institutions for comparison is an effective 
strategy for advocacy. If peer institutions offer 
more extensive services or materials, this chart 
can visually offer data to justify requests for ad-
ditional support. For example, if your institution 
provides students with research consultations by 
email and telephone, but peer institutions offer 
consultations using video conferencing, you can 
request funding for webcams, headsets, and 
software to provide parity of services.

Create direction
For institutions with clear goals and adequate 
support and resources, using this worksheet 
can help create direction for programs and 
help answer some questions, including how 
do the ways that the Standards are met all tie 
together? What needs to be improved? How 
can the library make the services and support 
provided more sustainable moving forward?

At Norwich University, a small, private 
university, the sole distance learning librarian 
was accomplishing goals and getting support 
from the library and the institution but felt 
there was no overarching strategy for the 
librarian’s job duties, as a whole. This uni-
versity, like many, plans to expand its online 
offerings, so which responsibilities should 
take priority among the many that may only 

increase in the future? How can the level of 
service and support be maintained? 

The Standards speak to a need for a “written 
statement of immediate and long-range goals 
and objectives for distance learning library 
services, which addresses defined needs and 
outlines the methods by which progress can be 
measured.”9 When benchmarking this standard, 
the librarian spurred on a wider conversation 
about the current role of the distance learning 
librarian and possible future directions of the 
role within the library. These discussions led to 
the realization that the current rate of growth 
of the online school wasn’t sustainable for 
library support without more help. As a result, 
responsibilities were shifted so another librarian 
could assist with goals and objectives support-
ing distance learning. 

If your librarians find themselves creating tu-
torials on demand, embedding instruction when 
asked, or making reactive rather than proactive 
strides with online and distance learning, this 
worksheet may be just the thing to help open 
up a broader conversation about vision, sustain-
ability, and realistic expectations of workload.

Notes
1. I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, “Digital 

Learning Compass: Distance Education En-
rollment Report 2017,” (n.p.: Babson Survey 
Research Group, 2017), 11, https://www.
onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/digtial-
learningcompassenrollment2017.pdf. 

2. Standards for Distance Learning Library 
Services (American Library Association, re-
vised June 2016), http://www.ala.org/acrl/
standards/guidelinesdistancelearning.

3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. David Jacobs, “LSU Sets Ambitious 

Online Education Goal for Flagship Campus,” 
Greater Baton Rouge Business Report, Janu-
ary 17, 2018, https://www.businessreport.
com/business/lsu-online-education-goal.

9. Standards for Distance Learning Library 
Services.