Academic Library & Athletics Partnerships: A Literature Review on Outreach Strategies and Development Opportunities

In recent years, collaboration between academic libraries and non-academic departments in higher education has emerged as a popular trend in practice and is a frequent topic in contemporary scholarly literature. Recent research suggests that there are at least 180 academic libraries involved in a wide variety of partnerships with non-academic departments at colleges and universities across the United States. Academic libraries have forged collaborative relationships with writing centers, international student services, veterans support departments, and chaplain services, to name a few (Wainright & Davidson, 2017). While there is a growing interest in scholarship concerning these various types of partnerships with non-academic departments, arguably one of the most neglected of these arrangements are academic library-athletics partnerships. The purpose of this literature review is to provide an updated, more comprehensive analysis of all scholarship pertaining to academic library-athletics partnerships and to highlight related issues