Academic Librarianship and the Redefining Scholarship Project: A Report from the Association of College and Research Libraries Task Force on Institutional Priorities and Faculty Rewards

At the July, 1996 Annual Conference of the American Library Association, the Board of Directors of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) appointed a task force to write a formal statement defining and describing the kind of scholarship performed by academic librarians, using as a framework the taxonomy developed by Eugene Rice and elaborated by Ernest Boyer in his 1990 book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate.(1) The task force's statement, upon approval by the ACRL Board, is intended to become part of a larger movement established by Syracuse University's Center for Instructional Development, entitled the Institutional Priorities and Faculty Rewards project. The project, which is being funded by the Lilly Endowment, with support from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, is providing assistance to academic associations for the development and dissemination of definitions of scholarship for their disciplines. The definitions are intended to extend the range of activities recognized as scholarly for the purposes of tenure, promotion, merit, or reward system guidelines. The following is the report of the ACRL task force.