Student success librarianship is a rapidly growing area of practice, yet it remains conceptually fuzzy—positioned somewhere between traditional classroom instruction and student affairs programming. As a result, campus partners often struggle to understand what library instruction looks like outside the one-shot or credit-bearing course, and librarians struggle to articulate their instructional role within cross-campus initiatives.
This lightning talk explores that ambiguity as a starting point rather than a problem to eliminate. Drawing on collaborative work with multiple student success partners, the presenter introduces a cognitive, affective, and behavioral student success framework developed to create a shared language for collaboration, planning, and assessment. Rather than forcing library work into classroom or student affairs models, the framework helps partners understand how student success librarianship and cross-campus collaboration operates at the border of both—supporting learning, belonging, and student action through informal and co-curricular contexts.
Participants will be able to: 1. Explain why student success librarianship is conceptually ambiguous across campus contexts and how this ambiguity affects collaboration and assessment. (Bloom’s: Understand) 2. Apply a cognitive–affective–behavioral framework to articulate shared goals with partners, define measurable outcomes, and support sustainable partnerships supports scalable, sustainable partnerships within their own institutions.
