Writing Center and Library Collaboration: A Telephone Survey of Academic Libraries

Writing and researching are highly interrelated processes and there is much overlap between the goals and responsibilities of writing center staff and librarians. There is little evidence, however, that partnership between writing centers and libraries has been instituted as standard practice in academic institutions. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to explore the current state of the relationship between the writing center and the library. A telephone survey was administered to librarians in a sample of 268 academic institutions. The results indicated that only 26.7% of libraries actively collaborate which their university’s writing center. A strong majority of the non- collaborating institutions (74%) expressed a willingness to do so in the future, while 85.7% of the collaborating institutions thought that the program was effective in increasing the writing and researching skills of students. In the libraries where collaboration was either not possible or not desirable, the main reasons, which were interpreted from the librarians’ responses, included lack of resources, a disconnect between theory and practice, and cultural issues