Date/Time
Date(s) - Aug 6 2026
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Online via Zoom
REGISTER
Academic libraries are operating under a convergence of pressures that resists description as ordinary budgetary cyclicality. Financial constraint remains the dominant barrier to change, compounded by hiring freezes, unfilled positions, and mounting pressure on collections. For many libraries, the reductions are no longer anticipated but efforts to reduce spending have already started with more cost mitigations likely on the way. What the 2025 US Library Survey reveals, however, is not simply a field with less money. It is a field in which conviction and capacity have differed. Library leaders express a remarkably steady commitment to the values at the center of their work, and describe a mission that holds even as sociopolitical circumstances shift. The strategies through which those values are enacted are far less stable. Values hold; the means of pursuing them are in motion. And leaders are notably divided on whether their role can be understood as apolitical at all.
The divergence is sharpest around artificial intelligence. Leaders overwhelmingly anticipate AI’s consequences — for instruction, for discovery, for staffing, for research integrity. Considerably fewer report they believe their institution supports the policy, the expertise, the capacity, or the plan to meet these needs. Conviction has arrived well ahead of strategy, and the resources required to close that gap are precisely the ones contracting.
In this session, Mark McBride of Ithaka S+R will present findings from the US Library Survey 2025: Under Pressure — the seventh triennial cycle of a survey administered since 2010 to deans and directors of four-year, not-for-profit academic libraries across the United States. The 2025 cycle preserves longitudinal items while opening new lines of inquiry, including on leaders’ confidence in guiding organizational change, AI adoption and the barriers to it, climate preparedness, cross-institutional partnership, and the library’s role in academic freedom, public trust in information, and engagement with the community beyond the campus.
About the Presenter: Mark McBride, senior director of academic mission at Ithaka S+R. He is co-founder of the Open Education Research Lab at the University at Buffalo and his research interests focus on the impact OER has on teaching and learning.
This program is sponsored by the Empire State Library Network (ESLN).